Russian Lawmakers Clean Their Desks--if They’re Lucky : Reforms: After the bloodshed in Moscow, the Communists’ last bastions--ruling councils--are falling.

MOSCOW — The mayor’s men began evicting members of the now-defunct Supreme Soviet from their cushy apartments here on Friday. In St. Petersburg, police blocked neighborhood council members from their offices this week.

All across Russia, lawmakers are cleaning out their desks and unpinning the small metal badges that made them special.

These are the mundane signs of what may be the most historic change to result from last week’s bloody clashes in Moscow--what the Trud newspaper trumpeted as “The Liberation from Soviet Power.”

“The time of Soviet power is coming to an end,” Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin declared Friday on national television.

The Soviet Union collapsed two years ago, but the Soviet form of power that gave the former colossus its name is dying only now.

No longer will the country be ruled by the huge and unwieldy councils (known as soviets) that the Bolsheviks packed with milkmaids and factory workers and turned into handy rubber stamps for their party machinations--or which more recently, as democracy took hold, turned into the last bastions of the Communist elite.

“The soviets have done a lot of harm to the reforms. They have to go,” said Sergei Samoilov, deputy chief of Yeltsin’s department on regional policy.

Some councils will remain. But they will be stripped to one-tenth their current size, officials say, and most important, they will be kicked out of the business of running day-to-day government.

The highest soviet of all, the federal Parliament, will not even have a chance to approve Russia’s new constitution. Yeltsin decreed Friday that the new charter should be passed in a nationwide referendum on Dec. 12 during parliamentary elections rather than adopted by lawmakers.

It was the federal Supreme Soviet’s deadlock with Yeltsin’s executive branch, and the local soviets’ routine blocking of reforms, that led to the deadly confrontation that culminated last week in Moscow battles that left at least 193 dead.

On Friday, the Interfax news service reported that a slew of opposition leaders involved in the violence--including former Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi, Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov and ministerial designees Viktor P. Barannikov, Andrei Dunayev and Vladislav Achalov--had been charged with organizing mass disorders. That crime carries a maximum penalty of 15 years.

Now, back from Japan and poised to sign a new raft of decrees, Yeltsin is intent on one final battle--to deliver the death blow to what Russian newspapers call the “many-headed Soviet Hydra.”

He has asked regional councils to do him the favor of self-destructing, but many have refused to oblige. So, said Samoilov, he is about to decree several more out of existence, on the grounds that they abetted the Supreme Soviet in its defiance of his order that it be dissolved.

The Moscow City Council, formerly a mastodon of some 465 members, has already been banned; plans are to reconstitute it with a sleek 30 or so members. Sixteen regional councils out of a total of 88 have either dissolved themselves or been dissolved by governors.

Others, Samoilov said, are planning to dissolve themselves but are dragging their feet to get better positioned for the December elections.

From a land that once was the major part of “The Country of the Soviets,” Russia is turning into a place with a growing allergy even to the word. The replacement for the Supreme Soviet will be called the Federal Assembly; only one of its two chambers, the Federation Soviet, uses the “S word.”

Officials could not say exactly how many deputies there are on local and regional councils. But one noted that the Chita region, with a population of 1.4 million, has a full 11,000 deputies. By extrapolation, Russia has more than 1 million deputies at all levels.

Once, noted Prof. Anatoly Krasikov in the Trud newspaper, “The Soviet form of power was put forth by its creators as just about the highest achievement of democracy.”

Workers’ soviets functioned as strike committees in the uprisings of 1905 and subsequent unrest, and “workers’ and peasants’ soviets” became the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in 1917. “All Power to the Soviets” was one of the main slogans of the Revolution.

Afterward, V. I. Lenin proclaimed that “the soviets are the essence of the new state apparatus.” There was even a popular patriotic song that went, “We’ll go bravely into battle for the power of the soviets and we’ll die as one for it.”

But by 1918, it was already clear that the Bolsheviks as a party were really running everything. And over the decades, the soviets became mere democratic window-dressing for Communist Party decisions.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the former Soviet president, did much to change that, allowing partially free elections and orchestrating the transfer of power from the Communist Party to the councils and government.

But then a new problem with the soviets arose. Instead of being stacked with milkmaids and factory workers, the soviets were stacked with Communist apparatchiks because the system still was largely controlled by the party.

They became the “antipodes of democracy,” Krasikov wrote in Trud.

“The current soviets are the successors of the Communist Party and its apparatus in the center and in the regions,” he wrote. “So there’s nothing surprising in the fact that the old organs of power turned into the brake on the road to democratic reforms in the country.”

Samoilov said that councils at all levels arrogated to themselves so much power that governors and mayors could barely function. And most of that power they used to block reforms or to grab resources for themselves.

“They sabotaged the reforms in every possible way,” he said.

“They prevented the privatization process from engulfing the regions, they wanted to keep state property to themselves, they opposed land reform, they threatened not to pay taxes to the federal budget. They were hotbeds of separatist tendencies in the regions and republics.”

Beyond that, they were simply inefficient. The sprawling Moscow City Council would drive Mayor Yuri Luzhkov to distraction when it blocked or slowed his moves and ended up at loggerheads with him when it supported the Supreme Soviet after Yeltsin moved to dissolve the national body.

St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak, similarly frustrated, closed down neighborhood councils this week, leaving bewildered deputies to gape on the street corner and wonder what to do next. “They’ve just thrown us out onto the street and won’t even let us get our things,” complained Yuri Okulov, a deputy in the Kuibyshevsky district.

Under a presidential decree, local leaders have the right to strip councils of executive powers and to close them only under special circumstances. But many have been going a bit overboard now that they finally have a chance to take revenge on their longtime rivals.

It appears to be a full rout for the soviets.

But political analyst Vladimir Chervyakov cautioned that it may be too early to judge.

If voters in the Dec. 12 elections bring back many of the same deputies, he said--which could happen because time for the election campaigns is so short--then the old soviets may rise again, in a different, trimmed-down form and with fewer powers but the same makeup.

“It is still early to say that the soviets are completely finished,” he said. “In this country, they have great potential of re-creating themselves.”

Times special correspondent Matt Bivens in St. Petersburg and Sergei Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.