Day for Workers Marred by Violence in Some Nations : 100,000 Marching Soviets Mark May 1

More than 100,000 Soviets waving red banners, posters and balloons marched through Moscow’s Red Square on Monday to mark May Day. Elsewhere in the world, there was violence in Poland, Czechoslovakia and West Germany, and workers in Panama and Venezuela used the occasion to protest.

May Day has been the designated holiday for the recognition of Socialist and Communist labor since a proclamation by the Second Socialist International in 1889. Elsewhere, it has been celebrated historically as a festival to the Roman goddess of spring.

Popular tunes mixed with martial music in the Moscow festivities, where marchers filed past President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and members of the ruling Politburo for more than two hours, carrying banners praising his reforms.

“There were more flowers, balloons and color than in previous years,” said a Western diplomat. “It seemed more relaxed. There was also a distinct lack of ideology.”

Gorbachev, sporting a gray overcoat despite the sunshine and 60-degree temperatures, waved with members of his Politburo to the crowds from their traditional podium atop Lenin’s tomb.

Even the once-disgraced Moscow politician, Boris N. Yeltsin, who was swept back into thelimelight by voters during the March elections, had a place of honor among the senior officials.

“It was a very positive parade,” Yeltsin told reporters. “I liked the rock dancing. My daughter dances the rock.”

In contrast, no parades were held in the republics of Georgia and Armenia. In the republic’s capital of Tbilisi, the parade was canceled because of the deaths of 20 Georgian nationalist demonstrators in a clash with security forces April 10. And festivities were canceled in Yerevan, Armenia, to remember the 24,800 victims of the earthquake last Dec. 7.

In Poland, up to 100,000 Solidarity supporters marched through Warsaw with banners flying, but police used force to break up May Day rallies in two other cities.

Thousands lined the streets and cheered as marchers chanted “No Freedom without Solidarity” and waved huge banners and flags in the independent trade union’s first legal May Day march since martial law was imposed in 1981.

In Czechoslovakia, police detained more than 100 people after a crowd of about 1,000 chanted demands for freedom. At Prague’s official May Day rally, some unfurled banners calling for the respect of human rights. The protest in Wenceslas Square was the first since a crackdown on dissent after anti-government demonstrations in January.

In West Berlin, demonstrators threw rocks at police and looted stores in the city’s third violent May Day parade in as many years, police said. Fighting broke out after a “revolutionary” rally by 7,000 people in the suburb of Kreuzberg, considered to be a hotbed of anarchist youth.

Across the world in Central and Latin America, about 300 demonstrators marched to a downtown square in Panama City shouting anti-U.S. slogans and cheering politicians who back Panama’s military leader, Gen. Manuel A. Noriega. The marchers, belonging to a pro-government workers union, protested what they said was an impending U.S. invasion.

In Venezuela, more than 100,000 workers marched through the capital of Caracas in a noisy May Day protest against the economic policies of President Carlos Andres Perez.

The Confederation of Venezuelan Workers--the nation’s largest trade union federation--turned its traditional May Day parade into a demonstration against austerity measures that have sent the cost of living soaring.