From Soap to Tanks: Soviet Bureaucrats Put on Spot

Soviet lawmakers wanted to know: What did the prime minister know about a mysterious and huge arms scandal, and when did he know it? Like a similar question from U.S. political history, the query may someday be as well remembered as the answer.

Improvising the rules of Kremlin-style parliamentary democracy as they go along, members of the Supreme Soviet on Wednesday gave themselves their first monthly “question time” to grill government officials, who were once beyond the legislature’s reach but are now being held responsible for how they do their jobs.

“We’re a young Parliament, and we’re still learning,” said one deputy in the year-old legislature, Leningrad jurist Anatoly A. Sobchak. “Among the things we’re learning is how to exercise the function of control over the government.”

“Question time,” to occur on the last Wednesday of each month, is another tool in Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s campaign to force the vast state bureaucracy to be more responsive to the citizenry and to make government officials regularly accountable to the legislature.

However, there are still some bugs in the system, as the inaugural run in the Supreme Soviet’s marble-trimmed chamber inside the Kremlin walls showed.

Few in the 542-member legislature rose to the occasion with tough, precise questions, and the three top government officials on the receiving end responded with a melange of information, numbing statistics, obfuscation and the buck-passing familiar to bureaucrats of all lands.

The topics ranged from soap to tanks, with the answers at times becoming so anesthetizing that a clerk who tabulates the legislature’s vote totals dozed at his computer terminal.

“Here we have a question about what is being done to avoid a recurrence of last year’s soap shortages,” Deputy Prime Minister Alexandra P. Biryukova said at one point, reading yet another written query carried by a deputy to the rostrum. She said a 14.5% increase is planned in the output of soap, now rationed across the country.

What galvanized the audience, however, was not soap statistics but the explanation offered by another deputy prime minister, Igor S. Belousov, of progress in the investigation of a colossal, illegal trade deal engineered by a cooperative known by its Russian-language initials as ANT.

The “ANT affair,” as it is commonly known, is only understandable in the context of the shortage-plagued Soviet economy and the resulting hunger for foreign goods. Before the KGB swooped down to break up the deal at the last minute, ANT was preparing to illegally ship 14 new Soviet T-72 battle tanks to an unknown destination overseas.

With its proceeds, the cooperative was to import commodities that would be hugely valuable on the Soviet market: condoms and computers.

The signature of Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov is on the document approving the creation of ANT with government assistance in 1987, and his degree of involvement in the tanks-for-condoms sale has become a topic of keen debate among Soviet citizens.

“In no way do I want to link this tank operation with the name of Nikolai Ryzhkov,” Armenian deputy Genrikh S. Igityan said from the floor.

However, Sobchak, the jurist from Leningrad, has charged that ANT was a secret state agency exporting billions of rubles worth of strategic materials and weapons, with most of the profits vanishing into foreign bank accounts.

Belousov assured the lawmakers that the 60-year-old Soviet prime minister’s signature is on a document that makes no mention of the tank sale, but he said a 3-month-old government probe has failed to find the people ultimately responsible or to determine where the tanks were supposed to be sent.

His vague statements failed to satisfy both progressives like Sobchak and more mainstream deputies like Gorbachev protege Anatoly I. Lukyanov, the legislature’s chairman.

“It’s strange that in three months, the government couldn’t find out the essence of the operation, like who the tanks were being sold to,” Sobchak said after the session. “If they can’t answer such a question, it’s unclear how they can run the country.”

Lukyanov, usually impassive, told the chamber, “I don’t think we have received a completely satisfactory answer about ANT.” He recommended sending a transcript of Wednesday’s proceedings to the Council of Ministers that Ryzhkov heads and demanding precise, written answers.

Tass, the official news agency, primly noted that the deputies investigating the first Watergate-caliber scandal of the Gorbachev era want to know not only the responsibility of low-level officials “but also of those in high places who authorized it.”

Ryzhkov has angrily rejected allegations that he was linked to ANT’s deals, and he warned earlier this month that he would quit if radicals continued harsh attacks on his government. He has said the cooperative was supposed to export scrap metal from the defense industry and import consumer items in short supply.

He did not attend Wednesday’s session of the Supreme Soviet.

The trial run of the monthly question-and-answer period was praised by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who watched for about 20 minutes as Biryukova answered questions about the nationwide shortage of building materials and the dearth of books in Braille for the blind.

“It’s much livelier and engaging than I expected,” said the Massachusetts Democrat, who received an ovation from the Supreme Soviet after Lukyanov pointed out the American visitor seated in the first row of the balcony. “There’s a sense of the whole in here; they laugh together, for example. There’s an institutional feel about this place already.”

Sobchak, however, said that since Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov is visiting France, no government official had felt obliged to respond to written questions about the Soviet army’s conduct in breakaway Lithuania, one of the most pressing issues of the day.

“We need to come up with a permanent way to make the government give us information,” Sobchak said. “That’s the only way we can exercise our control function over it.”