Soviet Gunman Linked to Radicals : Terrorism: Officials see political overtones in the shooting near Gorbachev on Revolution Day. Leftist groups distance themselves from the activist.

The Red Square gunman who fired two shots across from Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was identified Saturday as a radical activist who had hawked subversive leaflets and belonged to a new party pledged to remove the Communists from power.

Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, chief of the KGB security agency, had indicated last week that officials believed Alexander A. Shmonov, 38, of Leningrad, who fired a sawed-off shotgun during the annual Revolution Day parade Wednesday, was simply insane.

But amid growing signs that the incident is taking on highly political overtones, Shmonov has been charged with attempted terrorism. A conservative newspaper reported Saturday that he had sold pamphlets for the Democratic Union, an ultra-radical group.

Shmonov, formerly a machinist at a Leningrad factory, organized “rallies that seldom ended without a scandal” during the 1989 election campaign, according to Sovetskaya Rossiya, known as the country’s most hard-line daily newspaper.

Sovetskaya Rossiya quoted Shmonov’s former boss as saying that “participating in ‘democratic’ propaganda helped him ripen to the point of committing a terrorist act.”

Valery Terekhov, one of the leaders of the Democratic Union’s Leningrad branch, vehemently denied that Shmonov was one of the group’s 110 members and said the group had never advocated terrorism.

“We’re for changing the current system but only through nonviolent means,” Terekhov said Saturday.

He added that, according to other activists, Shmonov was a member of the Free Democratic Party of Russia, founded last summer among a welter of new political parties that have arisen since the Communist Party renounced its monopoly on power.

Marina Salye, a Leningrad councilwoman and leader of the Free Democrats, refused to comment when reached at her office. “I don’t want to give any information on that matter,” she said but added that the party would put out a statement on the Shmonov affair soon.

Terekhov has predicted that the statement from the Free Democrats would disclaim Shmonov, just as the Leningrad Popular Front, a liberal organization that Shmonov apparently supported, has already done.

Like the Democratic Union, the Free Democrats hold the peaceful removal of the Communist Party from power as one of their main goals but are willing to allow it to continue competing in the political arena.

If Shmonov is shown to be sane but a political radical who took his ideas too far, his violent move could go far to discredit the liberal end of the Soviet political spectrum, Terekhov said.

Thus far, the KGB security police, who are interrogating Shmonov, have not announced whether they believe that he was planning an assassination or was simply hoping to disrupt the traditional Red Square parade marking the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

According to official reports and film showing Shmonov’s arrest, he was at least 100 yards from the mausoleum where Gorbachev and other leaders stood watching the parade when he pulled out his sawed-off shotgun. He thus could have had little hope of an accurate shot. He was grabbed immediately by plainclothes police, and no one was hurt.

“There are still a lot of questions about his motivation,” KGB spokesman Alexander N. Karbainov said Saturday. “There are still a lot of questions here.”