Soviets Bar Communist Party Activities; Republics Press Search for a New Order
Coup Role Inquiry
Ukrainian-Russian Pact Seeks Ways to Insure Economic Survival
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
Special to THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Moscow, Aug. 29 -- After three hours of anguished debate, the Soviet Parliament voted today to suspend all activities of the Communist Party pending an investigation of its role in the coup. It was an action that confirmed the demise of the old regime even as the search quickened for new forms of association and order.
The fate of the party was already sealed before Parliament's vote. Individual republics had closed its offices and seized its vast properties and funds and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had quit as its General Secretary and had called on the leadership to step down.
But Parliament was the only national institution with the formal powers to act against the entire organization, and its decision served to confirm the indictment already passed by the people.
Republics Take Action
While Parliament settled scores with the past, newly unfettered leaders of the republics searched for interim arrangements to prevent chaotic disintegration.
A Russian-Ukrainian agreement reached in Kiev in the early morning after hurriedly arranged negotiations declared it imperative to prevent the 'uncontrolled disintegration' of the Soviet Union and to insure its economic survival and security.
The communique seemed to establish a model for interim agreements among the republics to safeguard the fundamental ties forged over decades as the tight central controls and Communist-dominated institutions of rule crumbled in the aftermath of the failed coup. [The text of the Russian-Ukrainian statement and excerpts from the Soviet Parliament's debate are on pages A11 and A12.]
Talks With Kazakh Chief
From the negotiations in Kiev, the Russian delegation, led by Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi, flew to Kazakhstan for similar talks with President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a republic leader who has demonstrated considerable authority in Central Asian and national councils.
The day's developments reflected multiple efforts to fill the political void, to assert local authority and to prevent chaos. If the actions often conflicted and even sometimes put the republics at odds, the underlying search 10 days after the coup attempt still seemed to be for an orderly transition to a new and yet undefined association of self-governed states.
In Parliament, Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak of Leningrad, who has emerged as a leading advocate of maintaining some form of union and who led a parliamentary delegation that monitored the talks in Kiev, declared that 'the former union has ceased to exist, and there is no return to it.'
And over the Russian radio, Boris N. Yeltsin, the President of the Russian federated republic, whose heroism during the coup attempt and assertion of Russian power in its aftermath have kept him in the eye of the storm, declared that the center must hold.
'We are maintaining constant contact with President Gorbachev and republican leaders and we are coordinating our actions,' he declared in a statement evidently intended to soothe secessionist passions. 'I want to state firmly that the collapse of the center is not tantamount to a collapse of the country, let alone Russia.
'I stress, the union center must exist, but there must be a sharp cut in the number of its staff and in the cost of maintaining it.'
The center itself worked to regroup. Parliament approved Mr. Gorbachev's proposal to include leaders of nine republics in an expanded Security Council and was expected to approve his nomination of several prominent reformers.
Mr. Gorbachev said the new council would serve as a transitional authority during the reorganization of the union. 'Now, however, life demands action,' he said.
Interim Government Meets
The interim government under Ivan S. Silayev also met today and discussed urgent measures to stabilize the economy and maintain foreign trade and food supplies.
The suspension of the Communist Party by Parliament followed a wrenching debate over what constituted responsibility for the coup. That debate has weaved through the televised proceedings of the legislature since it convened Monday.
Parliament itself has been accused by Mr. Yeltsin and others of complicity through silence, and its debates have been filled with attempts to justify and explain the behavior of various deputies and officials.
The 535-member Parliament is expected to conclude by dissolving itself and clearing the way for the full 2,500-member Congress of Peoples' Deputies to name a new legislature when it convenes Sept. 2. The Congress is constitutionally the highest authority in the Soviet Union.
Debate on Party's Fate
The sharpest debates over the fate of the party focused on an article in the draft resolution that called on the Supreme Court to decide whether to close down the party altogether.
Behind it was the question of whether the entire party as an institution was an integral part of the old system that tried to thwart change through the coup attempt and so must be swept away, or, as Mr. Gorbachev and other deputies argued, that at its base it was a reformable organization of well-meaning 'workers and peasants.'
Born of the utopian Marxism of the last century, the Bolshevik party formed by Lenin was never meant for a democratic role in a multi-party system. Rather, it was meant to be the vanguard of the working class in the struggle against 'class oppressors' and to be the chosen elite in the shaping of a new order.
It evolved under Stalin and his successors into a vast and privileged network of institutions that controlled all facets of Soviet life and numbered 19 million members. Even with its powers trimmed by Mr. Gorbachev's perestroika, the party continued to exert a powerful brake on any efforts to change the system, and Mr. Gorbachev himself continued to merge the powers of the presidency and party leadership until after the coup, when he finally resigned as General Secretary.
'We are talking about the liquidation, not of a party, because the Communist Party has long ceased to be a party, but about a super-state structure, parallel to the structures of power which it illegally usurped,' one deputy argued.
Jobs of Thousands Affected
But others pleaded against the dismantling of a structure that still provided employment for thousands and held the loyalty of millions.
'Think of the 150,000 people from the party apparatus who are going to lose their jobs,' another deputy said. 'They are our voters, they will come to us tomorrow and will ask, what are you doing there?'
In the argument that finally tilted the debate, Roy A. Medvedev, the historian and former dissident who returned under Mr. Gorbachev to a prominent position in the Communist Party, declared that liquidating the party would only repeat its own errors. 'We cannot liquidate the Communist Party because in people's minds the word liquidation is associated with such facts as liquidation of the Cossacks, kulaks,' he said. 'It meant either arrest or murder or deportation.'
In the end, Parliament voted against the article, leaving open the possibility that the party could return in some social-democratic form. But it adopted the balance of the resolution suspending the activities of the party throughout the territory of the Soviet Union, instructing the Interior Ministry to take custody of the party's property and archives and ordering the state prosecutor to open an investigation into its role in the coup.
Vote on Party Is 283 to 29
Even if not threatened with liquidation, the party of Lenin had been relegated to the dustbin of history. The vote was 283 to 29, with 52 abstentions -- the highest number of 'nays' and abstentions so far in the session.
On the economic front, it was a measure of the general recognition in all 15 republics that they faced uniformly serious economic trials in the months to come that representatives of all 15 attended the first organizational meeting of the Committee for the Management of the National Economy, the acting government formed under Mr. Silayev, the Russian Premier.
According to the Interfax news agency, the meeting was told that the climatic conditions in the country were the worst in a decade and that only 25 million tons of grain of the 85 million ordered had been delivered to the state, evidently because collective farms were hoarding in anticipation of higher prices. The committee also heard that supplies of coal and oil were at 80 percent of the norm as the cold months approached.
Plans for the Military
Attention also focused on the military. Both Mr. Yeltsin and the new Defense Minister, Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, declared that the military must remain centrally controlled regardless of the form the country takes.
'Whatever the destiny of the union -- and most likely, in my view, it will be preserved, maybe not in the same form as now, but perhaps along some kind of socio-economic lines -- I just cannot imagine our army being composed of several armies located on the territories of sovereign republics,' Marshal Shaposhnikov said.
He also said there was and is no cause for concern about the Soviet Union's vast nuclear arsenal. 'Those who now have their finger on the nuclear button are those who are supposed to,' he said.
Among the day's other major developments, the Supreme Soviet voted to lift parliamentary immunity from its former Speaker, Anatoly I. Lukyanov, a longtime friend of Mr. Gorbachev and who had repeatedly denied accusations that he supported the coup at least by failing to condemn it in time and to summon Parliament. The move cleared the way for Mr. Lukyanov to be interrogated and possibly charged, and Tass reported that soon after, his offices were searched.
Prosecutor General Resigns
The official who made the motion against Mr. Lukyanov, Prosecutor General Nikolai Turbin, then announced his own resignation. Mr. Turbin was in China during the coup, but he accepted responsibility for the inaction of his office.
For many, the most promising development of the day was the joint Russian-Ukrainian communique, which lifted some of the tensions raised by the Ukraine's declaration of independence on Saturday and Mr. Yeltsin's subsequent warning that borders between the republics would have to be 'reviewed.'
The accord may serve as a prototype for cooperation among the republics on key economic and military issues during the search for a new relationship.
The program called for the setting up of temporary structures involving all 15 republics to prepare an economic agreement, to form a collective security system and to take no unilateral actions on military-strategic issues, to avoid measures which would create frictions among republics, to recognize existing borders among republics, to conduct a coordinated policy of radical economic reform and to confirm their adherence to the Soviet Union's international obligations.
The new search for cooperation was also evident in Moscow as Mr. Yeltsin, who had issued decrees encroaching on central powers, drew back. He withdrew decrees that had imposed Russian controls over Soviet foreign transactions, including those in foreign exchange and precious metals, after foreign bankers expressed concerns.
Among the crucial questions for the immediate future is whether Western governments will be prepared to come to Moscow's aid this winter. That question is likely to be at the heart of his meetings with Soviet and republic leaders when Prime Minister John Major of Britain arrives Sunday. He will be the first major Western leader to visit Moscow since the failed coup.
Possibly the most tangible sign of Mr. Yeltsin's new moderation was the announcement that Pravda, the mouthpiece of the party, would reappear as an 'independent social-political newspaper of civic consensus.' |
