Soviet Union Heading into the Homestretch

By Paul Hofheinz/Moscow

The corridors of the neoclassical House of Trade Unions building were dark when Boris Yeltsin, 58, Moscow's former Communist Party leader, emerged from a conference room to speak to journalists and admirers waiting in the hall. Yeltsin looked weary but triumphant. "Boris Nikolayevich! How does it feel?" shouted a foreign reporter. "All of Moscow will vote!" Yeltsin beamed. "Can you imagine what that means?"

Only minutes earlier, 886 electors had cast ballots approving Yeltsin's candidacy for city-wide representative to the Congress of People's Deputies, a recently created legislature that Mikhail Gorbachev is counting on to boost his floundering reform drive. Yeltsin's success was a signal turnabout. Sixteen months ago, Gorbachev ousted the Moscow party boss after he passionately attacked the slow pace of Soviet reform. Last week Yeltsin overcame that taint as one of two candidates to survive the emotional twelve- hour meeting called to decide how many of ten proposed candidates would appear on the ballot for Moscow's elected representative in the new body. Thus the Soviet Union's first real electoral campaign, in which several candidates will be able to vie for the same seat, entered its final phase.

Across the country, lists of candidates were approved after weeks of often stormy preliminary meetings. The sessions became controversial because they included only specially chosen local voters with the power to eliminate candidates before the March 26 vote. "Why should we, 886 people, make a decision for all of Moscow?" asked a delegate at the meeting that nominated Yeltsin. "We need a system that is fully democratic."

Many popular contenders failed to get past the electoral-district gatherings. Vitali Korotich, editor of the popular weekly magazine Ogonyok, walked out of a seven-hour session in Pravda's House of Culture, charging that the delegates had been stacked and that the meeting was being manipulated by the chairman. Two weeks ago, Andrei Sakharov withdrew his candidacy by publishing a short announcement in a Moscow newspaper saying he would run only as a representative of the Academy of Sciences, which turned him down as a candidate last month.

In the Ukrainian Republic it appeared that at least 40 of 175 districts would have only one candidate on the ballot. Gorbachev made a hasty trip to the region, where he exhorted citizens and party officials to make better use of their democratic rights. Speaking to a group of coal miners in Donetsk, the Soviet leader warned that his reform program needed the Ukraine's support. Said he: "If every republic doesn't make its contribution, then of course perestroika will slip into neutral."

Many Soviet citizens needed no urging to take advantage of their new democratic prerogatives, and some were already champing to go further. Candidate Yeltsin, for one, called for an open discussion of the possibility of introducing a multiparty system before the next Soviet election. Seated in a hall beneath a banner that proclaimed THE ELECTION OF U.S.S.R. PEOPLE'S DEPUTIES IS A SCHOOL FOR DEMOCRACY, nuclear scientist Yasen Shevelev, 63, marveled at the change in political climate. Said he: "It's hard to believe any of this is happening."