The Komissarov Affair: Just Who Is Moscow’s Police Chief, Anyway? : Soviet Union: The City Council’s choice is not the Communist Party’s choice. And therein lies the dilemma.

Here, for a change, is a police chief imbroglio from the other side of the globe: The Komissarov Affair lacks damning videotape, it’s true. But it offers its own special Soviet mix of dueling decrees, a beefy hero caught between the old and the new, a perilous hunger strike and a cast of tens of thousands of confused cops.

Vyacheslav S. Komissarov, 53, a policeman’s policeman who worked his way up from lowly Volgograd patrolman to the rank of general in the Interior Ministry, is the Moscow City Council’s choice to lead the capital’s 118,000 men in blue.

As radical council members tell it, he won their backing in a simple test of his political colors. When asked last fall whether he thought the Communist Party was the best-organized Mafia structure in the country, Komissarov, unlike the five candidates who preceded him, said yes.

Then his appointment went for routine approval to the national Interior Ministry leadership, still dominated by Communist Party loyalists under hard-line minister Boris K. Pugo. They said no to Komissarov.

Stalemate.

Since January, Komissarov’s fate and his status have been unclear.

Is he police chief or isn’t he?

“I’m caught between the sky and the earth,” Komissarov, whose bull-like build and head-on approach hint at his old days of boxing and wrestling, said in his temporary office at the Russian Federation Interior Ministry. “I sit here and rely on common sense. Maybe common sense will reign someday in our tattered empire.”

Komissarov has become a walking symbol of the “war of laws” paralyzing much of the Soviet Union’s government, pitting local, republic and national authorities against each other in a seemingly insoluble legal tangle.

In a rough comparison, it is as if Los Angeles--during the current controversy over the videotaped beating of motorist Rodney King--had appointed a new police chief to replace Daryl F. Gates, but President Bush had somehow stepped in and vetoed the appointment. Then California authorities had offered the would-be chief temporary refuge in their ranks until the matter was cleared up.

Komissarov’s case also reflects the difficulties that reformers encounter as they try to crack the longstanding nomenklatura system, under which all key appointments in government and the military are controlled by the Communist Party.

“We must get democrats into power in key positions, and one of them is the Moscow police,” Moscow council deputy Valery Ikishcheli said. “That’s why there’s been such a hullabaloo around Komissarov.”

And at the heart of the whole business is the battle over Moscow, over whether city officials, the national government or the Russian republic control those critical acres around the Kremlin, along with the country’s largest city and its 9 million residents.

Last month, 20 despairing Moscow council deputies declared that they would refuse to eat until Komissarov took his rightful place as police chief.

“We had no other forms of protest left,” deputy Victor Kuzin told a news conference at City Hospital No. 68, where six deputies were recuperating. “We’re in power, but we can’t make our power work. That means we’re not in power.”

They were still fasting on March 26, when President Mikhail S. Gorbachev issued a decree placing the Moscow police directly under the control of his national Interior Ministry. The decree, issued two days before a planned mass rally outside the Kremlin, showed just how determined the Soviet leadership was to keep its hold on the capital’s law enforcement.

But the scene that best demonstrated that determination came on April 8, when Komissarov arrived at 38 Petrovka St.--Moscow police headquarters--to be formally presented to the staff. The day before, he had gained Russian Federation approval for his appointment, which legal experts said was enough to take office.

The police at the entry refused “in a crude, sharp way” even to let him and the Moscow deputies accompanying him into the building.

“If I had reacted, a conflict could have arisen. I didn’t give in to this provocation,” Komissarov said. “I don’t know why they didn’t let me into the office. Were they afraid I’d sit in the chair and chain myself to it? It’s funny, but it’s sad.”

What is it about Komissarov that so threatens the powers-that-be that they blocked not only his appointment but even his physical entry into police headquarters?

“Probably my political views,” Komissarov said with a grin at the understatement. A self-described lover of “order and discipline,” he does not spout his anti-communism--he is, in fact, still a party member; he simply lays out his logical analysis of why the party has lost its right to lead the country by leading it into “a dead end.”

“All Communists are guilty for what happened,” he said, “although the degrees of guilt are different.”

When he sees party functionaries defending themselves with force or political maneuvers, Komissarov added, “It evokes a feeling of protest in me. Why, because of you or me--and I’m a party member, too--should people suffer? Better for us to suffer, the 16 million party members, in order for the other 300 million to live better. This egotism, this cynicism, they kill me.”

Komissarov estimated that two-thirds of ranking police officers similarly oppose the party leadership, despite their image as loyal party soldiers.

In practical terms, Komissarov says openly that police should not be forced to choose sides in political conflicts, but that if they must choose, they should serve the republic or city on whose territory they live rather than the Kremlin. He also backs removing all Communist Party organizations from the police establishment.

As for controlling protests, “I’m for nonviolent methods,” he said. “I have declared that Moscow police will never shoot at an unarmed crowd.”

The Moscow City Council, in its latest Komissarov gambit, has voted to get around the Gorbachev decree by simply creating a whole new police, a municipal force totally under the council’s control and funded from the city and Russian republic budget. Needless to say, Komissarov would be its chief. The fasting deputies declared themselves satisfied by that decision the other day and called a halt to their hunger strike after three or so weeks on an all-liquid diet. But Komissarov said he thought that creating a municipal police force, although a good idea, would take years to do properly.

Meanwhile, the capital’s police do not know exactly who their boss is--Komissarov or Gen. Ivan F. Shilov, the Kremlin’s man.

Patrolmen tend to sympathize more with Komissarov, police say, and expect him to eventually become their leader.

“The majority of police are tired of feeling that they must act against the people,” Moscow council member Vladimir Daineko said. “The people see them not as defenders but as a means of repression.”

Komissarov said that one of his first priorities when “all this is put in its place” will be to concentrate on cleaning up Moscow’s rampant organized crime under a program that was one of the main sources of his appeal to the Moscow council. That means attacking the Communist Party functionaries who cooperate with Mafiosi, Moscow council deputy Ikishcheli said, and Komissarov, clean and detached from the party, is the man for that job.

The national Interior Ministry has tempted Komissarov with other choice positions in an attempt to defuse the conflict, but “I’ll carry my cross to the end,” he said, sending “greetings and sympathy” to Los Angeles Chief Gates.

“I know what it’s like to be persecuted and unrecognized by the authorities,” Komissarov added. “The main thing is to feel that you’re right.”