Sakharov Denied a Parliamentary Nomination : Protest Targets Soviet Science Academy

This country’s first multiple-candidate national election campaign broke more new ground here Thursday when hundreds of Moscow intellectuals waved banners and chanted slogans in an outdoor protest against alleged ballot-rigging at the prestigious Soviet Academy of Sciences.

The demonstrators were objecting to a closed-door vote by the academy leadership last month that denied human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov and other prominent, reform-minded scientists the right to contest for seats reserved for academy members in a new Soviet Parliament.

The academy’s leaders, some of whom watched discreetly from a second-floor window during Thursday’s demonstration outside their offices, approved only 23 nominations for 25 reserved seats, voting down Sakharov and others who had been nominated by dozens of member institutes. The other two seats were given away to another organization.

The action meant that the full academy will, effectively, have no choice when it meets to elect its representatives next month.

The crowd shouted for academy officers to “Resign! Resign!” as a dozen speakers blasted their selection procedure as undemocratic.

Sakharov, who was present for the hourlong demonstration but did not address the crowd, told journalists afterward that the protest proves that opposition has a place in President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s program of perestroika --economic and political reform.

“I consider this is an important event on the road to our perestroika ,” the physicist and 1975 Nobel peace laureate said. “The scientific society has had its say. I think it (the protest) will play a great role in the history of Soviet science.”

Scored by Izvestia

An editorial in the government newspaper Izvestia the day before had criticized him in strong language for making negative statements about perestroika to the foreign press. Sakharov has said that he supports the program’s aims but should be free to criticize its failings.

City authorities had approved the demonstration, and the police and civilian crowd controllers on hand made no attempt to interfere. Protesters held up banners that stated: “Down With Academic ‘Democracy!’ ” “Sakharov-Yes” and “25 Places; 23 Candidates--Shame!”

“We have a fundamental crisis in the Academy of Sciences,” space researcher Lev Mukhin told the crowd, “a crisis of mistrust of the wide masses in Soviet science. . . .”

The demonstrators handed out copies of a resolution urging the candidates put forward by the academy leadership to withdraw from the elections and proposing creation of a new, independent scientific association.

Academy officials rejected charges of manipulation but said the resolutions will be discussed at a leadership meeting next week.

While rejected as a parliamentary candidate by the Academy of Sciences, Sakharov was subsequently nominated to represent Moscow in the new Congress of Peoples’ Deputies. One-third of the 2,250 seats in the new congress were reserved for institutions such as the Academy of Sciences and the other two-thirds are to be filled from territorial constituencies.

Election authorities say Sakharov is one of 15 nominees for the Moscow National-Territorial seat, a list that is to be further whittled down under ground rules not completed. He must pass that stage of the election process before it is certain that his name will appear on the March 26 ballot.

The elected congress is to choose a full-time legislature, which will in turn name a president, expected to be Gorbachev, with sweeping executive powers.