Pro-Soviet Protesters Brave Moscow Taunts : Russia: Demonstration outside Kremlin denounces Yeltsin, price increases and the demise of communism.

The cold, the wind and the snow suited Marina Matkovskaya in a way. So did the taunts of passersby and even the open abuse of an old man who shouted “Fascists, fascists!” as she unfurled the red flag of the old Soviet Union.

“We are in the wilderness,” Matkovskaya, 54, a chemical engineer, said. “It’s almost right that we should suffer, I suppose, because, quite frankly, we made a mess of it. That our successors are doing far, far worse, however, is no comfort.”

Matkovskaya was in the crowd of about 5,000 that gathered Sunday morning in a pro-Communist demonstration on Manezh Square outside the Kremlin to denounce the rule of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, the 10-day-old sharp price increases, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the demise of socialism.

“These are bitter days for us,” Matkovskaya said. “We see everything that our parents and grandparents built over seven decades being destroyed. We see our country being divided and its pieces auctioned off. We see a president who virtually seized power ruling by ukaz (decree) like a czar.”

The bitterness ran wide and deep through the small crowd. It was the bitterness of men and women who felt betrayed by their leaders in the now disbanded Communist Party; it was the bitterness of those who had felt that socialism, once reformed, could work, and it was the bitterness of those who realized their nation, once a superpower, was now an international beggar.

But, perhaps most of all, it was the bitterness of this nation’s “haves,” for many like Matkovskaya enjoyed the privileges that came with Communist Party membership. They suddenly find themselves lumped with the rest of the population as “have-nots.”

As one speaker from the pro-Communist group Moscow Labor ran through a long list of foods and consumer goods that are no longer obtainable in Russian stores, even Matkovskaya snickered.

“Most of that stuff has not been in ordinary shops for two, three or four years, maybe longer,” she said. “But everyone had his ways to get it--mine was through our ministry’s ‘order department’--and the trouble now is, first, that the ministry is shut down and, second, that most of the stuff is no longer produced. That’s why we ask, what shall we do?”

The rally’s solution was a military takeover.

After demanding the trial on charges of treason of former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the ouster of Yeltsin and the restoration of Soviet rule, the crowd cheered several proposals, including some from middle-rank officers, that the “army fulfill its constitutional duty and take authority into its own hands.”

“The army is the guardian of the nation and the only protector we have left,” Yegor Popovich, 52, a Moscow municipal official standing in the crowd, commented. “Things are so bad now, and getting worse every day, that we need the army to take charge. . . .

“Our national survival is at stake, and every single Soviet family feels that threat every day. To my mind, this danger is much greater than that we faced in the Cold War, even in World War II. And that threat is coming from our own government.”

Popovich’s anger was raw and biting as he assessed where perestroika, as Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms were known, had gone wrong, how “these so-called democrats seized power” and how they “are turning the whole country into a stinking whorehouse.”

“They say that perestroika brought us out of the ‘era of stagnation,’ but no one starved in those days,” Popovich said. “They say that the end of socialism brought us democracy, but who voted for these changes of Yeltsin? They say price reform will promote economic growth, but our economic disintegration is accelerating.

“This is all a political fraud, and Yeltsin is an arch-criminal. He must be deposed, and before the winter is out and we starve. The army may have to do it because our deputies in the Parliament have no more sense or gumption than trained camels in the circus.”

And the small showing on Sunday--Yeltsin’s Democratic Russia movement filled the same square with more than 250,000 people a year ago--suggested that any reinstatement of Soviet rule would have to come through some kind of coup d’etat, whether a military takeover or a restoration of the Communist Party, for it seems unlikely to come from an outpouring of popular support.

The crowd’s hatred for Yeltsin and for the reformist mayors of Moscow, Gavriil Popov, and St. Petersburg, Anatoly A. Sobchak, was palpable nonetheless--just mention of their names by the speakers brought shouts of “Shame!” and “Down with him!” from the crowd. Many held placards with caricatures of the three, calling them agents of “U.S. imperialism” or “Masonic Zionism.”

“Only true government by the people, not presidents, can rescue the country from the crisis,” Vladimir Shebarshin, a trade union leader from a Moscow machine-tool factory, told the rally, urging them to join the reconstituted Russian Communist Party and make it “a real vanguard of the working people.”

And Leonid Sukhov, a taxi driver and former deputy from the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, called upon workers to take over their factories and prevent their sale to private investors and to ensure full distribution of their products to “end these false shortages the Jews are creating to justify higher prices and bigger profits.”

Oleg G. Rumyantsev, a leader of the Russian Social Democratic Party, warned later that the conservative discontent, despite its small size, still represents a danger to the development of democracy and successful economic reform here.

“Democrats have left the streets,” Rumyantsev said. “They have taken over chairs and occupied posts (in the government). . . . And onto the streets went leaders of the former state-run trade unions and the Zhirinovskys (populist conservatives). These people are beginning to take over this space.

“While we are playing tug-of-war with one another, the extremists are getting stronger, and unfortunately they may become the dominant factor.”

But Gennady E. Burbulis, first deputy prime minister of the Russian government and Yeltsin’s principal adviser, dismissed the conservative opposition as intolerable in its “destructiveness.”

“There is a permanent need for (political opposition) for genuine reforms with a democratic perspective,” Burbulis said in an interview on Russian Television. “For me, the constructiveness of opposition is when the opponents accept our ultimate goals, agree with our strategic tasks and in their opposition correct the means and methods the government uses. This is constructive--all the rest is destructive opposition.”

The conservatives, Burbulis continued, have proposed virtually no alternatives to the Yeltsin program and only reject its measures. “They propose a very natural Soviet invocation--to achieve order and maintain discipline, to nominate more clever bosses and then, somehow, we will start to live better and produce more,” Burbulis said.

Earlier Sunday, about 1,000 demonstrators had protested the shortage of milk in Moscow by blocking Borodino Bridge across from the Russian “White House,” where Yeltsin made his stand during the conservative putsch in August.

Another conservative rally across from the Moscow City Hall drew only a few hundred people. And in St. Petersburg about 100 people picketed the Winter Palace, now an art museum, demanding the ouster of the Yeltsin government.

Organizers of the rally on Manezh Square said they will mount further protests this week during a meeting of senior military officers from around the country and then again next month outside the Russian government offices.