Moscow Tense as 100,000 Attend Opposition Rally

MOSCOW — Central Moscow looked like a capital under occupation Sunday as subway stations closed, traffic halted and thousands of troops in riot gear guarded government buildings and encircled demonstrators rallying in opposition to the Communist Party and in support of faster reform.

In more than four hours of speeches under gray skies, progressives applauded the estimated 100,000 people who attended the protest for defying government “scare tactics.” They complained that since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Communist Party has taken the country, as one banner proclaimed, “72 Years on the Road to Nowhere.”

Nevertheless, the mood was low-key and the turnout far smaller than the up to 1 million predicted. It indicated that a week of ominous warnings from the government, combined with heavy army and police presence, succeeded in intimidating many and persuading them to stay home.

The pattern was followed in other Soviet cities. In Leningrad, only about 8,000 people demonstrated after activists called on their supporters to boycott the city’s rally because authorities refused to give them permission to demonstrate on a central street.

About 2,000 people demonstrated in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, with many would-be protesters reportedly going to the wrong places because official media refused to broadcast the plans for the city’s rally.

Local authorities banned planned rallies in at least 10 other cities, according to the semiofficial Novosti news agency.

In Moscow, police used snowplows and sand-filled dump trucks to block access to the Kremlin. They also closed to traffic much of the Garden Ring Road, which encircles the city, as protesters met in two places--at Gorky Park and outside the Foreign Ministry--and then marched along the road to a central, joint meeting place at Zubovsky Square.

About 17,000 Interior Ministry troops and at least several thousand additional Red Army soldiers blocked alleys as well as main roads, government office buildings and entrances to subway stations. They carried gas masks, plastic shields and truncheons. Several water cannon were stationed near the Foreign Ministry.

The rally began slowly, almost cautiously, and picked up steam only near the end.

As speakers complained about the slow pace of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms, the crowd chanted “Resign! Resign!” One homemade banner read: “Gorbachev and Company: Leave.” Others read: “Communism Is a Cancerous Tumor” and “The People’s Army Against Party Bureaucracy.”

Many of the speakers complained about dire warnings from the Supreme Soviet, the national Parliament; the Communist Party Central Committee, and by official media that had said the rally would not be safe for children, that “criminal elements” could take control of events and that authorities would respond harshly.

“We came here in good spirits to demand radical changes in our country,” said progressive legislator Yuri Afanasyev. “But the government has tried to ruin our mood. It has used scare tactics to try to persuade people not to come out on the streets. . . . We are here, nevertheless.”

Another speaker, legislator Gavriil Popov, told the crowd: “All was against us. The City Council was late in announcing the site, time, routes. Television has special entertainment shows on.”

The government-run Soviet television on Sunday morning showed a Polish film, “The Sex Mission,” complete with nudity, in an apparent effort to keep people at home.

Afanasyev, Popov and others said the turnout would have been greater if they had been given a chance to tell people on television or radio that their rally would be peaceful. They contended that the refusal to allow them to speak was an attempt to silence progressive candidates running for office in the Russian republic’s Parliament in March 4 balloting.

The Kremlin put tremendous effort into trying to curtail the rally, its organizers said, because party officials were surprised by the success of a Feb. 4 demonstration. That protest, attended by an estimated 200,000 people, was the largest demonstration of its kind in the capital since the Bolshevik Revolution. It was held with official authorization to call for the end of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power--a move that was supported by Gorbachev and endorsed within three days by the party’s Central Committee.

In contrast, Sunday’s demonstration seemed an expression of deeper anger with Gorbachev and the party--frustration that went beyond simply a desire to share power.

Reforms that speakers called for included legalizing private property, holding direct presidential elections and taking state-run media out of party control.

“There is corruption everywhere, even within the church,” said one of the protesters, a 60-year-old priest named Victor Pichujkin. “Gorbachev isn’t listening to us, so I decided to come out on the streets. At least here, I have a chance to be heard.”

Some speakers complained about the poor living standard in the Soviet Union, with low pensions, empty store shelves and inadequate health service. “Our country is the poorest in Europe,” declared one speaker.

One radical legislator, Sergei Kuznetsov, complained that the Communist Party had “in the past sucked our strength so we could not oppose them.”

Even now, he said, “the deputies in the Congress of People’s Deputies (the national legislature) perform a show aimed at preserving the power of the party.”

It is time for the people to join together to “fight the party Mafia . . . the totalitarian Bolshevik government that exists today, even under Gorbachev.”