Gorbachev Demands Respect for Monuments to Lenin : Soviet Union: The president decries ‘outrages’ against nation’s past, including statues, graves and the national anthem.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, wielding his presidential powers to defend the honor of the Bolshevik leadeI. Lenin, issued a decree Saturday mandating respect for statues and monuments to the Soviet past.

The statues of Lenin that once dominated virtually every major town square in the country have come under increasing assaults--particularly in non-Russian areas--from anti-Communists who have vandalized some and carted others off for good.

In excerpts from the decree read on Soviet television, Gorbachev also complained that along with attacks on Lenin, “outrages” against soldiers’ graves, the Soviet flag, the national anthem and the state coat-of-arms are increasing.

He called for stricter punishment for vandals and the annulment of decisions by local and regional councils to remove memorials.

The decree came at a juncture when the Soviet Communist Party is looking ever more embattled, struggling to defend both its property and its symbols, including Lenin, who founded the Soviet state and became a virtual deity for successive generations.

In a resolution published Saturday, the party’s policy-setting Central Committee bemoaned “attempts by anti-Communist, nationalist, separatist forces to oust the Communist Party from political life, to outlaw it.”

Gorbachev issued a decree on property rights Friday in an attempt to safeguard the party’s enormous holdings from local governments that want its luxurious halls, hotels and hospitals turned over to the people.

The Soviet president has come to Lenin’s defense before. On April 20, Lenin’s birthday, he argued that “the arrogant, essentially vulgar slandering of him (Lenin) as a man is immoral and groundless.”

But Gorbachev’s support for Lenin has had little effect against the groundswell of anti-Communist sentiment that appears to find its physical expression in the urge to splash Lenin’s statues with paint, to cut them off at the knees, to knock them over in a symbolic toppling of Soviet power or simply to cover them with graffiti.

In the southern republic of Georgia, where every single Lenin statue has reportedly now been removed from town squares, Communist Party chief Givi Gumbaridze tried to defend one statue in the republic’s capital by bodily blocking the would-be vandals.

Gumbaridze succeeded once, but late last summer the 60-foot statue was finally felled and carted off to the cheers of thousands of Georgians.

In Ternopol, a city in the Ukraine that is rapidly gaining the reputation of the most anti-Communist community in the country, local authorities decided to remove the statues of Lenin and Karl Marx from the central square and sell them to the highest bidders.

In a town near Odessa on the Black Sea, the central Lenin statue was hauled away to a warehouse, and in Petropavlovsk in the Far East, the Lenin statue was smeared with paint.

In Moscow this spring, a man threw two firebombs at the granite mausoleum where Lenin’s body lies on Red Square, a shocking gesture of disrespect for what was long a national shrine. Now, calls are growing for the body to be properly buried in the Russian earth.

Bronze and marble images of Lenin have also been firebombed in Poland, hanged in effigy in Romania, toppled in Hungary, defaced in East Germany and wrapped in anti-Communist slogans in Bulgaria.