Demonstrators Call for Unity in Moscow Rally : Soviet Union: Tens of thousands turn out to support the Communist Party. The gathering comes on the Red Army’s 73rd anniversary.

Massive demonstrations of liberals have become common in the Soviet capital, but on Saturday, Soviet Army Day, it was the conservatives who marched by the tens of thousands into a huge square near the Kremlin, waving red flags and unfurling pro-Soviet banners.

“Yes to the Union! No to Chaos!” and “The People and the Army are United” were two of the most popular sayings in the first major Moscow demonstration by hard-liners, who have successfully consolidated their forces and made a dramatic comeback over the last several months.

“There is anarchy in our country and we understand the army is the only stabilizing force,” poet Mikhail Nozhkin told the crowd.

On the day honoring the Red Army’s 73rd anniversary, servicemen, policemen and civilians gathered at Manezh Square to protest nationalism and separatism in the republics and to support the Communist Party, the country’s armed forces and a strong centralized state.

The lineup of hard-line Communists and army brass who attended the rally included Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, Interior Minister Boris K. Pugo and Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, chief of the KGB security and intelligence agency.

“Always, in difficult moments in our history, we stood up and consolidated around one thing--our state,” said Col. Viktor Alksnis, a leader of Soyuz, the right-wing faction in the national Parliament. “Our ancestors will not forgive us and they will condemn us if we permit the collapse of the union. Our main goal is to save the union. Only in the union will we survive.”

Alksnis, 40, who has taken on the role of chief reactionary on the Soviet political scene over the last few months, warned the crowd that a strong union is the only alternative to fratricidal conflict. “A civil war in a nuclear superpower will become a world war, in which the entire world will perish,” he said.

Speakers called on their countrymen to vote for remaining in the Soviet Union when they cast their ballots in a referendum on the issue March 17. At least six of the republics have already decided not to participate in the referendum or to change the question to be asked voters.

The square chosen for Saturday’s demonstration has been used repeatedly over the last year by proponents of radical democratic reform. As many as 300,000 liberals have packed into it to call for the end of the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, a fast transition to a market economy and independence for the republics.

Judging by the estimates of earlier demonstrations, not more than 50,000 people turned out for the hard-line rally, far short of the 200,000 predicted by Soyuz, one of the rally’s organizers. Workers had received invitations at their jobs, and military personnel were given time off to attend.

About 50,000 people attended a similar demonstration in Leningrad, the official Soviet news agency Tass reported.

The demonstrations came at a time when the military desperately needed a boost to both its morale and its rating with the public. Liberals have been fiercely criticizing the military, especially since 22 people were killed in Lithuania and Latvia last month when Soviet soldiers and police used their firearms.

“There are forces in society which would want . . . to show the army as a predatory monster that all but devours people,” Moscow City Councilman Yuri Vinogradov told the crowd. “People who do this want to destroy this country. Our army is the same as the people, and to go against it is to go against the people.”

Several of the banners carried anti-American slogans linked to the war against Iraq. One pictured a U.S. flag whose stripes each turned into a bomb. “Bush is a murderer,” the sign read.

Other banners, such as “Hands off Lenin!” and “Yeltsin--to Whom Have You Sold Russia?” showed that the sentiments of the crowds were with Soviet founder V. I. Lenin and not Boris N. Yeltsin, the rebellious president of the Russian Federation.

Tatyana V. Romanova, a 40-year-old housewife, held a sign that read: “No to attacks on the Soviet Army, KGB and Interior Ministry.” She said she once had believed in the democrats and Yeltsin as their leader, but that now she is fed up.

“I’m not satisfied with what has happened in our country for the last five years,” Romanova said. “The democrats are not fighting for the needs of the people to feed and clothe themselves. Their power is against the people.”

As the rally broke up, a small group of counterdemonstrators started chanting “Yeltsin, Yeltsin!” in support of the radical Russian president, who called on Tuesday for the resignation of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

A tense standoff ensued as many supporters of the conservative rally gathered around the small group of radicals and jeered at them, but there was no violence.