Conservatives Vote to Keep Curbs on Demonstrations : Liberals Blocked in Soviet Congress

In a significant defeat for liberal members of the new national assembly, the Congress of People’s Deputies refused Friday to suspend a controversial law restricting political demonstrations here after crowds gathered outside the Kremlin wanting to meet their deputies.

Although the liberals complained that the riot police had prevented people from meeting them as their elected representatives, conservatives voted to keep in force--even during the current session of the congress--legislation that bans unauthorized public gatherings.

The vote--1,261 to 831 in favor of keeping the law--appeared to reflect the balance of power, roughly 3 to 2, between conservatives and liberals among the 2,250 members of the congress, which is holding its first session.

Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a respected sociologist and policy adviser to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, told the other deputies that security forces had surrounded people gathered late Thursday outside one of the Kremlin’s gates and in one of Moscow’s main squares as they sought to meet their representatives.

“I ask the minister of the interior why such measures were taken against the people?” Zaslavskaya demanded. “I ask that we suspend these anti-democratic laws during the congress and reconsider them.”

Ban on Demonstrations

Vadim V. Bakatin, the interior minister, who was called to the podium by Gorbachev to reply, said the police were enforcing the ban on demonstrations not authorized by the Moscow city authorities.

Troops had been deployed around the Kremlin solely for security reasons, Bakatin said, but they had been instructed not to interfere with demonstrators. No one had been arrested, he said, and added that meetings were held with permission in dozens of other cities this week to mark the inauguration of the congress.

Several hundred people defied the ban again Friday evening and gathered in Pushkin Square, a frequent venue for dissident protests. They ignored police calls to disperse.

An anonymous leaflet distributed Friday said: “A few deputies truly elected by the people are trying to defend what has been promised . . . but everything is being done according to a previously worked-out scenario, just as it always was.

“What are we, the people, doing at this moment, which could become the turning point in our history of slavery? We, the people, are doing what we have been doing since 1917--we are looking for food and now for soap as well.”

Bakatin’s statement led to a quarrel at the opening of the Friday session of the congress.

Applause Silenced Speakers

Liberal deputies insisted on the right to meet with their constituents and called for reconsideration of the legislation. Conservatives, many of them party and government officials joined by deputies from Central Asia, applauded loudly to silence the liberal speakers, who shouted back, demanding that Gorbachev ensure their right to speak in the congress.

Andrei D. Sakharov, the nuclear physicist and human rights campaigner, said he had gone to Pushkin Square on Thursday evening and spoken to a crowd of about 2,000 there after they had been driven away from the Kremlin.

“This is our youth, our future, our people,” Sakharov said, pleading with other deputies to assure them the rights of assembly and free speech as well as access to their elected representatives. “I spoke to these people, and it was a very good conversation about the problems of the congress. They asked us to come every day after the debates.”

He said that “we cannot surround the people by the divisions that were used in Tbilisi and are demonstrating their potential here in Moscow”--a reference to the use of troops and police in the capital of the southern Soviet republic of Georgia in an attempt to suppress nationalist demonstrations there this month.

But Viktor Filippov, director of a research institute in the Komi republic in northern Russia, accused the liberals of “artificially stoking the situation” in order to build support for their position.

‘We Should Do Our Work’

Yuldash Akbarov, a truck driver from the Central Asian republic of Tadjikistan, then urged the congress to get down to the country’s most vital problems.

“We should do our work,” Akbarov said to the applause of most deputies.

During the vote on whether to suspend the legislation, Gorbachev announced that Lev N. Zaikov, the Communist Party’s first secretary in Moscow and a member of the ruling Politburo, had advised him that city officials had agreed to permit rallies near Luzhniki Park, which is on the Moscow River but away from the center of the capital.

Gorbachev later announced that the congress’ secretariat would open an office to receive and evaluate complaints and proposals, which would then be forwarded to the proper offices and institutions for action.