Bold Rightists Press Cause in Uneasy Moscow

Brash, angry and playing by its own set of rules, the new Soviet right now has the world’s undivided attention.

“I stand before you a reactionary, a hawk, scum,” one of its leaders, Col. Viktor I. Alksnis, of the reactionary Soyuz (Union) faction, told the Soviet Congress hours after Eduard A. Shevardnadze, complaining of right-wing “hounding,” quit Thursday.

Like the black-haired Latvian colonel, other military officers, Communist militants and ethnic Russians from outlying areas are disgusted at recent events.

To hear them, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has made too many concessions in U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations, “lost” East Germany and pursued policies that may doom the very existence of the Soviet state.

But Soyuz members are better at articulating what they oppose than they are at offering alternatives to Gorbachev’s perestroika program.

“Yes, when a nursing baby is thrown into a fire, I am a hawk,” Alksnis told the Congress, referring to atrocities committed in the ethnic unrest that has become common under Gorbachev. “When a pregnant woman is thrown out of a ninth-floor window, I am a hawk. When an old man is skinned alive, I’m a hawk.”

By calling himself “scum,” Alksnis was derisively taking up the label bestowed on Shevardnadze’s foes by prominent liberal writer Ales Adamovich.

Where old-style conservatives, such as former Politburo member Yegor K. Ligachev, were basically content to work within the system, seeking to brake or channel Gorbachev’s economic and political reforms, the new breed of rightist seems to oppose absolutely all change.

Also, unlike Establishment conservatives, the new Soviet right has gone public with criticism and even contemptuous words about Gorbachev.

Alksnis’ comrade, Col. Nikolai S. Petrushenko, was asked recently what he thought of his commander in chief. He said Gorbachev is a nice man but indecisive. “He must be pushed,” Petrushenko said.

Shevardnadze earned Soyuz’s enmity for the same achievements in foreign policy that helped win Gorbachev the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. “The minister made too many concessions to the West,” Petrushenko said. “Witness the unjustifiably hasty withdrawal of our half-million-strong military contingent from the Eastern European countries.”

For Soyuz, it is the height of stupidity that their government, in the person of Shevardnadze, has voted at the United Nations to authorize the use of force to counter Iraqi aggression in the Persian Gulf, but has not sent in its own army to crush secessionist leaderships in the Baltic republics and Soviet Caucasus.

Few believe that the pinpricks of Soyuz alone were sufficient to drive Shevardnadze off the political stage. Shevardnadze asked aloud who the backers of Soyuz really are, and undoubtedly, their political impact has been far out of proportion to the votes they can muster in the Parliament.

For example, only 426 deputies of all stripes, about a fifth of the Congress of People’s Deputies, voted Monday in favor of holding a vote of no confidence in Gorbachev.

Yet Soyuz can claim that it has driven three progressives of the first rank from their jobs: Shevardnadze, longtime Gorbachev ally Alexander N. Yakovlev and Interior Minister Vadim V. Bakatin.

Still, other members of the Congress are worried.

“Reactionaries, centralizers and imperialists have united to take the offensive,” Vladimir K. Chernyak of the Ukraine warned Friday.

Views vary on whether Soyuz is the mouthpiece of the conservative power brokers, whom Lithuanian lawmaker Nikolai Medvedev dubs “the gray cardinals,” or whether the group is just a band of loudmouthed extremists. Gorbachev’s recent actions, however, show he is increasingly tailoring his policies to appeal to the KGB, Soviet army, police and other institutions from which conservatives draw much of their support.

The right, reform economist Pavel G. Bunich told reporters, is now composed of “a very big part of the party apparatus, a big part of the Soviets (local government councils), the labor unions and the overt rightist forces that you know, like Pamyat (the Russian nationalist organization) and the military-industrial complex.”

By sounding the alarm about the looming danger of a Soviet “dictatorship,” Shevardnadze, one of the founding fathers of perestroika, was evidently trying to end Gorbachev’s courtship of the right. But he also was trying to force a rallying of increasingly dispersed progressives around the Soviet president.

Some fear it may already be too late and that Gorbachev may already have become an accomplice or a prisoner of the right wing.

“Who will be next?” Nikolai Tutov, a Social Democrat, asked after Shevardnadze’s resignation. “I don’t rule out that the initiator of perestroika himself, Mikhail Gorbachev, will be next.”