Liberals Ensure Yeltsin Seat in Supreme Soviet : Conservatives Outflanked in Skillful Maneuver as Law Professor’s Resignation Creates Opening

Boris N. Yeltsin, the populist politician who was denied a seat in the new Supreme Soviet over the weekend, became a member of that body Monday as liberal members of the Congress of People’s Deputies fought the conservatives’ domination of the legislature.

After a day of heated debate that sharply divided the new Soviet lawmakers into liberal and conservative wings, the liberals managed a skillful but dramatic maneuver--over the initial protests of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev--to include Yeltsin in the Supreme Soviet, the country’s restructured full-time legislature.

Yeltsin, dismissed last year as an alternate member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo for his radicalism, will take the place of Alexei I. Kazannik, a Siberian law professor who gave up his seat, saying that his conscience would not permit him to sit in the legislature if Yeltsin were excluded.

When a surprised Gorbachev suggested that Kazannik’s offer be referred to a legal commission for study, hundreds of deputies objected with a roar of protest that reverberated through the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, and the liberals had two lawyers ready to explain how Yeltsin could be seated, quickly and neatly.

Moderates Join Rumble

“All right, all right, all right,” Gorbachev said, holding up his hands in surrender, as even moderates, loyal party members, joined the rumble of discontent. “I rely on the deputies’ judgment.”

Calling for a vote on Yeltsin’s inclusion in the Supreme Soviet, Gorbachev was then the first to raise his hand in support of the liberals’ motion. While a majority endorsed the motion, many deputies--presumably conservatives opposed to Yeltsin’s calls for faster and broader reforms--did not participate in the vote.

Throughout Monday, the fourth day of the congress, liberal deputies had hammered away at the conservative majority, denouncing its “moronic acquiescence” in “all the plans and plots of the party apparatus,” as one speaker put it. They declared that the exclusion of Yeltsin, probably the most popular politician in the country after Gorbachev, had shamed them all.

Thanking Kazannik for his “political courage,” Yeltsin told reporters after the session: “The congress is becoming more and more democratic. If this process continues, the hopes of the people in this Congress of People’s Deputies may be justified.”

There were immediate celebrations on the streets of Moscow, nearly 6 million of whose voters had elected Yeltsin in a landslide in the March elections for the city’s deputies in congress.

The congress has 2,250 members, meets once or twice a year to discuss and decide broad policies and elects and oversees the Supreme Soviet, which has 271 members in each of its two houses and will be in session for as much as eight months a year.

Impromptu Victory March

Greeted by shouts of “hurrah!” from jubilant supporters at the Kremlin’s Troitsky Gate as he left the congress, Yeltsin led an impromptu victory march down Gorky Street, one of the capital’s main thoroughfares, to Pushkin Square, often the site of dissenters’ protests. There, he thanked the deputies who had reversed the original move to exclude him from the Supreme Soviet.

The sharp conservative-liberal division in the congress became increasingly apparent through the day as deputies debated Gorbachev’s nomination of Anatoly I. Lukyanov, 59, a constitutional lawyer and a close friend since their days at university more than 30 years ago, as the first vice chairman of the Supreme Soviet and his deputy for day-to-day legislative affairs.

Liberals, pushing hard for faster and broader reforms of the political system, asserted the authority of the Congress of People’s Deputies as the embodiment of supreme state authority. Conservatives deferred to the Communist Party’s leadership of the country, placing their trust in the party to set the pace and scope of reform.

There were also direct and repeated challenges to Gorbachev’s authority, both in his role as the Communist Party leader and in his conduct of the meeting. He was accused of manipulating the debate to assure himself what one liberal called “a comfortable result . . . with the veneer of democracy.”

The debate is certain to grow today after Gorbachev delivers a lengthy speech on the country’s future policies at home and abroad--and the proposals are then publicly debated.

The conflict, however, is not only about the course of reform but also about the roles that the congress, a broad-based assembly that will meet only once or twice a year, and the Supreme Soviet, a full-time legislature, will have and what their relationship with the Communist Party will be.

While Lukyanov’s election was never in doubt--he eventually won with only 179 of the deputies voting against him and a further 137 abstaining--he was asked tougher questions than any leading Soviet politician has had to answer in public for many years.

Noting an upsurge in crime in recent years and Lukyanov’s past responsibility within the party secretariat for law enforcement, a top investigator of official corruption, Telman Gdlyan, asked, “How do you assess . . . your responsibility for the failure of the departments entrusted to you?”

Organized crime was spreading, law enforcement agencies were demoralized, some investigations into corruption had been slowed, diverted or halted, Gdlyan charged, and now there were more and more cover-ups, largely for political reasons.

How Different From Ligachev?

Another deputy asked whether he differed in any way with Yegor K. Ligachev, who is widely regarded as the leader of the Politburo’s conservative faction. What had his role been in formulating controversial legislation restricting political meetings, in making it a crime to “insult” the government or any of its institutions and officials and in giving the police increased authority to pursue those suspected of political wrongdoing?

There were other sharp questions--about the poor, sometimes chaotic organization of the congress, which was Lukyanov’s responsibility; about what he knew about the police action in suppressing a nationalist demonstration last month in Tbilisi, the capital of Soviet Georgia; about the rehabilitation of ethnic minorities persecuted in the past; about the Soviet Union’s pact with Nazi Germany to divide Eastern Europe between them; about plans for a broad legislative program.

So fast and furious were the questions as liberal deputies sought to recover the initiative they had lost in Friday’s voting for members of the Supreme Soviet that conservatives complained.

Gorbachev came to the rescue of his beleaguered deputy several times. “Comrade deputies, please do as I suggested,” he said at one point when the debate became sidetracked in procedural matters. “People should not put a monkey wrench in the works.”

In the end, however, the most telling argument in Lukyanov’s favor was that of Roy A. Medvedev, a longtime dissenter who was recently accepted back into the Communist Party. He said that Gorbachev needs a deputy who thinks as he does and on whom he can rely.

For too long, Medvedev said, policies had changed--”as much as 180 degrees”--every time Gorbachev left Moscow, either on a trip abroad or on holiday. The implication was that Ligachev, as the second-ranking Politburo member, had made serious shifts in party policies in Gorbachev’s absence.

Lukyanov eventually won overwhelming support, but it was far from easy, and there were still doubters.