Liberals Rejected for Supreme Soviet : Conservative Backlash Bars Yeltsin; Tumultuous Session Sparks Crisis

Boris N. Yeltsin, the populist politician who won more votes than any other candidate in the Soviet Union’s recent national elections, lost his bid Saturday for a seat in the country’s new legislature in an angry conservative backlash against radical reformers.

Yeltsin’s defeat, along with those of several other leading reformers, stunned the Congress of People’s Deputies, and members of its progressive and conservative wings bitterly denounced one another, throwing the session into such turmoil that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev could barely control it.

Describing the situation as critical, Gorbachev said late Saturday that he could not permit “this congress to be torn to pieces” and indicated he would seek a way to intervene Monday when the session resumes.

‘We Must Not Panic’

“We cannot simply sit back and let passions run high, for we are speaking about the fate of the country,” he said at the end of a tumultuous day in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses. “I am not overdramatizing the situation, but we must not panic.”

Some radicals, however, were threatening to form groups to oppose the Communist Party in the congress. Others accused Gorbachev of manipulating the proceedings to assure himself a pliant legislature in the Supreme Soviet, the lawmaking body that the congress chose from among its own members, and ardent Yeltsin supporters, who number in the tens of thousands in Moscow, were considering a march in protest against the vote.

The congress, whose 2,250 members were elected from territorial and ethnic constituencies around the country and from a variety of public organizations, had voted in a secret ballot late Friday for 542 deputies who will form the two-chamber Supreme Soviet as a full-time national legislature.

A number of leading liberals were among those chosen for the Supreme Soviet from the Baltic republics, the Ukraine and outlying areas--and Gorbachev himself is certain to dominate all its proceedings as the body’s chairman. But so many prominent reformers were excluded in the voting that the results put into serious doubt major elements of Gorbachev’s broad political reforms.

“We have crossed out Yeltsin, who was supported by 6 million Muscovites,” an enraged deputy from the Ukrainian region of Donetsk said. “What right do we have to ignore their opinion?”

Historian Yuri Afanasyev, a leading reformer, described the congress as an “aggressively subservient majority (that had) overturned all the decisions awaited by the people” and called the new Supreme Soviet a “Stalinist or Brezhnevite” body unlikely to carry out any reforms.

To Slip Away ‘Like Shadows’

And novelist Ales Adamovich, another prominent reformer, told the congress after the results of the vote were announced: “People have great hopes for this congress, but does our work justify those hopes? . . . Won’t we be forced to buy dark glasses so that at the end of the congress we can slip like shadows through the crowds that stand each day outside the Kremlin?”

Yeltsin, a maverick member of the Communist Party leadership who had been dropped from its ruling Politburo in early 1988 after criticizing the pace of reform as too slow, failed to win a place in the new Supreme Soviet after coming in last among 12 candidates for the 11 seats reserved for the Russian Federation, the largest of the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics.

Although he had received nearly 90% of the votes in Moscow’s prestigious citywide constituency in the elections two months ago, Yeltsin’s bold challenges to the party leadership had apparently rankled conservatives, nearly 1,000 of whom crossed him off the list of candidates, leaving him with the support of only 1,185 deputies.

Yeltsin, saying that he was upset and saddened by the results, said he is looking for another way to continue his challenge. “I must fight to the end,” he told reporters during a recess. Asked if he would seek election as the Supreme Soviet’s first vice president, a post that would make him Gorbachev’s deputy, Yeltsin said, “I would not throw away any job.”

More reformers were defeated when the congress voted on candidates to represent the Moscow constituencies in the Supreme Soviet. The losers included sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya, economist Gavriil Popov, historian Sergei Stankevich, biologist Alexei Yablokov, journalists Mikhail Poltoranin and Valentin Logunov and Ilya Zaslavsky, an advocate for the handicapped.

Some Liberals Chosen

But a few liberals, including historian Roy A. Medvedev, physicist Yevgeny Velikhov, agronomist Alexei Emlyanov and newspaper editor Ivan D. Laptev, managed to win seats in the Russian or Moscow delegations.

“From the very beginning our work has met with some disbelief and prejudice,” Popov told the congress. “It is becoming more and more evident that the (party) apparatus clearly wants to retaliate, clearly wants to impose its own way of work at the congress. The apparatus, no doubt, has won.”

The Moscow liberals, most of them intellectuals with disdain for the party rank and file drawn from the working class in the provinces, had clearly aroused widespread resentment, and their attempts to shape the session from its outset Thursday had increased that indignation and anger.

At the same time, they had wanted to uphold the principle of competitive elections and so nominated 55 people for 29 seats reserved for Moscow deputies in the Supreme Soviet--although the whole congress would vote on them.

The result was a backlash against the most outspoken and radical of the reformers, and conservatives, who had earlier demonstrated a clear 3-to-2 majority in the congress, applauded and cheered as the liberals’ defeats were announced.

Choice of Voting Yes or No

Other delegations, including those from the liberal Baltic republics, had decided on their slates in their own caucuses and gave the full congress the choice of simply voting yes or no.

The protests of Afanasyev, Popov and others over the liberals’ defeat then set off a furor that Gorbachev could barely control as the two sides lashed out at one another for most of the day.

“They find themselves in the minority, and the result cannot satisfy them,” Yevgeny Meshalkin, a leading Soviet medical researcher, said. “They instigate work aimed at breaking the congress into factions.”

Leonid Kravchenko, the director general of the official Tass news agency, accused the radicals of “trying to impose on us their viewpoint, trying to frighten us into accepting their vision as the only alternative to Stalinism.”

Popov’s call for a group of “independent deputies” added to the highly charged debate as the party’s old guard denounced any attempt to form political factions within the congress.

“This is not what I expected,” the novelist Chingiz Aitmatov said toward the end of the day’s debate. “There are too many emotions and too many speeches that have not been thought out. We need to find ways for dialogue. The things that are happening in our congress are very troubling.”