Marchers in Moscow Back Yeltsin, 2 Other Mavericks

Thousands of people marched to the walls of the Kremlin on Saturday to show support for Boris N. Yeltsin and two other members of Parliament they claim are threatened by hard-line Communist Party bureaucrats.

The protest, held on Constitution Day, a Soviet holiday, was also staged to demand that the civil and human rights enshrined in the 1977 Soviet constitution be observed.

In a near-freezing drizzle, members and sympathizers of the grass-roots pro-democracy Russian People’s Front linked hands to form a human chain that stretched for miles along Gorky Street, the main artery leading from the Kremlin to Moscow’s northwestern suburbs.

Demonstrators carried placards defending Yeltsin, Moscow’s outspoken representative in the Soviet Parliament, and two state prosecutors in the legislature, Telman Gdlyan and Nikolai Ivanov, who have alleged corruption at the party’s highest levels involving Politburo member Yegor K. Ligachev.

Yeltsin, the former Communist Party boss in Moscow, came under attack late last month in the party daily Pravda for allegedly going on a drinking and buying spree while visiting the United States.

Pravda later apologized to Yeltsin, saying those charges, made in an Italian newspaper article that Pravda reprinted, could not be substantiated. But to Soviets, the affair was more proof that the party apparatus is out to get the 58-year-old Communist maverick, who has opposed privileges received by the party elite and called for a better life for the average Soviet.

In the case of Gdlyan and Ivanov, the party’s policy-making Central Committee has ordered the Moscow party organization to take action against them for making the charges against Ligachev, which the Soviet prosecutor general’s office said have no basis.

“Yeltsin, Gdlyan and Ivanov are our conscience!” said one hand-lettered poster carried by a Gorky Street protester.

In leaflets distributed throughout the Soviet capital, the People’s Front had called for Muscovites to line Gorky Street from central Moscow to the suburban city of Zelenograd, which Gdlyan represents in the legislature, but organizers said bad weather kept participation down.

Nevertheless, knots of protesters were seen as far away as Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow’s international airport, 20 miles from the Kremlin.