Kremlin Shift Just Makes Matters Worse for Uzbeks : Soviet Union: Prices rise after Asian republic declares independence, adding to economic and ethnic troubles.

In this remote Asian corner of the crumbling Soviet empire, the longest line at the Alayski Market was not for bread, or meat, or even vodka. All of these were well stocked on the counters of the sprawling open-air vendor stands nearby.

The line that snaked for 30 feet or more was for pigs’ ears.

“Hey, get out of there! I’ve been waiting on this line for two hours!” shouted a Russian in the line who later identified himself as Gennady. His protest was aimed at an ethnic Uzbek, the Turkic group that dominates here, who had handed over a few extra kopecks to cut in the front of the line.

The smiling Uzbek paid no attention. He grabbed his pigs’ ears, paid slightly more than the fixed state price of 1 ruble and 40 kopecks per kilogram (about 2 cents a pound) and walked off.

Economic deprivation and ethnic tension: These have long been the basic realities of life in the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. And both were intensified by last month’s abortive coup in Moscow, its impact sweeping to the farthest reaches of the modern world’s largest and most ethnically diverse nation.

The economy of the crumbling federation is a prime concern.

“It’s because of the lack of meat that we buy these pigs’ ears,” said Gennady, a construction worker who supports a wife and four children on 600 rubles a month. “We boil them and put them in the refrigerator, and then we eat them.”

Reminded that the private-sector market just 20 feet away was stocked with plump lambs and big sides of beef, Gennady shrugged and said: “Of course. But it’s very expensive. Not all of us can have this luxury. And since the big events in Moscow, it has become worse for us.”

Uzbekistan, like seven of the other 11 republics still in the Soviet Union, declared its independence during the tumultuous weeks after last month’s botched coup in Moscow.

For now, from the perspective of the Uzbek people, that has only made matters worse.

“You see, when the leadership here declared the independence of Uzbekistan, the prices all went up,” Gennady contended Thursday. “Everything we get here from the other republics was on barter agreements. They are finished now, so everything costs more, and we pay more, but our salary is the same.”

Adding to economic troubles are the pent-up ethnic rivalries, no longer suppressed by the heavy hand of central Soviet authority.

In this republic of nearly 20 million, 70% are Uzbek and only 11% are ethnic Russian. Without Moscow’s protective shield, the Russians are beginning to feel not only unwelcome but afraid.

“The other day in a line for fuel, an Uzbek yelled at me, ‘Hey, get out! Go back to your beloved Russia!’ ” said Nikolai Shripunov, a pensioned factory worker, as he examined a stack of beefsteak tomatoes in the free-market zone.

“Yes, we Russians are here,” Shripunov continued. “If somebody invites us to return to Russia, gladly we will go. But I am here because my father’s farmhouse in the Volga region was seized by the state in the ‘30s, and we were sent here. Now, we cannot go back.

“Go where? We are like hostages here.”

The economic and ethnic tensions that are seething here in the Uzbek capital seem ready to explode any day. That helps explain why democracy has not reached here despite the rush to democracy 2,200 miles away in Moscow.

Indeed, this is one republic where communism still appears to be alive and well.

Just this week, its strongman, President Islam Karimov, explained to several visiting foreign journalists that his “new nation” is far too volatile and hot-headed to tolerate an instant burst of democracy.

He said he prefers the pace of China’s slow march to democracy--a progress that has included the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators near Beijing’s Tian An Men Square.

Although Karimov this week changed the name of the local Communist Party to the People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, his hard-line style of leadership remains undiluted.

Karimov banned a Sept. 8 demonstration by the pro-democracy Uzbek group Birlik (Unity) by filling the streets with more than 15,000 policemen, who sealed off the entire downtown area surrounding the park where the rally had been scheduled.

And a pro-independence and pro-democracy weekly newspaper called Munosabat (Attitude), which was banned two days before a referendum on Uzbek independence last March, still has not received permission to publish.

The 40,000 copies of its last issue, seized by authorities for featuring a front-page drawing of the Soviet Union padlocked under a heavy chain, have not been returned to the publishers.

“We are negotiating now, and I hope in the near future we will start work again,” said editor-in-chief Fahriddin Hudoykul Tojri-Ogly. “But there is still no democracy in Uzbekistan.”

Tojri-Ogly has not given up. “Before, each hour we waited here to be arrested,” he said. “We have stopped waiting for it now. It is a trend--perhaps only a feeling. But we feel this weight of change coming, even here.”

There are few signs of it at the moment in the streets of Tashkent, a city ruined by a devastating 1966 earthquake and rebuilt almost entirely in hulking gray concrete in the decade that followed.

Last weekend, Karimov permitted the removal of the towering statue of Felix E. Dzherzhinsky, V. I. Lenin’s No. 3 man, who created the precursor of the KGB, from the park beside Tashkent’s KGB headquarters.

And he officially changed the name of Lenin Square to Independence Square after the failed Moscow coup.

But a huge, bronze statue of Lenin continues to stand in the heart of the square. So does an enormous granite head of Karl Marx above the slogan, “Workers of the world unite,” in another park just outside the Stalinesque state-owned Hotel Uzbekistan.

Such images are enduring testimonies to Karimov’s continuing hard-line Communist policy, a position that has endured despite his concession to fiery popular sentiment from fellow Uzbeks to declare independence after the coup.

Despite the risks, Karimov is not without his critics.

Moscow’s recently liberated newspaper Izvestia this week challenged Karimov’s loyalties during the failed 72-hour coup. Commentator Valery Vyzhutovich, strongly suggesting that Karimov actually backed the coup, selected passages from a speech he delivered Aug. 20 while the hard-line emergency commission still clung to power in Moscow.

“We have always been supporters of firm order and discipline,” Izvestia quoted the Uzbek president as saying that day. “A leadership that abandoned order and discipline does not return.”

Vyzhutovich also quoted an article in Pravda of the East, the Tashkent Communist Party newspaper that Karimov controls.

“Leave Moscow’s problems for the Muscovites,” Pravda of the East declared. “Perestroika has not changed the old problems that the fish begins to rot from the head. And the stench of the rotting fish attracts to it all forms of democrats--especially from Uzbekistan.”

On the streets of the Uzbek capital, where Karimov critics abound, many express their distaste for him in the form of jokes.

One joke, recounted by a taxi driver who smiled as he passed the downtown statue of Lenin, has Lenin and Dzherzhinsky restored to life to examine what has become of the country they founded. So appalled are they that Lenin says to Dzherzhinsky, “Let’s go underground and start all over again.”

Later in the day, walking in the park near the giant head of Karl Marx, another local resident tells a variation of the story. At the punch line, Marx says: “Workers of the world, forgive me.”

The jokes demonstrate how Tashkent’s 2 million people have endured seven decades of communism, which was imposed on them in this overwhelmingly Islamic region after years of fierce and bloody battles between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and Uzbek freedom fighters known as the Basmachi.

But just below the layer of grim humor, anger is bubbling close to the surface.

“Uzbeks are now the poorest people in the (Soviet) Union,” editor Tojri-Ogly said. “We have many natural resources--gas, oil, uranium, gold--but all of this was transported to the rest of the union, and we got nothing. Now these belong to us, so we have hope that the future will be different.”

Foreign and Uzbek businessmen said the would-be nation has already begun withholding gold shipments to Moscow, which has depended upon Uzbekistan for much of its gold reserves. That will provide Uzbekistan with leverage in negotiations with the other Soviet republics over a new form of economic confederation.

Intellectuals such as Tojri-Ogly remain realistic about Uzbekistan’s potential for survival as an independent, land-locked nation.

“I think that it is impossible,” he said. “Our economy is specially built for cooperation with the other republics. We depend on other places in the Soviet Union to manufacture almost everything. I would like to see the future of Uzbekistan as politically independent but economically related to the other republics.”

In the downtown Alayski Market, shoppers are more concerned with their personal survival than with that of their new nation.

“No, I don’t know about these things,” said pensioner Shripunov as he passed up the free-market tomatoes as too expensive.

“No, there is only talking now. Lots of talking. Everyone’s talking. And nothing changes. Life gets worse and worse.”

A Look at Uzbekistan

Land: 172,741 square miles

People: 20 million, mostly Sunni Muslim Uzbeks

President: Islam Karimov

Economy: Agriculture, oil and mining

History: The semi-independent khanates of Khiva and Bokhara became the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic in October, 1924. Uzbekistan declared independence from the Soviet Union on Aug. 31.