May Day March Takes Violent Turn in Moscow

In Russia’s worst political violence since the 1991 attempted coup, Communists marching in a May Day demonstration clashed Saturday with Moscow police in a prolonged melee of flying bricks and swinging truncheons that left more than 140 injured.

“Fascists!” yelled several dozen young men from the protesters’ ranks as they charged the barricades set up by police to keep them from straying from their officially approved route. “Yeltsin is a Judas!”

White-helmeted riot police, protected by shields and backed by water cannons, defended their line of trucks and buses with a vengeance, beating back the column of several thousand demonstrators--many of them pensioners and women--until, after more than an hour, the crowd dispersed.

The clash, coming less than a week after President Boris N. Yeltsin won a resounding vote of support in a nationwide referendum, heralded a new offensive by Communist and nationalist opposition leaders who refuse to acknowledge his victory.

“One thing is clear: The confrontation between the government and opposition forces has reached its peak,” Russian Television’s nightly news warned.

“These wild revolutionaries could actually repeat the 1992 Los Angeles riots in Moscow,” said anchorman Mikhail Ponomarev.

As evening fell Saturday, remnants of the crowd of protesters gathered at the Russian Parliament building, setting up a makeshift barricade of trucks and scrap metal and calling for an emergency session of the legislature and Yeltsin’s resignation.

One deputy, Gennady Sayenko, promised a chance for revenge on May 9, when Russians traditionally celebrate victory in World War II with parades and marches.

“We have to answer force with force,” Sayenko declared through a megaphone.

Yeltsin’s spokesman, Vyacheslav Kostikov, said that the Russian president is “deeply concerned and indignant about the actions of these political provocateurs” and had given orders for an investigation.

Kostikov accused the protesters of purposely “creating mass unrest,” but Yeltsin and the Moscow leadership that supports him also seemed to share in some of the blame for ordering police to stand tough against the surging crowd of demonstrators.

Past opposition protests have repeatedly marched along unsanctioned routes, but authorities had always let them pass rather than provoke violence.

An official statement from the Parliament blamed Yeltsin for the bloodshed, saying that his referendum had deepened the schism in Russian society and hinting that he purposely provoked the clash to find an excuse to clamp down on his opposition.

Leonid Mamushkin, a cane-toting veteran of World War II who got caught in the fighting, also blamed Yeltsin.

“We Soviet people are used to going to a demonstration on May Day. So what? What would have been so terrible if they let us through?” he asked. “Why beat people? They talk about rights and freedom. We have nothing, no freedom. Why beat people?”

On the pavement in front of Mamushkin’s apartment building on Leninsky Prospekt lay the debris of a pitched battle: hundreds of bricks and granite blocks, bloodstains, and a small circle of rocks and steel bars inscribed with white chalk: “On this spot on May 1, a participant in a peaceful demonstration was killed.”

Actually, no reports of deaths were confirmed, but doctors and health officials said about 70 protesters were hospitalized, others were treated on the spot and at least 70 police officers were injured. The worst reported injuries involved a policeman and a protester who were crushed by vehicles maneuvering in the chaos of the fight. The policeman was in critical condition Saturday night.

During the 1991 coup attempt, three young men were killed in a clash with an armored personnel carrier. They had been trying to defend the White House, which was then Yeltsin’s stronghold, from a feared attack by soldiers under orders from the coup organizers.

Saturday’s May Day celebrations, continuing a favorite Soviet ritual that had always been crowned by a mass march through Red Square, began auspiciously in Moscow with a perfect blue sky and a holiday calm pervading the city.

The march through Red Square was banned this year, but Communist and nationalist protesters had permission to gather on a central city square and proceed to a spot across from Gorky Park.

Instead, the crowd, estimated at about 7,000 and including several of the leaders of the 1991 coup attempt, decided to march up Leninsky Prospekt toward Moscow University. They had walked nearly a mile, reaching the square named for cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, when they found their way blocked by lines of police standing before barricades of trucks and buses.

Instead of turning back, a phalanx of young men at the head of the crowd surged forward, trying to slip over and around the vehicles and push back the police. The police fought back, and what began as a pushing match turned quickly into a bloody battle.

“It was just like war,” said security guard Igor Baturin, who watched the whole thing from behind the plate glass windows--later shattered--of a new delicatessen. “We were on the front line.”

Protesters set two trucks aflame, swung at police with the flagstaffs of their red banners and lobbed hundreds of bricks and paving stones in a frightening hail of projectiles. A truck, emblazoned with the slogan “The country will be saved by the dictatorship of the working class,” veered wildly through the chaos carrying flag-waving protesters.

Police turned their water cannons on demonstrators climbing over the bus barricade, sweeping several of them to the ground. Mounted police pitched in to help drive away protesters. Special anti-riot forces used their rubber truncheons to beat back the surging crowd and often pursued fleeing protesters for a few extra blows.

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov told Commonwealth Television that for the first time, the opposition protesters had used “brigades, fighting brigades, young men who were there to force a breakthrough using weapons.”

Moscow’s police chief showed viewers sharpened metal bars, weighted chains and a wrench that he said demonstrators must have brought from home in preparation for a fight.

About 20 protesters were arrested, police said, and the city’s prosecutor launched the procedures to bring criminal charges against the organizers of the clash. However, Yeltsin’s main political opponents, those most responsible for leading the charge, are lawmakers and immune to arrest.

Ilya Konstantinov, a leader of the rabidly anti-Yeltsin National Salvation Front, claimed that it was the government, not the opposition, that was interested in provoking the clash “in order to paralyze all resistance.”

“From today, real resistance has begun,” he said.

Andrei Ostroukh, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this report.