Soviet Congress Starts Forming New Legislature

The Soviet Union’s new national assembly began electing a full-time legislature from its ranks Friday, opening the country’s lawmaking process more widely to broader popular participation after years of domination by the ruling Communist Party.

Sharp divisions quickly emerged among members of the Congress of People’s Deputies as the liberals fought conservatives for seats in the new Supreme Soviet, which will be the nation’s standing legislature.

A number of radicals, including the populist Boris N. Yeltsin, were included in the lists of candidates, but party officials maneuvered through the day to ensure a pliable legislature as the country sets out on one of its most fundamental political reforms.

“We are in a fight, and a tougher one than I expected,” Vladimir Shevlyuga, a deputy from the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, said midway through a day of debate. “The party apparatus is once again asking us to elect the Supreme Soviet according to the old system of ‘lists,’ which represent its will but not the people’s. It is hard to say how it will all come out.”

The congress, which has 2,250 deputies, was asked to choose from a list of about 600 to fill the Supreme Soviet’s two houses, each of which will have 271 members. Results of the voting, which began here at midnight after a day of debate, should be known this afternoon.

“We do not have laws yet that would make our process of democratization irreversible,” President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said as the voting began, “so you must support the best figures among us.”

The system of representation is complex, based on one person, one vote constituencies and on ethnic districts as well. Although the candidates were originally chosen in regional or local caucuses, they must be approved by the whole congress. Every Supreme Soviet member must be endorsed by at least 50% of the congress deputies.

Most of the competition took place in the spirited caucuses, with conferees striving to ensure strong regional representation in the Supreme Soviet by candidates already chosen on the regional or local level. In these regions, there was generally only one candidate for each seat on the list presented to the full congress.

Vladimir Zolotukhin, a deputy from Uzbekistan in Soviet Central Asia, complained to the congress that party leaders from his republic, one of the most corrupt in the country, had nominated themselves, as they always had in the past, and he asked other deputies to vote against the whole list of nominees from Uzbekistan.

Several delegations, notably Moscow’s, nominated more than one candidate for each vacancy, however, and thrust their intense competition upon the whole congress to resolve. With 29 seats, the Moscow delegation nominated 55 people, including some of the country’s best-known political figures and most active reformers.

“Those selected to represent Moscow will be like a political weather vane,” commented Roy A. Medvedev, a prominent historian, longtime political dissident and now a candidate for the Supreme Soviet. “If the wind is blowing with the progressive forces, you should see it in those selected from the Moscow list, but if it is with the conservatives that, too, will be clear.

“The whole congress will vote on the Moscow list, and deputies will have to choose among us.”

Although the Moscow list includes many prominent figures, including Yeltsin and Medvedev, a last-minute attempt to add a handful of more controversial names to it, including two anti-corruption campaigners suspended recently from their Justice Ministry jobs, was defeated.

Conservatives also defeated a proposal that would have forced government and party officials to give up their other posts if they chose to serve in the Supreme Soviet--a rule that would have embarrassed Gorbachev, who retains his post as the party’s general secretary.

The deputies, many of whom voiced their reluctance to leave their present positions for the unknown world of the new parliament, instead voted to make it possible to keep their old jobs the four or five months a year when the Supreme Soviet is not in session. Nonetheless, the new parliament is expected to become largely a full-time legislature.

The delegation from the small Baltic republic of Lithuania attempted to force a change in the voting procedures, calling for deputies to vote only on those who would represent their own republic, rather than the congress voting as a whole on nominees from across the country.

“We cannot elect people who are not known to us,” Vytautas Landsbergis, chairman of the Lithuanian Sajudis movement, which holds most of the republic’s seats, told the congress. “It is not right to vote in the darkness.”

To other delegates, the Lithuanian challenge sounded like the threat of a boycott that would have thrown the election into chaos if others joined-- Gorbachev described it as a potential “crisis situation”--and other reformist deputies appealed to Sajudis to reconsider and participate.

“I ask the comrades from Lithuania . . . not to break the huge amount of work down in our society to democratize it,” Medvedev said.

“We are electing not the Supreme Soviet of Lithuania, but the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Why should we speak here during these elections about the sovereignty of every republic, and why should we vote only for our own candidates and keep from voting on other candidates? This Supreme Soviet will make laws for the entire nation.”

Often trying Gorbachev’s patience, the disputes seemed endless. Many of them were procedural on the surface, but they reflected the importance that the new institutions will have in time.

“Not everything goes smoothly,” Georgy A. Arbatov, director of the Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada and a deputy from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, commented. “But then democracy is a rather troublesome and not always a pleasant thing. However, no one has invented anything better so far.”

Although the crucial caucuses were not televised, almost everything else was broadcast live from the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin along with interviews with critics of the party leadership.

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