Tadzhikistan’s Communist Regime Begins to Crumble After Only a Week : Soviet Union: President bows to thousands of protesters and says he is ready to give up post.

The Communist regime that seized power in Tadzhikistan a week ago began to crumble Monday under the weight of a marathon street protest as the regime lifted a national state of emergency and agreed to consider suspending both the Communist Party and its hard-line leader.

With tens of thousands of protesters shouting “Resign! Resign!” from their growing tent city just outside the Parliament building, President Rakhman Nabiyev, who led the coup, announced that he is ready to give up his post.

“Let’s suspend my activities until elections,” he said during an extraordinary debate in Parliament. “If I am elected president, I don’t want to hear rumors that I used my position as chairman to win the office.” Republic-wide elections are scheduled for Oct. 27.

But leaders of last week’s coup made clear they were not ready to meet some of the protesters’ demands, including a ban on the Communist Party. Maksud Ikramov, the mayor of Tadzhikistan’s capital of Dushanbe until his ouster in the coup, warned that the protesters in Liberty Square, just outside the Parliament building, want more.

“If they do not get approval of all five demands, they will never leave that square,” warned Ikramov, who was ousted by the new regime for ordering the dismantling of the V. I. Lenin statue in the protest square.

Parliament adjourned without resolving all issues and scheduled another session for today.

The outcome will have enormous implications not only for Tadzhikistan but also for the other four republics of Soviet Central Asia. Like most of the other Soviet republics, they are seeking to break away from the Soviet Union in the wake of the botched hard-line coup against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

The overwhelming majority of protesters in Liberty Square are Muslims, who represent over 75% of the republic’s 5.1 million people. If the protesters can topple Tadzhikistan’s stubborn regime, that would probably embolden Islamic parties to challenge conservative regimes in neighboring Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

It was abundantly clear from Monday’s extraordinary session of Parliament, carried live on Tadzhik television, that the mass street movement had already scored a moral victory. The Communists, who control 94% of the seats in Parliament, conceded that they are backpedaling in response to the tens of thousands of Tadzhiks gathered outside.

“Why are the organizers of this meeting in the square forcing their opinions on the deputies?” shouted one Communist member in near hysterics. “They have no right to threaten us. If we give in today, nobody knows what will happen tomorrow.”

An opposition deputy quickly reminded him: “Let us set personal issues aside. The people of the republic are on strike. They are living in tents. These are our own people--our fathers, our children.”

A red-faced Nabiyev, who later all but announced his resignation, took the podium in an angry reflection of the hard-liners’ bewilderment. “I cannot understand this,” he shouted. “You voted for me. Yet in the course of seven days, you change your mind?”

“What kind of deputies are we, declaring a state of emergency one week and repealing it the next week?” Safarali Kendzhiyev, one of the chief architects of the coup, asked just after parliament voted unanimously to lift its state of emergency Monday evening.

“Can we change our constitution every week according to our wills and whims? What will people think of us? This is really hypocrisy.”

Every deputy in the Parliament hall, where a 12-foot marble statue of Soviet founder Lenin stands over the leaders’ benches and hand-painted hammers and sickles grace the ceiling, fully realized the magnitude of the emergency meeting.

“This is a historic session,” one non-Communist deputy told his colleagues at the very start. “If you vote again with your eyes and ears closed, ignoring the wishes of our people, it will aggravate the situation in the republic and trigger mass discontent.”

Another deputy who heads Tadzhikistan’s trade unions warned that virtually every farm collective and factory union is on the verge of striking. “The state of Tadzhikistan is in your hands,” he warned the Communist deputies.

In the end, the protesters tempered their demand to ban the Communist Party and nationalize its property. They settled, instead, for proposing to suspend all party activities. The Communist majority refused even to discuss one of the opposition’s five demands--the resignations of the republic’s prosecutor and the director of state-run television and radio, who took the podium to condemn the protesters for smashing one of his cameras.

In the day’s most vicious verbal assault, former Tadzhik President Kadriddin Aslonov turned on the man who replaced him in the coup.

“Today, Nabiyev, whether you like it or not, you cannot keep the people at bay!” Aslonov shouted. “You cannot silence them. You abused the people--your own people. Whether you like it or not, you are unable to rule these people. These are the last seconds and minutes of your political career.”

Nabiyev said little in his own defense. “I just cannot understand this,” he said. “I have given you my heart, my dignity, my family, my children. What else do you want from me?”

Later, Parliament rejected his appeal to represent the republic this week at a spacecraft launching in Kazakhstan.