Sakharov Calls Gorbachev Moves a Well-Meant ‘Coup’

Soviet human rights champion Andrei Sakharov said on Friday that Mikhail S. Gorbachev is concentrating governmental powers in his hands to such an extent that it is “tantamount to a coup” with good intentions.

He called it a dangerous development but also urged the West to support Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) policies because the alternative would be an expansionist Soviet Union that “would constitute a threat to the rest of the world.”

Sakharov, who only two years ago was living in internal exile in the closed city of Gorky, made his comments in separate appearances before U.S. human rights activists and scientists, groups that pleaded his case before the world.

In a morning meeting with members of the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, Sakharov expressed concern about Gorbachev’s concentrating too much power in his hands as a means of stopping his opposition.

But in a later meeting at the New York Academy of Sciences, Sakharov urged the West to support the Soviet leader.

He said that if perestroika were to fail, new Soviet leaders would be forced to find “relief outside the system in expansion, and that expansion would have a much more serious consequence than what we had during the period of stagnation.”

Sakharov said he was worried at how his nation’s Parliament, the Supreme Soviet, was being reorganized into a body whose leader, expected to be Gorbachev, would have enormous powers.

He criticized the plan to create a 2,250-member Congress of People’s Deputies that would meet once a year to elect an inner chamber of 450 deputies, which would convene more regularly.

He said the inner chamber would be a Supreme Soviet with legislative powers and its leader “will concentrate in his hands an enormous amount of power--more than the President of the United States.”

“This is tantamount to a coup,” he added.

Speaking through a translator, he said he believes Gorbachev is concentrating powers “out of good intentions, but I think it is a dangerous development. You can envision several scenarios which would lead to catastrophe.”

Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize winner, made his comments on the sixth day of a two-week U.S. visit, his first to the West.

He said it is clear that Gorbachev’s plan represents an attempt to retain as much power as possible to break resistance to reforms and counter opposition to perestroika.

Sakharov said the draft for the new legislature came “out of the blue” and things were developing quickly.

“This draft will be submitted to the Supreme Soviet, which recently took 40 minutes to change every position in our government,” he added.

Sakharov said the Congress of People’s Deputies “can only gather for a few days and cannot make a difference. It can only vote for the initiatives of the apparatus.”

He said he and other Soviet human rights activists were concerned that new laws were being announced that would restrict freedom of speech and assembly.

The laws were prepared in secret without legal experts’ knowing about them in advance, he said.

Sakharov said he supports the idea of an official Soviet conference on human rights in Moscow in 1991, provided that all Soviet prisoners of conscience are released and that the Soviet Union withdraws all its troops from Afghanistan.

Asked by a reporter after the meeting how he liked the United States, he laughed and said: “It is great, terrific, but I am not giving any interviews.”