Russia Objects to Using Troops to Patrol Streets

In a direct challenge to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s emergency powers, the Russian Federation decided Thursday to question the constitutionality of his decree authorizing troops to patrol the streets of the country’s cities, and it appealed to him to suspend the order to avoid further confrontations and possible bloodshed.

With the patrols scheduled to begin today, the Russian Legislature expressed concern that they could lead to clashes similar to those in the Baltic republics last month, when 21 people were killed, and that they could mask a right-wing takeover of the government.

“Who knows what might happen in the next 24 hours?” Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, the maverick populist who has emerged as Gorbachev’s most powerful critic, said during the debate.

The Russian Legislature warned in a resolution that “the use of armed soldiers on city streets can lead to further destabilization of the political situation and to a considerable curtailment or violation of rights and freedoms.”

The lawmakers asked the Committee on Constitutional Compliance, which acts as the Soviet Union’s constitutional court, to rule on the legality of Gorbachev’s decree. They argued that the Soviet president had exceeded even the enhanced authority given him in December by the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament.

Sergei S. Alexeyev, the chairman of the Constitutional Compliance Committee, has indicated that the panel already has begun to study the decree. As the Soviet Union’s largest constituent republic, the Russian Federation has the weight to put the issue at the top of the committee’s agenda.

Alexeyev, who is known to oppose the order, told friends this week that this could well become the case that decides whether the Soviet Union becomes the “law-governed state” to which it aspires. He also said it could define his committee’s future role.

Sweeping powers were written into the Soviet constitution for the president twice last year in response to Gorbachev’s repeated declarations that he needed greater authority--the right to rule by decree, in fact--to press ahead with the political and economic reforms of perestroika and to cope with the country’s deepening crisis.

But the fundamental point raised during the debate Thursday was political rather than legal: Is the deployment of the Red Army on the streets of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and virtually every other major Soviet city part of an anti-crime campaign--or part of what Gorbachev’s critics see as a creeping right-wing coup d’etat?

“This is not a decree to fight crime--it is a decree to fight one’s own people,” Col. Alexander V. Rutskoi, a prominent deputy, said, warning that extremists might provoke the soldiers into opening fire. “This again sets the army against the nation.”

Sergei M. Shakhrai, another leading member of the Russian Legislature, argued that political factors lay behind the order, originally signed in late December by the Soviet ministers of interior and defense and circulated secretly for a month.

Although crime has risen sharply over the last three years, Shakhrai said, the level still does not justify the deployment of troops on city streets. Most of the increase in crime has come in apartment burglaries and economic crimes, such as black marketeering, which is better fought with police.

The four-man military patrols, although supervised by a policeman, would be made up largely of young conscripts who might easily open fire with their automatic weapons when they encounter trouble, Shakhrai said. Soviet officials, attempting to ease such fears, have said the troops ordinarily would not be carrying firearms.

Yeltsin told the lawmakers that Viktor Barannikov, interior minister of the Russian Federation, believes the order to be “erroneous” and that the minister would obey the instructions of the republic’s government against joint patrols.

But it was not clear how opposition from the legislatures in Russia, the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and in the southern republic of Georgia, as well as in cities with liberal councils, would affect the deployment of the troops.

Boris K. Pugo, the Soviet interior minister, said earlier in the week that the soldiers would not be sent to areas where republican or regional governments do not want them, but army commanders in the Baltics, some regions of Russia and in the Ukraine said on Thursday that their soldiers would be on patrol.

Yeltsin had backed away from a direct confrontation with Gorbachev as the lawmakers passed a second resolution asking him to suspend the order while the Constitutional Compliance Committee studies it and while other republics express their views. He blocked a more radical resolution declaring the order invalid across the vast Russian Federation.

The Russian president came under fresh attack himself from conservatives as political tensions continued to rise.

Writing in the Communist Party newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya, a group of nine hard-line military officers, headed by former Warsaw Pact commander Viktor Kulikov, accused Yeltsin and his supporters of being “destructive forces who are actively striving to clash with the generals . . . destroy the army and turn our country into separate principalities.”

Gorbachev, meanwhile, was presiding over a meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, which drew up a major political statement calling for “civic peace and national accord” as the only basis on which the country could emerge from the deepening economic, ethnic and political crises.

Although the text of the statement was not released immediately, party Secretary Alexander S. Dzasokhov said it is intended to provide the basis for the renewal of the Soviet Union as a cohesive federation.

The statement recognizes the right of the Soviet Union’s republics to establish their sovereignty, he said, but it blames much of the recent unrest on the fact that they ignored the Soviet constitution and laws, particularly the guarantees of human rights and minority protection.

“These violations have inevitably been taken as provocations,” Dzasokhov said.