2 Uzbek Students Die in Riots Over Price Hikes

Thousands of students enraged by soaring prices and empty bread shops smashed windows, overturned cars and battled police in a Central Asian city, authorities said Friday. Two students were reportedly killed, and several were wounded.

The riots in Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, represented the worst violence connected with the new reforms launched in former Soviet republics.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin freed prices on Jan. 2 to spur production and plant the seeds of a market economy. Uzbekistan and other states went along to keep their store shelves from being stripped by desperate Russians.

But reports Friday indicated some food processors had raised prices so high that stores couldn’t pay them, leaving shelves bare. The Tass news agency said meat and candy factories in Moscow and Krasnodar had cut production because warehouses were full of goods that consumers couldn’t afford.

Meat consumption has fallen 17% in St. Petersburg, 19% in the southern city of Keremova, and 20% in Moscow because of high prices, the State Statistics Committee reported, according to the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossia.

In St. Petersburg, workers on the subway system that carries 3 million passengers a day threatened to stop work Monday if Mayor Anatoly Sobchak does not raise their salaries by as much as 500%.

In Tashkent, the government of President Islam Karimov lifted most price controls and introduced food coupons Thursday. Students complained that their stipends had failed to keep pace with rising prices and that they had not received any food coupons.

The students Thursday night vandalized food stores, overturned cars and threw rocks at police, according to reports from the scene.

When some of the students began marching toward the presidential palace to demand Karimov’s resignation, police first fired blanks and then live ammunition, said Anvar Umonov, a Tashkent journalist.

One student was killed and about 50 injured, including two seriously, according to students and local journalists. About 20 policemen were injured and several hundred people arrested, reports said. One of the seriously injured students died early Friday, Interfax said.