Leningrad Reformers Won--Now the Struggle Begins

LENINGRAD, Soviet Union —  Something revolutionary happened this spring in the city where, 73 years ago, a band of determined Russian Communists led by V. I. Lenin seized power.

They finally lost it.

The comrades’ undoing was anger at barren store shelves, perks for the powerful and the shoddy state of many architectural glories in the former capital of the czars.

In the freest municipal elections ever, party apparatchiks who held sway for decades were trounced by a coalition of democrats, radicals, ecologists, reform Communists and overt anti-Communists.

For many who live in this cradle of the Russian Revolution, it was another day in local history that seemed fated to shake the world.

“Our victory can be compared to the February Revolution of 1917 (which forced Czar Nicholas II to abdicate),” fledgling Deputy Alexei G. Lushnikov said with conviction. “Our margin is so one-sided, the question of fighting the conservatives isn’t even posed now.”

Partisans of the Democratic Elections 90 coalition took more than 60% of the seats on the 400-member city council, or Lensoviet. And immediately after convening, the deputies distanced themselves from their predecessors by observing a minute of silence for all who have died for democracy and human rights.

“Things in Leningrad have finally come full circle: To call someone a Bolshevik in this chamber is now an insult,” observed local journalist Oleg Nesterov, who watched the inaugural proceedings from the gallery. One Soviet newspaper marveled at the “strange picture” of “lots of bearded men in jeans and pullovers” occupying the plushly upholstered seats of power.

If this were a perestroika- era remake of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” there would be no doubt about the ultimate triumph of the righteous in politics. But what has happened in this city of 4.4 million since the first Lensoviet session April 3 shows that winning power is not the same as wielding it--and it bodes poorly for progressives in other Soviet cities, including Moscow, who were also victorious in last month’s local elections.

Leningrad’s vast Communist Party machine, though stunned at the polls, may still be the most potent force in urban life.

But a greater shock to the victors is this: Within a week of the Lensoviet’s inaugural meeting, the anti-Establishment coalition, which had united 40 organizations from the pro-democracy Leningrad People’s Front to veterans of the World War II Nazi blockade, collapsed.

Among the causes of its demise were rival ideologies, jockeying for power and some deputies’ growing fears that others were seeking to impose their will by maneuvering to be elected the chamber’s vozhd, a Russian word for “leader” that was applied to Stalin and Lenin and thus has chilling associations for many.

“The democratic movement is disintegrating because of contradictions between its leaders,” progressive Deputy Pavel F. Kopeikin said. “But the problem is that people like me who are against the vozhd principle don’t have a vozhd of their own.”

The man Kopeikin says would be vozhd is economist Pyotr S. Filipov, 44, whose consuming desire to become Leningrad’s new mayor has done a lot to sunder the electoral alliance he helped forge. His nemesis turned out to be a co-founder of the Leningrad People’s Front, chain-smoking geologist Marina Y. Salye.

“The democrats have divided into those like Filipov who are willing to compromise with the existing apparat and even become its members, and those like Marina who think a radical overhaul of the system is indispensable and no compromise with the old order possible,” said Vitaly V. Skoibeda of the avowedly anti-Communist Democratic Union opposition party.

In short, Filipov, a pro-reform member of the Communist Party, wants to get on with the business of governing, even using old-time party hacks if they can get the job done. Salye, more radical, wants to reinvent the entire structure of municipal government.

Five days into the session, as the bearded Filipov was demanding in his brassy voice that the Lensoviet proceed by passing rules of order before tackling other business, Salye was planning a demonstration to protest the Kremlin’s treatment of Lithuania and an attack by Soviet soldiers that killed 20 Georgian demonstrators a year ago.

“If we don’t succeed with this rally, we won’t succeed with anything,” the stocky, gray-haired mineralogy expert told a circle of followers gathered outside the Lensoviet’s chamber.

His voice dripping with scorn, Filipov said later: “I understand why somebody would go to a rally to become a deputy of the Lensoviet. But I can’t understand why anybody would become a deputy to go to a rally.”

The progressives’ schism has meant virtual paralysis in government. A week after the minute of silence, work on forming the Lensoviet’s standing committees was still bogged down. A new mayor hadn’t been elected. The rally, however, drew an estimated 30,000 people.

How Communist Party leaders intend to deal with the new city fathers is a matter of concern to many. At Smolny, a former school for girls from the aristocracy that Lenin made his command post during the Russian Revolution, about 1,000 full-time party functionaries staff a political machine that would put Boss Tweed’s to shame, the voters’ verdict notwithstanding.

“I’m certain the party machine will sabotage or torpedo the decisions of the Lensoviet,” declared novice Deputy Lushnikov, 23.

“There are already two centers of powers--the party, which has it de facto, and the Lensoviet, which has it de jure. There must be a transfer. I’m sure it won’t be friendly.”

For decades, the party has kept a chokehold on city life here, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, through the practice of nomenklatura, which allowed apparatchiks at Smolny to choose the holders of top jobs in government and industry.

That meant a huge patronage network in the Soviet Union’s second-largest city, where more than 900,000 people, from the grandmothers who sweep courtyards to schoolteachers, are employed by the “urban economic system.”

How loyal the products of such ideological patronage will be to the principle of democratic government remains to be seen. City party boss Boris V. Gidaspov has declared his willingness to hand the reins of economic power over to the Lensoviet and said all agencies in his 500,000-member party organization were ready to offer “help and support.”

But the newspaper in which he made the offer, Leningradskaya Pravda, was suddenly claimed as exclusive party property this month after decades of co-publication with the Lensoviet and a regional governing council. To many Lensoviet deputies, it seemed like the first salvo in their war with Smolny.

“The party will interfere to sow havoc in our work, so we are running from one fire to another and can’t get anything accomplished,” Skoibeda, 28, predicted. “The structures of democratic city government are only being invented here, but the Communist Party has existed for decades.”

However, in its first battle of wills with the powers that be, the new Lensoviet emerged victorious--at least for now. The issue was who runs the city’s television station, famed nationwide for its pioneering outspokenness but still a cog in the Gostelradio state broadcasting system controlled by Moscow.

Deputies voted to give live TV time to controversial government prosecutor Nikolai V. Ivanov, who electrified the country with charges of corruption in high places, including the Politburo, and who has since been fired and kicked out of the Communist Party. Ivanov, a member of the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies, is being probed by that body and wanted to defend himself against charges of official misconduct.

Faced with the Lensoviet’s demand, the chief of Leningrad’s state-owned broadcasting committee, Boris M. Petrov, asked for advice from Gostelradio headquarters in Moscow. He received back a telegram saying Ivanov’s appearance on television would be unacceptable and refused him access.

The Lensoviet deputies reacted with anger. “Either we continue to function as a body of government power, or we surrender before the officials who are trying to hamper our work,” Sergei Dekterev, television journalist and newly elected deputy, declared.

Petrov was hauled before the council to justify his actions. He argued that his committee’s legal status made him subservient to Moscow as well as to the Lensoviet, but he was jeered by the deputies. By a 216-4 vote, with 24 abstentions, they voted to fire Petrov, put his deputy in charge and compel Leningrad TV to put Ivanov on the air.

Bearing a text of their resolution, 15 deputies accompanied Ivanov to the TV studios, where shortly before midnight he was brought before a camera and allowed to show videotapes of his investigations. Clearly, he hoped these would refute charges that he had threatened witnesses and jailed them without due cause.

It was a heady moment for the new Lensoviet. Some deputies are now talking about laws to abolish privileges like special food parcels and limousines for party officials. Others want to declare Leningrad a “free city” with the right to direct ties with foreign countries.

Some even propose stripping Lenin’s name from their city on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, since they equate the importance of their peaceful triumph with other, bloodier political upheavals here--the abortive 1905 workers’ uprising, the February Revolution in 1917 that ended czarist rule and the October Revolution that same year that brought Lenin’s Bolsheviks to power in Russia.

“Why should this city, which throughout history has experienced four revolutions, now bear the name of the author of just one of them?” Lushnikov asked. “Moscow has never changed its name, not to Stalingrad or Brezhnevgrad, and I don’t think it will become Gorbachevgrad. So why our city?”