Discord Joins the Parade on Soviet Revolution Day : Upheaval: Doubters protest on the heels of annual military parade. Shots are fired near Gorbachev.

Angry Communists demanded a return to orthodoxy, radicals accused them of leading Russia to ruin and one marcher fired shotgun blasts within sight of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Wednesday as the traditionally staid ceremonies marking the Bolshevik Revolution exposed the scale of the nation’s discord and discontent.

Pro- and anti-Communist parades crisscrossed the capital, and arrests and clashes were reported in Moscow, Kiev and Minsk as the Soviet Union marked the 73rd anniversary of the seizure of power by Vladimir I. Lenin and his comrades.

Gorbachev, presiding over the annual military parade on Red Square, pledged loyalty to Lenin’s ideals but also promised his compatriots a new deal.

“Through a second great revolution, we all now stand a real chance to transform our society into a normal, healthy, just and ultimately prosperous society,” Gorbachev said from atop Lenin’s mausoleum before more than 8,000 Red Army soldiers, sailors and air force personnel high-stepped past the Kremlin.

By the thousands, however, doubters of Gorbachev and his philosophy flocked to Red Square to clamor their views: anarchists, social democrats, disciples of the late human rights campaigner Andrei D. Sakharov and of Josef Stalin, the longtime Soviet dictator.

In the official “workers’ demonstration” after the military march, one Leningrader even brought a sawed-off shotgun and fired two rounds in the air near the GUM department store about 150 yards from Gorbachev.

The unidentified man was wrestled to the ground and bundled away by police and KGB agents, hundreds of whom patrolled the square in plainclothes.

His motives were not immediately clear. He is probably insane, KGB Chairman Vladimir A. Kryuchkov later told reporters. He said the shots were clearly audible atop the mausoleum where Gorbachev stood. “We looked across the square and saw a man being seized. And that was it,” Kryuchkov said.

In a display of the kind of “civil concord” that he is seeking for an increasingly divided Soviet society, Gorbachev was joined on the mausoleum by two avowed political opponents, populist Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin and Moscow Mayor Gavriil K. Popov, who had originally opposed having celebrations on Revolution Day for want, Popov said, of there being much to celebrate.

Soviet leaders once greeted Revolution Day crowds with diffident waves from the squat building where Lenin’s embalmed body lies, but this year, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Popov and the others descended to the black cobbles of Red Square to head the march of Muscovites organized by the city’s Communist Party machine.

Braving occasional snow flurries, Soviets by the tens of thousands--100,000 in all, according to the official Tass news agency--crossed the square, many hoisting signs expressing disgust at the meager results of Gorbachev’s perestroika program, at social chaos, at the dearth of meat.

“No to the restoration of capitalism!” was a frequent message from people frightened by the Kremlin drive to create a market economy. Some, nostalgic for the old brand of discipline enforced by terror, held portraits of Stalin. Right-wingers denounced Yeltsin as a CIA agent and Russian radicals as stooges of Zionism.

Elsewhere in Moscow, the radicals, progressives and anti-Communists gathered. About 10,000 people, in symbolic “funeral rites” for the millions of victims of Soviet tyranny, walked to the building on Garden Ring Road where Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, had lived and where he died last December.

Another column of about 7,000, led by banners such as “Communist Party--Answer for the Genocide!” marched in a stop-and-go rhythm down the central shopping thoroughfare, Tverskaya Street, to take their turn after the official procession in crossing Red Square.

“This is a day for the will of the people,” declared Yeltsin, who joined the group to lead it past the Kremlin.

“Gorbachev-Ryzhkov government, resign!” the crowd chanted, referring to the Soviet president and his prime minister, Nikolai I. Ryzhkov.

However, unlike this year’s May Day parade, when radicals booed Soviet leaders to their faces, the review stand on Lenin’s mausoleum was empty. Gorbachev and the others had left long before.

The military parade gave the West its first look at what Soviet television called a “terrible weapon”--the SS-25 mobile intercontinental ballistic missile. Twelve of the ICBMs rolled through Red Square on 14-wheeled transport vehicles.

According to the Pentagon, the SS-25 has a range of 6,500 miles and carries a single nuclear warhead, which some Western sources say has a yield of up to 550 kilotons. Soviet TV, in its parade commentary, said the SS-25 packs more destructive power than all the bombs exploded in World War II.

The expression of so many political creeds--from black-flag-waving proponents of anarchism to the ultra-orthodox Marxists--was vivid proof of the greater freedom in Soviet society, but also of the progressive unraveling of any consensus. Last year, thousands of Muscovites marched in a Revolution Day counterdemonstration, but this year such protests were authorized by city authorities for the first time.

“I can only compare this Revolution Day to one other--in 1941,” Maria Frolova, 63, a Moscow pensioner, remarked as she waited for the procession down Tverskaya Street to begin. “1941 was the year the soldiers marched across Red Square, then went straight to the front to face the Nazis. Now we have the same sense of national awakening, and of crisis.”

Despite the free rein allowed anti-Communist ideals, some confrontations and clashes were reported. In Moscow, police arrested about 15 members of the ultra-radical Democratic Union when they tried to stage a festival of anti-Communist songs in Pushkin Square.

In the Ukrainian city of Kiev, police dislodged protesters from the Victory Monument and pushed them all the way back to the headquarters of the pro-independence group Rukh on the eve of Revolution Day, then would not let them out until Wednesday’s officially approved military parade was over.

According to Rukh, seven people were injured in the fracas with police and had to be hospitalized.

In Minsk, the capital of Byelorussia, scores of People’s Front militants were repulsed by police as they tried to storm the Lenin monument and cover it with mementos of the Gulag labor camps where multitudes of Soviet political prisoners were once confined, Soviet television reported.

Elsewhere, the military commandant in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku canceled the traditional “workers’ demonstration” for fear of possible unrest. In the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose governments are seeking independence from Moscow, marches and military parades were held despite bans by the local authorities.

In Georgia, where a nationalist coalition recently trounced the Communists in elections, Wednesday was a working day for the first time in 73 years. In Armenia, a holiday was declared, not because of celebrations of the Great Socialist Revolution, but to lengthen already scheduled school vacations. Not a single flower was laid at the Lenin monument in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, according to Soviet television.