Soviet Georgia Reaffirms Right to Secede

The Georgian republic, reaffirming its right under the national constitution to secede from the Soviet Union, has declared that any move by Moscow to limit that right would trigger Georgia’s withdrawal from the Soviet state.

Reporters in Tbilisi, the republic’s capital, said Georgia’s Parliament voted Sunday to insert a clause in the Georgian constitution on “the holy and inviolable right” of secession from the Soviet Union.

That right is nominally guaranteed in Article 72 of the national constitution, which says, “Each union republic shall retain the right freely to secede from the U.S.S.R.”

At the same time, Parliament approved a report declaring that the Soviet army’s entry into the then-republic in 1921 amounted to “military intervention and occupation,” the journalists, contacted by telephone, said. The republic had declared its independence after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

The twin moves firmly placed Georgia, home of former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and current Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, among the most militant of a group of Soviet republics increasingly asserting national autonomy.

Pro-independence attitudes, always strong in Georgia, have surged over the past few months after mainly ethnic Russian troops attacked nationalist demonstrators in Tbilisi last April and 20 protesters died.

The Tbilisi journalists quoted the new constitutional clause, published in local newspapers Monday. It declared that if the Soviet authorities, by act of the Soviet Parliament in Moscow or in any other way, seek to limit or cancel the right to secede, “the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic will consider itself already seceded from the U.S.S.R.”

The journalists said the clause was supported by the republic’s president and Communist Party chief Givi G. Gumbaridze.