Supreme Soviet Session Ends in Spasms of Guilt : Legislature: Discredited by lack of action during the coup, it’s doubtful it can survive in its current form.

It felt like the last day of the semester on Saturday in the Soviet Union’s much-touted “school of democracy,” the white-pillared halls of the national Supreme Soviet. And it looked like the whole class had flunked.

With its chairman under arrest on suspicion of treason, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church calling for it to dissolve itself and telegrams from disgusted voters lining its bulletin boards, the Supreme Soviet ended its six-day emergency session so besmirched and discredited that members say there is no way it can survive in its current form.

“I would give this Supreme Soviet a D or maybe an F,” said Alexei Yemelyanov, a deputy and Moscow University professor. “It was absolutely obedient and, legally speaking, we’re at fault for last week’s coup.”

In fact, the 542-member national legislature is guilty mainly of “criminal passivity.” Although the three-day putsch began Aug. 19, the Supreme Soviet, technically the highest Soviet governmental power when the larger Congress of People’s Deputies is not in session, did not convene until a full week later.

And when it did come together, it was mainly for mutual recriminations and pointless haggling over niggling points like whether the commission to investigate the coup should be called “parliamentary” or “of the Supreme Soviet.”

“Comrades, the country is watching you!” Deputy Chairman Rafik Nishanov cried in despair at one point.

Equally humiliating was the putsch members’ clear expectation that when it did convene, the legislature, known for its conservative bent, would accord docile approval to all their plans for a reactionary regime.

“This was their prop, their rear, that they were absolutely sure of,” Sergei Parkhomenko, political commentator for the popular Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper, said in an interview in the stuffy basement smoking hall of the Supreme Soviet building in the Kremlin. “And they were right in their expectations.”

As Yemelyanov pointed out, the legislature also carries a heavy load of guilt for having confirmed most of the high government officials who later turned against Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, as well as having confirmed the Cabinet that has now been dissolved in disgrace.

“We all accuse Gorbachev of having appointed all the people who turned out to be plotters,” Parkhomenko said. “But just a minute! They were all approved by the Supreme Soviet.”

National lawmakers’ performance--or lack of it--during the coup was even more embarrassing when compared to that of their colleagues in the Parliament of the Russian Federation, who convened immediately, held on-and-off sessions throughout the crisis and physically defended the Russian government building that became the bulwark of democracy.

For a national Parliament that initially began with such high hopes, “this is a sorry finish,” Yemelyanov said.

When the Supreme Soviet first convened two years ago, it was considered the proud centerpiece of perestroika, a promising replacement for the old rubber-stamp body that approved whatever the Communist Party dictated. More than half of its members had been chosen in the country’s first free elections, and its deputies, many of them young and enthusiastic, set about lawmaking with a vengeance, passing hundreds of hotly debated measures.

What went wrong?

The main problem, said Nikolai Medvedev, a deputy from Lithuania who now attends as a non-voting guest, is that the legislature, elected in summer of 1989, “reflects the state of the Soviet Union in 1989. And now it is 1991.”

In a thoughtful mood as the session drew to a close, other deputies reflected Saturday that the legislature had never managed to escape the adroit manipulation of its chairman, Anatoly I. Lukyanov.

Lukyanov failed to call the Supreme Soviet into session the moment the coup was announced, thus depriving Gorbachev, his friend of 40 years, of the constitutional support the president needed to fight.

Some commented, too, that any lawmaking body of the central government is naturally doomed as the Soviet Union falls apart.

“We passed all kinds of laws on paper,” Yemelyanov said, “but who needs such laws if you’re putting the cart before the horse? Who needs laws if you don’t know what the form of the Soviet Union will be?

“It was empty work,” Yemelyanov said bitterly. “Lukyanov was just powdering our brains”--a Russian expression for pulling the wool over someone’s eyes.

Yuri Kalmykov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s Committee on Legislation, has proposed that at least 80% of lawmakers be replaced when the Congress of People’s Deputies, which selects Supreme Soviet members from among its 2,250 deputies, convenes this week.

The current Supreme Soviet, he said, “was, unfortunately, not always principled, or independent, and it couldn’t always stand against the chairman.” But next session, he said, “we’ll take our experience into account. The most important thing for a parliament is to have genuine independence.”

If there is a next session.

With the entire Soviet political system in turmoil and the country splitting apart, the future form of the central government has yet to be worked out, but the role of the central legislature is almost sure to be drastically reduced.

Lawmaker Konstantin Lubenchenko said he could envision a Supreme Soviet that would become “a successor organ that can prevent a catastrophe in relations (among the republics) in the Soviet Union and an organ of diplomacy, like the European Parliament.”

Parkhomenko, too, predicted that the Supreme Soviet will be transformed into a coordinating body to help smooth relations among the 15--or fewer--Soviet republics in whatever form they ultimately may choose to remain together.

But “if the Congress and the Supreme Soviet stick to their conservative positions, it will be clear that they should simply be gotten rid of,” he said.

Yemelyanov was even less forgiving. “An elementary sense of honor demands self-liquidation,” he said. “If you have shamed yourself, you have to atone.”

But even Medvedev, who was clearly enraged by Saturday’s discussion of an investigatory commission on the coup, acknowledged angrily that at this point, the Supreme Soviet cannot simply evaporate.

“For now, there’s nothing else,” he said. “There’s nothing else to stabilize relations.”

Yuri Blokhin, a leader of the conservative Soyuz bloc, went even further.

“The Supreme Soviet must be restored,” he said, “because otherwise our government will lose its head altogether.”