Soviet Congress Will Strive to Be Independent

Popularly elected members of the Soviet Union’s new national assembly, announcing their broad legislative plans, declared their determination Sunday to maintain the independence of the Congress of People’s Deputies and resist any attempt by the Communist Party leadership to dictate to it.

Boris N. Yeltsin, the maverick member of the party’s Central Committee, who won nearly 90% of the votes cast in the congress’ prestigious all-Moscow constituency, told an estimated 30,000 people at a rally in the capital that independent deputies had their own program for “radical decisions on the economy, social justice and glasnost, “ or political openness.

The independents also want the congress, which assembles for the first time here Thursday, to adopt new legislation on pensions, children’s rights and property, Yeltsin said.

“If, at this historic moment that is so important for the future of our country, we permit the apparatus to dictate to us as it has in past decades,” Yeltsin declared, “we will not advance but sink back into the swamp from which we had only begun to extricate ourselves.”

The government’s critics will go as far as to nominate a rival to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Communist Party’s general secretary, as a candidate for the country’s presidency, Yeltsin said, to force Gorbachev into a debate over his policies, goals and achievements to date.

His speech brought yet another round of “Yel-tsin, Yel-tsin” chants at the rally, which brought together Yeltsin’s populist supporters with liberals from the Moscow Tribune, Memorial and the other informal avant-garde political groups that have developed here in the past two years. Nationalist groups from the Soviet Baltic republics also participated.

“We should elect true people’s power with a true people’s president--Yeltsin,” Alexander Tolstoukov, one of the newly elected deputies, declared to thunderous cheers.

Yeltsin, who had said earlier that he did not personally want to oppose Gorbachev and supported his basic program, argued that it was important that the party leader be challenged to ensure a full debate on his program and to establish the precedent of competitive elections at every level of the government.

Gorbachev was elected president last October without opposition and without discussion of any kind to succeed Andrei A. Gromyko, the country’s longtime foreign minister, who was later retired from all his posts.

But that election, based on the party’s nomination and conducted with a show of hands, was in the old Supreme Soviet, which had been transformed long ago into a legislative rubber stamp for party decisions and thus become the symbol of the old constitutional order that Gorbachev himself is seeking to change.

Yeltsin, who was dropped from the party’s ruling Politburo last year after criticizing the pace of reform here as too slow, warned that the party bureaucracy, the manipulative and much criticized apparat, is trying to impose an agenda as well as an already chosen leadership on the 2,250-member Congress of People’s Deputies, notwithstanding its constitutional position as the highest body of state power.

Early Party Congress Urged

In one of his boldest challenges yet to the party, Yeltsin called for an early Communist Party congress--the next is not due for two more years--to revamp the whole party leadership and its fundamental policies and thus to break the hold that party conservatives still continue to exercise over perestroika, the reform process begun by Gorbachev nearly four years ago.

This issue could arise as early as today with a meeting of the party’s policy-making Central Committee, which was reduced in size last month with the retirements of many holdovers from the earlier political era but which remains a “brake” on progress, according to speakers at the rally.

“We must call for an extraordinary 28th party congress to elect a new Central Committee and to elect a new Politburo and to ensure the long-term development of our society,” Yeltsin said.

Andrei D. Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and human rights campaigner, who will represent the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the congress, called on other deputies to assert their primacy over the new Supreme Soviet to be chosen from their ranks as the country’s standing legislature.

“The congress must be the only legislative body--not another body composed of only a fifth of its members,” Sakharov said, although this is the essence of constitutional changes introduced in early December. “This is an attempt to gain control of the situation.”

Elected with scores of ideas on how to speed the country’s political reforms, transform its economy and foster social change, Yeltsin, Sakharov and other liberal members of the new Congress of People’s Deputies are discovering that before they can work for passage of their programs, they must first ensure their control of the legislative machinery.