Moscow Masses Jeer Party and Urge Defections

Tens of thousands of Muscovites, massing outside the Kremlin walls, poured contempt on the Communist Party on Sunday and called for wholesale defections from its ranks.

In the style of an old-time religious revival meeting, speaker after speaker took the microphone to announce his decision to quit the party and call on former comrades to do the same.

“Dear friends,” renegade KGB Gen. Oleg Kalugin told the cheering crowd, “today I, like tens of thousands if not millions of Communists, closed a chapter in my biography and quit the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”

After a pause to allow the roar of approval to subside, Kalugin went on to condemn the party leadership for bringing the country to the brink of ruin and declared, “We have to say ‘No!’ to this party.”

Kalugin and other speakers denounced the 28th Communist Party Congress, which ended on Friday, for failing to undertake the radical reforms of the Soviet political system that they believe are necessary.

Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, the mayors of Moscow and Leningrad and several other well-known political figures quit the party as the congress ended, adding impetus to the mass resignations already under way.

The party’s radical Democratic Platform faction, which announced Thursday its decision to break off and form its own party, is drawing away reformists.

No new nationwide figures have come out on how many of the party’s 18 million members have turned in their red cards. From January to mid-June, 186,000 members had quit; although amounting to little more than 1%, the figure was a record for that amount of time, party officials said. And the trend then moved upward.

The rally, which Soviet television estimated drew about 50,000, was several shades more hostile in its anti-Communist rhetoric than other similar protests in the past year.

It highlighted the growing movement among radical reformers to abandon working from within the Communist Party and to try instead to form a potent and uncompromising opposition from the outside.

“We call on all Communists who have not done so yet to cut their ties with this shameful organization and leave,” said Arkady Murashev, an opposition member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament.

Until now, the major opposition group, the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies, had refrained from head-on attacks on the party. Murashev’s call signaled a readiness for open political battle.

“The idea that brought us here was to express our contempt for the party forum that just finished,” Sergei Bilozertsev, another opposition deputy, said, evoking a chorus of derisive whistles from the crowd.

The crowd, ranging from teen-agers flying the black flag of anarchism to elderly Red Army veterans with chests full of medals, stretched across the square in front of the main entrance to Red Square. The rally, which had begun with a 45-minute march from Gorky Park, continued for more than three hours despite a cool, beating rain.

Waving signs that said “Throw the Communist Party Onto the Trash Heap of History” and “Honorable People, Quit the Communist Party,” they chanted “Down with the Communist Party!” and “Down with the KGB!”

The rally’s tone got so angry at times that organizers and some Muscovites admitted it made them uncomfortable.

Objecting to calls for a public trial of the party and its leaders, a woman standing near a line of police officers guarding access to the speakers’ podium said, “God will judge the party. There’s been enough blood.”

The woman, art historian Inessa Semenicheva, said the protest was a catalyst for the rising tide of party quitters but that the process is already moving under its own momentum.

“The party is in agony. Our artists are leaving the party every day,” Semenicheva said, referring to members of the Moscow Union of Artists. “Practically every day, they’re turning in their cards.”

Vladimir Boxer, one of the leaders of the Moscow Union of Voters, which organized this and several previous rallies, said he was concerned by the growing thirst for revenge he sensed.

“Democratization will truly be assured only when the idea of revenge has no place at such mass meetings,” he said.

The rally was called to push for three specific goals: the creation of a national coalition government that would have the people’s trust; the nationalization of party property, and the removal of party cells from the army, the police and the KGB, the security service.

Radicals at the 12-day Communist Party congress of almost 4,700 delegates got nowhere on those issues and several others they raised, Democratic Platform leader Vladimir N. Lysenko told the crowd.

The protest lived up to advance advertising as the largest Moscow rally since pro-democracy protests held outside the Kremlin in February. Those protests drew crowds ranging from 100,000 to more than 200,000 people. Protesters attributed the smaller turnout Sunday to the beating rain, the weekend exodus of many Muscovites to the countryside in the summer, and a general fatigue and frustration with politics.

Several speakers contributed their own creative proposals to the official rally calls, adding a note of humor to the hostility toward the party.

Writer Ales Adamovich proposed that the Red Square mausoleum where Soviet Union founder V. I. Lenin’s body is preserved be turned into a museum for holding all the party cards members are turning in these days--until it is too stuffed to hold any more.

Theater director Yuri Lyubimov suggested that the statue of Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, the KGB’s founder, be removed from the square where it stands and stored in the agency’s basement where innocent prisoners were held. The main KGB building should be painted black, he said, and turned into a memorial to all the people who died in it.

Another speaker proposed that psychic Yuri Kashpirovsky, who is known for his television demonstration of hypnotism, use his amazing power of imposing his will to persuade viewers to turn in their party cards.