Responding to the most serious challenge to Communist Party control in modern history, tens of thousands of people packed a huge square near the Kremlin Sunday, demanding political freedom and an end to the party`s monopoly on government.
They carried hundreds of homemade signs and banners calling for a repeal of Article 6 of the constitution, the legal basis for the party`s political monopoly; chastising the KGB secret police and the right-wing Pamyat organization; demanding freedom for the Baltic states; and warning the public to stay alert in the struggle for change.
The demonstration came on the eve of a crucial meeting of the party`s policy-making Central Committee, which is expected to hear General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev call for reforms that would radically change the party, ending its exclusive control of government and much of Soviet life.
In Washington, Nikolai Shishlin, a senior Central Committee spokesman, said he expects multiparty politics will emerge soon in the Soviet Union. He also predicted that Gorbachev`s position would be further strengthened during the party`s plenum Monday and Tuesday.
Asked on an ABC-TV news show whether he thought there would be a multiparty system soon, Shishlin replied, ”Maybe not now, but I can say that the political process is going in this direction, and I think we shall have a multiparty system.”
He said there would be ”reforms in the party ranks” because the party had allowed perestroika (political and economic restructuring) to lapse.
Another government spokesman, Gennady Gerasimov, reminded reporters that the party can deal only with party matters. Allowing new parties or abolishing the leading role of the Communist Party would require approval of parliament, which is already writing a new constitution.
Sunday`s rally followed long marches that carried the demonstrators from gathering areas past the new McDonald`s, the Christian Dior shop and the Levi`s jeans ads, all symbols of the rapid pace of economic change in Soviet society.
Outside the front door of the stately old National Hotel, which offers a view of the Kremlin and museums on the edge of Red Square, two protesters carried a graphic banner that said, ”KGB + Pamyat
death,” with a skull at the end of the formula and barbed wire for the equal sign.
A long schedule of speakers, including Moscow maverick Boris Yeltsin, drew applause and cheers from the crowd as they called for an acceleration of reforms.
”It is necessary to restructure the Communist Party. There must not be a party monopoly on power,” Yeltsin, once a member of the Politburo, told the cheering crowd.
The sentiments of the crowd appeared to be in harmony with Gorbachev`s political and economic reforms. Some of the marchers carried signs calling for the retirement of Yegor Ligachev, the Politburo`s leading conservative.
While Gorbachev`s personal popularity has dropped over the past few months, according to some surveys, support for his reforms, mirrored in the signs carried by the crowd, remains high. There are also no Soviet politicians who can draw anywhere near the favorability rating Gorbachev collects in various Soviet public opinion polls.
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It was all but impossible to determine how many people participated in the rally. Although one militia lieutenant said it was in the hundreds of thousands, and the Reuters news service estimated it at 200,000, those estimates seemed high.
There was no doubt, though, that it was one of the largest freely assembled groups of Soviet citizens in modern times, surpassing even the huge crowd that gathered to pay its respects to Andrei Sakharov at his funeral last year.
It was so big that the organizers left their speakers` platform and public-address system sitting in front of Mossoviet, the local government headquarters intended as the rally site, and led everyone down to the bigger intersection in front of the Red Square entrance.
There were hundreds of gray-uniformed militia throughout the crowd, and a convoy of military trucks carrying reserves sat on a side street. The police made no attempt to interfere with the peaceful rally.
The rally was sponsored by a host of organizations described by Radio Moscow`s Interfax newsletter as ”Moscow`s democratic forces.” The primary reason for the rally was to prepare voters for the March 4 election to the parliament of the Russian Federation, the biggest and most important regional parliament in the country.
But the sponsors also told participants that Monday`s plenum of the Central Committee ”will be the last chance to regain the people`s trust and start round-table negotiations with democratic forces with a view to finding a practicable way out of the current crisis.”
Communism has been in a free fall in Eastern Europe for more than a year, since Gorbachev made it clear the Soviet Union would not interfere in the affairs of its former satellite states. In Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Romania and Czechoslovakia, party power has collapsed in the face of mass demands for reform and democracy.
But Gorbachev`s perestroika and glasnost (openness) policies, the triggers of the Eastern European economic and political reforms, have met resistance at home. They have also sparked outbreaks of nationalism and demands for succession in the Baltics and a bitter war between Azeri militants and Armenians in Azerbaijan.
Because of the turmoil and resistance, the Soviet leader has been involved in a delicate domestic political dance, advocating radical reforms on the one hand but counseling patience and restraint on the other.
Monday`s session is likely to be the most important Central Committee meeting in modern times and may ultimately prove the most important in the life of the party, which has held unchallenged control over the Soviet Union since the end the civil war in the early 1920s.
Gorbachev has been cautious in party matters, arguing at one point that the party was the only structure strong enough to hold the Soviet Union`s 15 republics in line. But the usually reliable Interfax said the Central Committee would be discussing an entirely new platform of ”humane democratic socialism.”
”The draft platform calls for a radical restructuring of the party, which will fight for its leading role, but assume no state or government power, nor lay any claim to having its role set down in the constitution,”
the newsletter said.
In addition, Gorbachev will propose slashing 49 more members from the Central Committee, which was cut last year from 303 to 249 members.
He will also propose creating a new party structure, with a chairman and two deputies and a political executive committee with representatives from each republic.
Sunday`s huge rally ended with a call from radical historian Yuri Afanasyev for more rallies across the Soviet Union over the next three weeks: ”I end with a call: Hail the powerful nonviolent 1990 all-union revolution.”
The crowd observed a moment of silence for the hundreds of victims of ethnic clashes.