50 Arrested as Police Break Up Moscow Rally

About 50 anti-government demonstrators were detained Sunday as riot police broke up a rally in central Moscow protesting the deaths two weeks ago of 20 people at a nationalist rally in the southern Soviet republic of Georgia.

As several thousand people shouted “Fascists!” “Shame!” and “Gestapo!” at the police, 47 of the Moscow rally’s organizers and participants, members of the dissident Democratic Union, were hauled into police buses and will face charges of organizing a public meeting without a permit, police said later. Three more will face charges of distributing subversive literature.

Seen as ‘Provocation’

The official Soviet news agency Tass, accusing the Democratic Union of taking advantage of the country’s current political problems, including the deaths in Georgia, described the rally as a “provocation,” planned with the Western news media in mind and “jeopardizing the lives and safety of participants and all those who happened to be nearby.”

Although the organizers managed to make a few speeches to one another in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, one of the capital’s most popular parks, a tight police cordon kept away most of those who might have taken part, and half a dozen impromptu rallies sprang up instead around the periphery, often involving confrontations between would-be participants and the police.

“When are you going to start protecting our democracy rather than their bureaucracy?” a middle-aged woman demanded of a police lieutenant colonel, who was commanding forces on one side of the square. “Democracy is not a quantity to be rationed to protect our party autocracy. . . .

“And, if this is all nonsense, as you say, why are you afraid of it? In a workers’ state with a people’s government, why are you afraid of the people?”

Bested by such rhetoric from someone apparently more schooled in the dialectics of Marxism-Leninism, the police commander called up reinforcements from the special riot squad to push the crowd further down the street.

“They want a second Tbilisi!” a young man then shouted, referring to the use by troops of staves, shovels and gas to break up the nationalist demonstration in a central square of the Georgian capital April 9. Twenty civilians were killed and nearly 300 were injured on that occasion.

“How many will you murder here?” the young man asked.

“But here they dare not do what they did in Tbilisi,” he said later. “Here there are too many influential people, too many press men, too many foreigners watching.”

Testing Limits of Democracy

The Moscow rally, which had been prohibited by city authorities, was intended as another test by political dissidents of the limits of the Soviet Union’s expanding democracy.

While they have reveled in new freedom brought by perestroika , as President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms are known, the dissidents have declared their intention to push for the lifting of all constraints on political activities and to seek full freedom of speech, assembly and association.

“ Perestroika is in crisis,” a Leningrad activist said in an interview before the meeting, “and we want to bring it to a head. . . . The way forward is by sharpening the crisis, bringing out all the contradictions and forcing events. If perestroika fails, it is really no loss for us, as it is no better than half-measures that delay real change.”

The Democratic Union, formed nearly a year ago to pursue a multi-party democracy for the country, groups a wide range of dissidents, including independent Marxists, social democrats, nationalists from Armenia, Georgia, the Ukraine and several other Soviet republics and even some monarchists who argue that a constitutional monarchy would be the proper vehicle to establish full democracy and recover the country’s cultural traditions.

The flags of imperial Russia and of the Ukraine during its brief period of independence were waved by members of the crowd, taunting police, who apparently had orders to seize the flags.

“Bastards!” a senior police officer swore as the flags blossomed again in the crowd. “Don’t they know that the czar’s police would have just cut them down with their sabers or even a machine gun? All we do is take away their little flags--and get bopped on the head doing it.”

Constraints on Police

The constraints upon the security forces on Sunday were clearly severe--the rally, although forbidden, was dispersed only after two hours and with minimal force--and there were overriding political considerations.

While the authorities were determined not to permit protests the size of those during last month’s elections, when more than 10,000 people took to the streets several times in support of Boris N. Yeltsin, an anti-Establishment candidate, they were equally determined not to suppress them with the brutality that left so many dead and injured in Tbilisi.

Admitting that the rally was well timed, Tass commented that the Democratic Union had “cashed in on our real difficulties,” focusing on the deaths in Tbilisi and linking them to the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan and the continuing ethnic conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

Passers-by had joined with rally participants in shouting “Down with it!’ without knowing what they were denouncing or understanding the overall political situation, Tass asserted.

But many who joined the protest were quite clear about how they saw it--a popular demand for the political rights that they had been promised as part of the Soviet democratization and the stand of the police in refusing to permit a peaceful demonstration.

The middle-aged and members of the intelligentsia were as numerous in the crowd as youths, quickly joining in the human wall that stopped several police charges and enthusiastically shouting, “Down with fascism! Down with the bureaucracy! Down with the (party) apparat!”

The Democratic Union’s leaflet had declared: “We cannot turn to Parliament with these questions. We do not have a Parliament. We cannot turn to independent courts. We do not have courts or laws.”

The leaflet compared the clash in Tbilisi two weeks ago to the “bloody Sunday” in 1905 when czarist police opened fire on protesters demanding reforms. “ Perestroika died on a bloody Sunday,” the leaflet said.

Many of the country’s social tensions were evident around the periphery of the rally, where supporters of the dissidents debated their critics, with a lot of kibitzing by people who questioned their ideas or their motives, who expressed misgivings about the whole course of perestroika or who simply complained about the disruption of traffic around Pushkin Square.

“Do you reject the results of last month’s elections?” a middle-aged man, a well-spoken intellectual, demanded of one of the young demonstrators in a typical conversation. “Did not progressives sweep the Moscow contests? Have you no faith in these men? Why is it necessary to take to the streets now? We elected these men, and now we should push them to act in the Congress of People’s Deputies. That is democracy.”

The youth replied that “the system” corrupted everyone, that everyone who entered became a “sellout,” that nothing could be expected of the new Parliament.

“And who was elected in your district? Roy Medvedev?” the older man asked, referring to a prominent Marxist historian who was expelled from the Communist Party and spent 20 years in the political wilderness for his firm stand on matters of principle and refusal to toady to party authorities.

“You think that Roy Medvedev was a sellout?” he asked. “You poor boy. He was being persecuted for a principled and steadfast stand while you were still in diapers! You can be certain he will take up the tragedy in Tbilisi. . . . And if you think the problem is with the Moscow City Council, then let us vote them out of office--every last one of them--in the autumn elections. Get rid of the whole lot. I’ll be with you.”

Democracy, the younger man replied, “cannot be turned on for elections and off for the rest of the year. . . . If today we cannot discuss the killing of 20 Soviet citizens by troops in the capital of Soviet Georgia, what makes you think that we will be able to discuss anything democratically in the future?”