50,000 Call for Yeltsin to Resign : Russia: Economic reforms are denounced as ‘highway robbery.’ The Moscow rally is largest yet by pro-Communist groups.

Angered by the Russian government’s tripling of food prices, tens of thousands of protesters gathered outside the Kremlin on Sunday to demand President Boris N. Yeltsin’s resignation in the largest demonstration yet organized by pro-Communist groups against him.

“Yeltsin is a Judas!” the estimated 50,000 demonstrators chanted as they marched under red flags into Manezh Square, the forum for so many anti-Communist rallies in recent years. “Yeltsin must resign!”

Smaller anti-Yeltsin rallies took place in St. Petersburg and about a dozen other cities across the country.

Speakers here in Moscow demanded that the Congress of People’s Deputies be convened next month to restore “Soviet power,” and they called for the release and even the reinstatement of the leaders of last August’s abortive Kremlin putsch.

“The reforms launched in January and even earlier are aimed at robbing 90% of the people,” Alexander Kraiko, a leading conservative deputy in the old Congress, told the crowd. “These prices are highway robbery and have slashed people’s savings to nothing.”

For three hours, the vast square echoed with cries of “Shame!” as former Communist Party officials, conservative Russian nationalists and trade union leaders denounced Yeltsin and his economic reforms.

“Long Live Communism, the Ideology of the Working People,” read one banner, and another declared, “Leaders of Russia! We Won’t Forgive the Hungry Deaths of Our Children!”

Among the placards held up by the pro-Communist demonstrators were a number that were openly anti-Semitic, blaming Russian Jews and “international Zionism” for the country’s economic crisis. Yeltsin and Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov, an ethnic Greek, were both caricatured as Jewish figures, with Stars of David on their jackets where Soviet medals formerly were worn.

Less than two miles away, however, about 20,000 Yeltsin supporters gathered around the “White House,” his headquarters during the putsch, to declare their support for him and the reforms.

But here, too, there was criticism as leading liberals called upon Yeltsin to fire his chief of staff as an unredeemed Communist Party apparatchik and to purge the country’s administrative structure of the remaining hard-liners.

“Our victory of last August is being lost,” said Father Gleb Yakunin, a Russian Orthodox priest and former political dissident, who now is a member of Parliament and co-chairman of the political movement Democratic Russia. “The party apparatchiki are stealing the fruits of democracy from us. There is still a brake on reform. . . . Yeltsin must wake up!”

Most of the speakers at the pro-Yeltsin rally, whose carnival atmosphere contrasted with the somberness of the Manezh demonstration, called for renewed support of the Russian president.

“The danger now is different but as great as it was in August,” Ilya Zaslavsky, another prominent liberal politician, said. “The reforms must be implemented. A constitution must be written. The economy must be kept on the course to the market.”

The competing rallies, coming less than two months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, will be assessed closely here as a measure of Yeltsin’s popularity and his ability to govern as living standards fall as a result of his reform program.

Prices for food and consumer goods, held at artificially low levels for decades, have risen an average of 350% in the past month, and participants in the pro-Communist rally complained bitterly about the economic reforms.

“I came here to fight for my survival,” Nikolai N. Tsibin, a 67-year-old pensioner, said. “It has been bad many times in the past, but it has never been this bad. . . . The government destroyed all my life savings in just one day.”

Schoolteacher Irina Y. Veremchuk, 33, described herself as “scared to death of what will happen and where we are all headed” and called her participation in the pro-Communist rally “a gesture of despair.”

“In the past, they were pulling us by force into the ‘bright future’; now they are pushing us to another ‘bright future,’ again by force,” she said. “But nobody asked me or my children whether we want to go there.”

Eduard M. Salnikov, 42, a construction worker, commented, “What is happening now is not connected with objective difficulties or attempts to break through to the market economy--it is the plain and open extermination of the people.

“The government,” Salnikov argued, “is trying to put a large part of the population into poverty so they can be easily manipulated, politically and economically. Just in one month, most people have become poor, hardly in a position to make ends meet.”

The pro-Communist rally was organized by a loose coalition of groups that includes the Russian Communist Workers’ Party, the movement Moscow Labor and the nationalist group Nashi, or Ours. They are united by their opposition to harsh market reforms and the breakup of the old Soviet Union.

Alexei A. Sergeyev, a leader of the Russian Communist Workers’ Party and prominent Marxist economist, put forward an alternative program to the government’s reforms. He called for a 15% limit on profits, state control of foreign trade, seizure of the hard currency holdings of private entrepreneurs to buy food and closure of small businesses profiting through resale of goods.

“The people have had enough suffering,” Sergeyev said. “Let the black marketeers, swindlers and speculators suffer now.”

Another economist, Sergei Gubanov, called upon the country to prepare for a national general strike. “This is the only way to settle the question of power,” Gubanov said.

Kraiko said in an interview that the pro-Communist forces were now pushing for a new session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the old Soviet Parliament, as “our only chance of salvation.”

“This country, given its past integration, can exist either as a unitary or a federative state, but not as this Commonwealth of Independent States,” Kraiko said.

“The present leadership no longer has power. They missed the moment when they could send heads rolling. Power is slipping from their hands.”

But Col. Viktor Alksnis, another leading hard-liner, was less optimistic. “The leadership of Russia and the other republics is doomed,” he said in an interview. “None are capable of carrying out economic reforms independently, and economic reform is impossible with the state crumbling and disintegrating.

“Unless there is a unified state with strong central power, it is impossible to carry out reform, but the restoration of the state is a long process, taking five years at least.”

Alksnis said he doubted whether enough of the 2,250 deputies would come to Moscow to hold a congress even if it were convened. “It is an unrealistic idea because of the cowardice of many,” he said. “They are afraid of their shadows.”

The Manezh rally, where many waved the red flag of the old Soviet Union, was the pro-Communists’ largest since the August coup; they had not drawn more than 5,000 or 10,000 demonstrators in recent months. Although the police put the number of participants in the rally at 100,000 to 120,000, they occupied less than a third of the square, which has held more than 200,000 people.

Further anti-Yeltsin rallies were reported in other industrial cities across the country, including Chelyabinsk, Kazan and Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, Bryansk, Penza and Petrozavodsk in central Russia and Angarsk, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk in Siberia.

In St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad, where the 1917 revolution brought the Bolsheviks to power, pro-Communist demonstrators struck a strongly nationalist note, protesting against cutbacks in the armed forces and denouncing any deals that would diminish Russia’s territory.

Moscow authorities had mobilized an army of more than 10,000 police to contain the two rallies in the Russian capital and keep the demonstrators apart. No incidents were reported.

“This is the first time they have been faced with a really organized force of the working people, and they are terribly afraid now,” Viktor A. Tyulkin, secretary of the Russian Communist Workers Party, told the anti-Yeltsin rally, predicting his party’s ouster of Yeltsin and its takeover of the government.

“In every region and area of Russia, organizations of the Russian Communist Workers Party have been set up,” Tyulkin said. “Soon we will reach such a degree of organization that we will be able to get together at short notice without help of radio or television. And then we shall speak to the (armed forces) . . . and we shall tell them to carry out the change.”

Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, a leading conservative politician, who had run for the Russian presidency in June, commented in an interview during the rally: “This is the beginning of a new historic stage--now masses of people are siding with patriotic forces. Do you hear the thundering voice of the crowd? This voice will continue to grow and grow.”

Sergei Loiko, a researcher in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, also reported for this article.