Revised Amendments Would Protect ‘Sovereign Rights’ : Gorbachev Offers Proposals on Soviet Republics

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, moving to defuse a major political confrontation with several of the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent national republics, put forward proposals on Saturday that would protect their “sovereign rights” but still ensure the country’s unity.

He also accepted extensive revisions to controversial draft legislation that will restructure the Soviet political system, saying that widespread criticism had led to revision of more than half of the proposed constitutional amendments and much of the new election law.

“As a result of the democratic process of discussion, we have drafts that are considerably different from those we originally published, and we can say that we have really new drafts before us,” Gorbachev told a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the national Parliament, which received more than 250,000 comments and criticisms of the new legislation.

“The changes improve the drafts,” Gorbachev said, “and the main thing is that they express the mood of the overwhelming majority of the people.”

Although the changes were not outlined in reports on the meeting by the Soviet news media, officials said that the sweeping powers originally granted to the new national legislature had been reduced in the new draft and that the autonomy of the constituent republics was maintained, if not immediately enlarged as they had hoped.

Protection Pledge

The key concession to such constituent republics as Estonia, Lithuania, Armenia and Georgia was Gorbachev’s recognition of their “sovereign rights” and his pledge for the protection--through Parliament and a new constitutional court--of their national “political, social and economic rights” as a basic part of perestroika, or restructuring, as his overall reform program is known.

“We live in a multi-ethnic state, and the Soviet Union is our common home,” Gorbachev said. “In developing and implementing the plans of revolutionary perestroika, we should proceed from the premise that we cannot count on success if our reforms do not take into account the interests of all the nations living in our vast country. This, I believe, comrades, is a political axiom.”

The Presidium told its legislative commissions to begin drafting proposals to further this pledge even in advance of the special Communist Party meeting called for mid-1989 to discuss the relationship between the central government in Moscow and the country’s republics and outlying regions and territories.

Gorbachev’s strategy for reform is based on moves from the center outward. The constitutional amendments and the electoral law to be presented Tuesday to the Supreme Soviet are aimed at introducing fundamental changes into the central government, including the creation of an executive presidency and a full-time legislature.

He clearly intends them to be a major impulse for reform, and his speech to the Presidium on Saturday reflected his belief that these first constitutional changes will define the scope, the speed, the very nature of the whole reform effort.

After this will come reform of the country’s federal system and of the regional governments, Gorbachev said. The third stage would extend the process to local governments and to the myriad institutions, ranging from schools, factories, hospitals to construction companies, that they control.

“We must remember that many proposals (about the proposed constitutional amendments and electoral law) go beyond the framework of the first stage of reform,” he said. “But they do not now disappear without a trace. They will be kept and dealt with later.”

Ruled Invalid

But the Presidium, as expected, formally branded as contradicting the Soviet constitution, and thus invalid, recent legislation adopted by the Baltic republic of Estonia declaring its “sovereignty” within the Soviet Union and asserting its right to veto national legislation.

Gorbachev, who had encouraged the Estonians and had drawn inspiration from their political innovations, had some hard words for them Saturday. The Estonian decisions were “erroneous and have no legal force,” he said. He also made clear that he strongly believes that “our future is not in weaker relations between the republics but, on the contrary, in their consolidation and in expansion of cooperation.”

“All of us have the same destiny and, discussing our future, we should think of how we shall advance forward, pooling our efforts and feeling the shoulder and support of one another, without turning back to self-subsistence economy, isolation and confederation,” he said. “This would be theoretically erroneous and politically harmful. The entire history of our state confirms the need for the development of the Soviet economy as a single complex.”

Gorbachev also criticized others he said were using his reforms against their basic aims.

“We should not agree to a situation where the opportunities that were brought out by perestroika, democratization and openness are used to increase tensions and especially to heat up the dislike of representatives of various ethnic groups for each other,” he said.

As the Presidium met in the Kremlin, there were demonstrations against the constitutional changes in the three Baltic republics--Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania--and in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.

At the same time, troops were attempting to restore order in the southern republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, where more than 40 people have died in communal violence in the past nine months.

“We have quite a few problems related to inter-ethnic relations piled up,” Gorbachev said. “Some of them assumed a painful nature and now call for both analysis and decisions.”