‘It Is Necessary to Stop the Lies,’ New Chief Says : Party Leader Shakes Up Moscow

Members of the ruling Politburo are not known for riding in overcrowded buses, standing in long lines to buy food or tramping through impassable back streets in winter to check on snow removal.

But one member has done all these things. He is Boris N. Yeltsin, who as Moscow Communist Party chief is the man who runs the city. Since his appointment to the post ten months ago, he has emerged as a remarkable example of a senior party official who has at least sampled the hard life of an ordinary Muscovite.

Unlike most of the city’s long-suffering citizens, however, the tough-talking Yeltsin can do something about it. He has been assigned by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to make Moscow work better.

Judging by the official media, it might be easier to clean the city’s streets with a clothes brush than to rid the Soviet capital of corruption, inefficiency and inertia in housing, transport and retail services.

Before Yeltsin, Moscow’s party boss was Viktor V. Grishin, banished in disgrace last December after 15 years of complacent leadership and silence about the city’s shortcomings.

“It is necessary to stop the lies,” his successor, the 55-year-old Moscow chief from the city of Sverdlovsk, said in one of his milder remarks about the Grishin era.

Candor and Action

Combining candor with action, Yeltsin has purged the Moscow party of Grishin men and installed hand-picked replacements to reinforce his own vigorous approach.

Last summer, Moscow blossomed with outdoor cafes selling a wide variety of juices, as part of Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol drive. Attractive booths appeared, offering the biggest supply of fresh vegetables and fruits that residents have seen for many years.

In a nod to Moscow’s ancient past, historic street names were revived, and Yeltsin took a personal interest in restoring some architectural landmarks. Work was even stopped on a grandiose World War II victory monument when Russian artists denounced it as “pompous” and “dehumanizing.”

Yeltsin’s hard-boiled style, perhaps reflecting his career as a construction engineer, have not delighted everyone.

He reportedly has received death threats. At a recent party meeting, he received one anonymous note that said:

“We know you are Gorbachev’s stooge. Why don’t you go back where you came from?”

Other messages mocked his habit of riding the buses and subways to get a first-hand look at transportation in Moscow, which is cheap but often overcrowded. Yeltsin replied that he found that up to 35% of the buses did not work on any given day, adding: “Muscovites are not simply complaining, they are outraged.”

When he visited the Moscow markets where private goods are sold on a supply-and-demand basis, Yeltsin was startled by the prices.

“A miserable bunch of parsley costs 50 kopecks, sometimes as much as a ruble,” he reported, “a kilo of meat, 8 rubles”--2.2 pounds for about $12 at the official exchange rate.

Yeltsin proposed a remedy already advanced by Gorbachev--cooperative shops where farmers could sell their goods for less than they do in the markets but more than in the state stores where the prices are fixed by the government.

“It doesn’t matter if they sell sausage at 8 rubles a kilo in those shops,” he said. “At least they would be selling sausage which smells of meat.”

He also struck at entrenched corruption among store managers and clerks. A total of 800 employees of retail stores were arrested in a two-month period after Yeltsin came into office.

Moscow’s perpetual housing shortage also is on Yeltsin’s list of long-neglected problems.

He has said that 2.5 million families need apartments. About one million Muscovites still live in communal flats where they share a bathroom and kitchen with other tenants, and tens of thousands of people still occupy buildings condemned as slums. Yet, he noted, the largest city in the Soviet Union only ranks eighth in new housing construction.

The city’s famed subway system, with its heavily subsidized 5 kopeck fare, also desperately needs modernization, Yeltsin believes. It has 2,000 accidents a year, and the rolling stock is worn out, he says.

Yeltsin has acted to cut off the flood of workers who come to Moscow from the provinces to get the coveted propiska , or residence permit. This influx adds 70,000 to 80,000 people to Moscow’s population every year, strains public services and pushes up the crime rate, he said recently.

For all this, Moscow has a shortage of workers. To remedy that, Yeltsin has ordered a widespread crackdown on Muscovites of working age who do not hold a job.

“There’s a shortage of 5,000 drivers, yet Moscow has 200,000 people just loafing about,” he said.

His most daring act so far has been to remove some long-established perks of party officials and preach socialist egalitarianism to Moscow’s elite.

Ban on Official Perks

Yeltsin ordered an end to the use of official cars for transporting children to schools and wives on shopping trips, for example. He closed down a special store for party leaders that carried goods impossible to obtain in regular stores.

He fired a party official who had used government funds to add a fireplace to his apartment and ridiculed a factory director who installed a toilet with a pale blue bowl near a special dining room.

“Some leaders have cut their links with the people,” Yeltsin concluded. “This must be fought. . . . Only crystal-pure people should be engaged in party work.”

Yeltsin sets a fast pace. He claims he works from 6 a.m. to midnight, sleeping only four hours. As for his shoes, usually an indicator of affluence and status in the Soviet Union, Yeltsin said they were made by a Sverdlovsk factory, cost just 23 rubles (about $35) and would last for five years.

Yeltsin has had a relatively rapid rise in Communist Party ranks. He was admitted to membership in 1961 when he was a construction engineer. He became a full-time party official in 1968, rose to first secretary of the Sverdlovsk district in 1975 and was chosen for the party’s Central Committee in 1981.

He came to Moscow in July, 1985, to head the committee’s construction department but then was appointed first secretary of the Moscow city party last December.

Some Western diplomats regard Yeltsin as the most candid and credible member of the Soviet leadership. Although he is now only a candidate, or non-voting, member of the Politburo, it is considered likely that he will soon be promoted to full membership.

It was Yeltsin, for example, who gave the world the first detailed reports on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster when he was on a trip to West Germany.

And it was Yeltsin who raised some of the most interesting questions at the recent 27th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party.

“Why, after so many years, have we not been able to root out bureaucratism, social injustice and abuse of power?” he asked. “Why is it that even now the demand for radical change gets bogged down in an inert layer of time-servers with party cards?”

Then, with his customary straight talk, Yeltsin said the delegates might ask why he had not raised the same points at the previous party congress in 1981.

“I can answer, and answer frankly, that I clearly lacked sufficient courage or political experience at that time,” he confessed.

Now, in Moscow, the show-window of the party, Yeltsin clearly is indicating by his words and actions that he has acquired both.