Soviet Union Here a Nay, There a Yea

By John Kohan/Moscow

A drawn-out murmur echoed in the vaulted chamber of the Grand Kremlin Palace. From his front-row seat on the dais, President Mikhail Gorbachev enjoyed an unobstructed view of the extraordinary scene, but many of the 1,376 deputies at last week's session of the Supreme Soviet were forced to turn their heads to see what was going on -- not on the podium but in their midst. A motion to approve major changes in the constitution had just been put to a vote, but the show of hands was not unanimous. "Could I ask for a count of those voting against?" asked acting parliamentary speaker Avgust Voss, somewhat disconcerted, as aides hurried along the aisles.

The tally -- 1,344 ayes, five nays and 27 abstentions -- might have added up to a lopsided victory elsewhere, but the flicker of opposition to a key Kremlin program was a historic event in the Soviet parliament, long considered no more than a rubber stamp. Had the leadership not sought a compromise last week between the central government and a handful of republics over proposed electoral changes, the count of naysayers might have been even higher.

When Gorbachev, at last June's party conference, unveiled his plan to replace the existing parliament with a two-tier legislative system, he hailed it as a milestone on the way to "democratization." The Kremlin obviously underestimated just how democratic the response would be once the suggested legislation was presented for "public discussion" in October. More than 300,000 comments and suggestions flooded in; as a result, 58 out of 117 proposed clauses in the package of constitutional amendments and election laws were modified. Leading the legal revolt was the Baltic republic of Estonia, where the push for political reform has gone the furthest. Estonians feared that the new system would strengthen the authority of the central government and hamper efforts to achieve greater regional autonomy. In an unprecedented challenge to Moscow, the Estonian parliament rejected the constitutional amendments last month and passed a declaration of "national sovereignty." Ethnic Russians, he said, wanted to know "how this could happen to our brothers in Estonia."

But Gorbachev apparently had second thoughts about carrying the campaign against the Estonians any further. In his 70-minute opening address, he dropped a prepared passage that would have heaped more criticism on the Baltic republic. Instead, he acknowledged that some provisions of the draft laws had been "formulated imprecisely" and proposed the establishment of a commission to "scrutinize point after point" the separation of powers between the federal government and the republics.

The change of signal came too late to prevent most of the session's 37 speakers from sniping at the Baltic state. While Estonian President Arnold Ruutel watched impassively from the dais, his republic was accused of "creating a hotbed of tensions." In his own presentation, Ruutel repeated demands that Estonians be allowed to decide what form of parliament they wanted. There should be no place in the new laws, said Ruutel, for "formalistic texts that do not take into account the specific differences and demands" of each region.

If much of the oratory sagged under cliches and expectable praise for Gorbachev's policies, glasnost was nonetheless stirring. One party official from Turkmenistan questioned why clothes should be in short supply in his cotton-rich republic, while a deputy from the Autonomous Republic of Bashkir demanded compensation from Moscow for the destruction of arable land ruined by oil exploration. Another parliamentarian, from the industrialized Zaporozhe region of the Ukraine, complained of air pollution so heavy "that our lungs have taken in more poisonous filth than all the air filters put together."

Armenian President Grant Voskanyan exchanged barbs with his Azerbaijani counterpart, Suleiman Tatliyev, over Nagorno-Karabakh, the predominantly Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan that Armenia wants to put under its control. Tatliyev accused Armenian officials of "sabotaging" official decisions and appealed to Moscow for "protection." Voskanyan in turn charged that Azerbaijani leaders had encouraged the latest wave of ethnic violence in the region, which has so far claimed the lives of 28 people, drawn tens of thousands into the streets of the republican capitals of Yerevan and Baku in protests, and triggered the deployment of troops and tanks.

At the end of the session, Arkadi Volsky, the leader of an investigatory commission on Nagorno-Karabakh, chastised both sides for failing to seek a compromise. Blaming corrupt "clans" in Armenia and Azerbaijan for using the dispute to divert attention from their criminal activities, Volsky warned that "when laws are violated and blood is spilled the state cannot just stand by."

The three-day session had, in Gorbachev's words, inspired a discussion "the likes of which has not been seen in the national legislature for a long time." With the first troubled phase of political reform behind him, the President reaffirmed his determination to move into the second stage and end "mutual suspicion" between Moscow and the ethnic republics. "We will probably get more bruises," he said in his closing remarks. "We are learning great lessons in the school of democracy, and it is necessary that everyone become a good pupil." Even, it seemed, those at the head of the class.