Voters Bolster Gorbachev’s Reform Bid : Setback for Conservatives Seen in Runoff Balloting for Assembly

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s chances for pushing through political and economic changes were strengthened Monday by election results giving social reformers seats in runoff balloting for a newly created Soviet assembly.

A crusading prosecutor who accused conservative Politburo member Yegor K. Ligachev of blocking an inquiry into high-level corruption defeated more than two dozen other candidates in Leningrad.

The editor of the taboo-breaking Ogonyok magazine and some reformers from the Baltic states also were on the winners’ list after Sunday’s balloting for the Congress of People’s Deputies.

Balloting took place in nearly 200 districts where voters in March refused to elect the candidates listed on their ballots, showing their displeasure by crossing the names off their ballots. In many cases, the defeated candidates initially ran unopposed. For Sunday’s balloting, in contrast, there was an average of six candidates for each seat.

In Leningrad, the Soviet Union’s second-largest city, police investigator Nikolai Ivanov swept to victory with 60% of the vote, defeating 27 other candidates to claim the city’s seat.

Kremlin’s ‘Right Turn’

Ivanov told Leningrad television in a two-minute campaign speech Friday that Ligachev had ordered a corruption probe to be dropped. He criticized what he called the Kremlin’s “right turn” and “Comrade Ligachev’s increasing influence.”

Last year, Ligachev, the former ideology chief, was ousted from his No. 2 spot and given the agriculture portfolio in a Politburo shake-up.

Ivanov and his partner, Telman Gdlyan, are something of heroes throughout the Soviet Union for spearheading a lengthy corruption investigation in the republic of Uzbekistan that led to the conviction of former Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Yuri M. Churbanov.

Gdlyan won a parliamentary seat in the March 26 voting, receiving more than 85% of the vote in a Moscow district.

Leningrad officials said that Ivanov, a Muscovite, got last-minute backing from some undecided Leningrad voters who took issue with criticism of the prosecutor, which was published Saturday in the Communist Party daily Pravda.

Interference in Probe

The newspaper accused Ivanov and Gdlyan of trying to interfere with the work of a special commission that has been formed to look into complaints about the methods used by the two investigators.

Ogonyok editor Vitaly A. Korotich, a populist who compares himself in style to U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, won 84% of the vote to claim a seat in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov.

“It’s a conservative city of more than a million and a half people, but even the conservatives are tired of the old ways,” Korotich said in an interview in his magazine office Monday. “The local party officials opposed me, but the more they tried to discredit me, the more support I got.”

Korotich said he plans to help the community start a local newspaper to publish complaints and to try to get more supplies into the city’s stores.

“I cannot be god for them, but they are counting on me. We in the Congress of People’s Deputies must insist on having real power,” he said.

The Congress of People’s Deputies is to meet on May 25 to elect a president and members to a new Supreme Soviet, the nation’s national Parliament, which is to replace the previous rubber-stamp body.

It is not yet clear how often the Congress will meet and what its other functions may be. But Gorbachev is expected to use the body to help generate grass-roots support for his reforms.

The 2,250-member Congress is the centerpiece of Gorbachev’s efforts to bring political reform to the Soviet Union. Elections to the Congress in March marked the first time most voters ever had a choice at the polls and was preceded by unprecedented campaigning.

In Estonia, Klara Hallik, who was backed by the nationalist Estonian People’s Front, won just over 50% of the vote. A lecturer, she is an expert on ethnic relations at Tallinn Polytechnical Institute.

In neighboring Latvia, People’s Front officials said their candidates won five of the six races.

The People’s Front movements seek independence from the Kremlin.

In some of the runoff elections, no single candidate gained more than half the votes needed to win a seat, and the Soviet news agency Tass reported that elections between finalists will be held May 21.