Soviet Union: Russian Standoff

By Bruce W. Nelan.

The marchers, more than 200,000 strong, simply defied the government ban, the thousands of police, the scores of military vehicles. As an evening snow shower dusted their faces, the supporters of change in the Soviet Union thronged Moscow's streets to deliver a pungent political message, savoring the act of public assembly in the face of Mikhail Gorbachev's order forbidding rallies, and then tramped peacefully home. For what, then, had the Kremlin assembled an enormous security force -- to protect itself against its own people?

Gorbachev's futile show of force surely marked another drop in his waning popularity. Amid the ranks of uniformed men, a solitary woman stood weeping. "This is the country I love," said Natalia Kositskaya, a 50-year-old doctor at a Moscow military clinic, "and I am ashamed of it. I never would have believed Gorbachev could do this. In the past two years, he has become a devil." Her tears continued as she pointed at the moving phalanx of police. "It is a crime," she said.

Only two years ago, President Gorbachev was urging the Soviet people to be bold, to show initiative, to carry out demokratizatsiya at all levels. "Perestroika," he said, "is a revolution." That definition may have seemed all too literal to him last week as the marching Muscovites disobeyed him to prove their support for his main rival, Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. Just as ominously, thousands of striking miners, from the Ukraine to western Siberia, were also resorting to politics, and joined their city cousins in demanding Gorbachev's resignation.

Like the whole of the ailing Soviet economy, the mine strike has been festering for years. But Gorbachev brought last week's confrontation in the capital on himself. Communists inside the Russian republic's parliament had called a special session to mount a no-confidence vote against Yeltsin. Many feel that the maverick Russian should be dismissed for demanding Gorbachev's resignation, for supporting the breakaway Baltic republics and for such other sins as suggesting a separate Russian army.

Although Yeltsin holds support by only a thin margin in the 1,068-seat parliament, his position was strengthened three weeks ago by a question he inserted into the national referendum. Seventy percent of those who voted said yes to his idea of a popularly elected President, for which he would be the clear favorite. Last week's rally, for which plans had been announced even before the referendum, would burnish his image still further.

Gorbachev struck back with a ban on all public demonstrations in Moscow for three weeks, suggesting that deputies in the Russian parliament would be intimidated if they had to wade through an ocean of yelling Yeltsinites. To make sure the ban was enforced, the President took police powers away from the city council and turned them over to the national Interior Ministry, which mustered a virtual army of trucks, water cannons and troops in riot gear. Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov spoke of "looming threats," and Anatoli Karpychev, deputy editor of Pravda, the party daily, charged that radicals were planning a coup. Declared he: "Preparations for the final storming of the Kremlin have already begun."

On Thursday morning the streets of the capital were in the hands of 50,000 paramilitary police, soldiers and Interior Ministry troops. The squares and byways around the Kremlin were blocked by hundreds of heavy trucks, and the water cannons lurked like artillery behind the troops.

Even before the demonstrations began, Gorbachev suffered his first political setback of the day. The Russian parliament voted almost 2-to-1 to overrule his decree against public marches and seizure of law-enforcement power. Then the deputies adjourned so Yeltsin backers could take part in the protest and help keep it peaceful.

The rally organizers had planned to gather their marchers in public squares several blocks from the Kremlin and then move into Manezh Square. The crowds found they could not make it past the troops blocking the routes into the square, so they simply demonstrated in several places in the center of the city, and the police did not even try to break them up.

In a display of what Gorbachev used to call "the creativity of the masses," people turned out on sidewalks, balconies and street corners. Thousands gathered in Mayakovsky Square and the Old Arbat, the designated meeting points, carrying rebellious posters: GORBACHEV RESIGN and SAVE RUSSIA FROM THE COMMUNIST PARTY. As they assembled, they chanted, "Yel-tsin! Yel- tsin!" and scolded the troops surrounding them, "Shame! Shame!"

The day proved that if they have achieved nothing else, Gorbachev's reforms have wiped away Soviet citizens' fear of their government. "Despite a campaign of intimidation," Nikolai Travkin, head of the radical Democratic Party, told the crowd, "we have gathered here and crossed the threshold of fear." Their courage delivered another blow to Gorbachev's authority and a boost for the man fighting the Kremlin, Boris Yeltsin.

National television's evening news has reverted to its old propagandistic habits, and so took the government's dismissive view of the day's events as "nothing new." Yet even the newsreader added, "We cannot fail to see that appeals for a change in leadership and a change in the system are being heard more and more frequently."

Those appeals are also coming from important and angry segments of the work force on whose behalf the Russian Revolution established a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In the office of the miners' strike committee in Donetsk, coal capital of the Ukraine, a poster on one wall renders today's verdict on that myth. It shows a stylized Soviet worker in shackles, his neck ring labeled KGB, his iron waistband PROPAGANDA and the iron ball he carries COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION. Below is the caption: "We have nothing to lose but our chains."

Yuri Marakov, 52, is co-chairman of the Donetsk strike committee and one of the leaders of the new free-union movement. Where once trade unions existed only to transmit production orders from the party, perestroika and the strikes of 1989 have given rise to unions that put the worker first. They are relatively small but influential. In addition to the miners, groups of seamen, air-traffic controllers and journalists have set up independent federations. Almost every mine has a permanent workers' committee. "People just want normal working and living conditions," says Marakov, "but they can't have normal conditions in this system."

When the miners struck through much of the summer two years ago, they asked for higher pay, better housing, more consumer goods. Gorbachev praised their enterprise and promised to deliver. But he never did, and many miners still live in squalor and work with old equipment in dangerous conditions. They blame Gorbachev. "Before," says Marakov, "we made economic demands. Now we must make political demands."

More than 300,000 miners are on strike at 200 of the country's 600 pits, and most of them are calling for Gorbachev's resignation. Inspired by the miners, workers in other industries are signaling that they are almost ready to lay down their tools. A wave of support rallies rolled through metalworks across the country last week, and the giant machine-building plant Uralmash in Sverdlovsk staged a two-hour warning strike.

Moscow's bureaucrats seem as deaf as ever to such warnings. Asked by a TV correspondent about the merits of the strikers' demands, Mikhail Shchadov, Minister of the Coal Industry, replied with an obscenity. "This kind of language," said a miner in Kemerovo, "is the only thing the minister has in common with us."

Gorbachev and his unresponsive government are increasingly threatened by the revolutionary forces he has set loose in the land. Yeltsin failed to get his proposal for an elected presidency on the Russian parliament's agenda last week, so that debate will probably have to wait for the next regular session in a few months. But the mass turnout in Moscow could strengthen his hopes for the kind of People Power that overturned Communist governments in Czechoslovakia and East Germany in 1989 -- or, for that matter, Czarist Russia in 1917.

| Millions of miners and workers present an even more serious challenge. Armies might clear streets, but they cannot dig coal, build turbines or take over entire industries. Shaky as it is now, the Soviet economy could be paralyzed by the shock of a summer of strikes. The country, says Michael Mandelbaum of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, has "a potential for a general strike."

The government of the Soviet Union is not able to operate a productive economy. Last week it was unable to enforce a ban on demonstrations in Moscow. Gorbachev has shown a penchant for half measures in reform and an unwillingness to return fully to the dark days of rule by the iron fist -- and that has resolved nothing. Like the old American embassy that burned in Moscow last week, this rickety structure could go up at any time.

With reporting by James Carney/Donetsk, Ann Simmons/Moscow and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington