Moscow Air Defense Chief Loses Post : Practices That May Have Allowed Red Square Landing Hit

Soviet officials removed the chief of Moscow’s air defenses, the army newspaper said today in a report that strongly criticized his district for practices that may have allowed a West German teen-ager to land a private plane in Red Square.

The Defense Ministry daily Red Star did not say whether Marshal Anatoly U. Konstantinov had been replaced before or after Mathias Rust’s unauthorized flight from Finland to Moscow.

It said only that Col. Gen. V. Tsarkov had assumed the post “recently.” However, the article referred to the “violation of Soviet airspace,” an apparent reference to Rust’s flight.

The 19-year-old pilot crossed hundreds of miles of Soviet airspace May 28 and landed a private plane in the heart of Moscow--an area closed to all air traffic.

Several Ousted From Party

The army newspaper also said several other top-ranking officers in the Moscow district--including two lieutenant generals, a major general and a colonel--were expelled from the Communist Party.

A Western defense attache said the article was the first announcement of Konstantinov’s removal.

“I think it’s intimately connected with the intrusion into Soviet airspace, but there’s no way to tell from the paper when the change was made,” said the attache, who demanded anonymity.

The defense attache said the Red Star report was the harshest criticism he had ever seen of the military in the state-run Soviet press. He linked it to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s campaign to hold all members of the government bureaucracy responsible for their actions.

New Chief Also Criticized

He noted the article also criticized Tsarkov for not having speedily taken “urgent measures” upon assuming his new post.

After Rust’s flight, the ruling Politburo retired the defense minister, Sergei L. Sokolov, and fired the head of Soviet air defense forces, Chief Marshal Alexander I. Koldunov.

The Politburo said that the military spotted Rust’s plane by radar and that Soviet fighter planes twice flew around it, but nothing was done to make the teen-ager break off his flight.

Soviet police took Rust into custody after he buzzed Red Square several times, then landed his Cessna between St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin wall.