Election, Nationalism Stir Strife in Soviet Republics

MOSCOW —  With ethnic conflict gnawing at its southern fringes and exultant celebrations of freedom in the north, the Soviet Union on Sunday clearly showed the cracks in what was once a Communist monolith.

Tens of thousands boycotted an election for president in the predominantly Muslim republic of Azerbaijan in the Caucasus Mountains, protesting the one-candidate ballot as “undemocratic.”

About 50,000 angry opposition supporters converged on Freedom Square in that southern republic’s capital of Baku to allege fraud by incumbent President Ayaz Mutalibov, a former Communist running uncontested.

Nationalist strife racked other areas of the Caucasus, with an unspecified number of deaths reported in renewed fighting in the South Ossetia region of Soviet Georgia and armed confrontations in the little-known area of Chechen-Ingush in southern Russia.

Violence has raged throughout the multiethnic Caucasus in the wake of reforms easing hard-line Communist rule, which had caused age-old nationalist rivalries to fester over the years.

The separatist Popular Front of Azerbaijan contended that Mutalibov--who resigned from the Communist Party only a week ago and has been accused of supporting last month’s Kremlin coup--attempted to influence the vote in his favor by orchestrating the distribution of scarce goods such as candy and sausage.

An opposing candidate, Zardusht Alizade of the Social Democratic Party, withdrew from the race after appeals for a postponement of the election went unheeded.

The oil-producing republic on the Caspian Sea has been convulsed with conflict with neighboring Armenia and has been one of the slowest of the 15 Soviet republics to embrace democracy and economic reform.

With more than 80% of eligible voters in the republic of 7 million turning up at the polls, Mutalibov’s preordained victory was easily validated and “can be considered a fait accompli ,” Soviet television commented.

In Armenia, the Communist Party ended its 29th Congress in the capital of Yerevan on Saturday night by voting to dissolve itself.

According to the Soviet news agency Tass, speakers at the congress said the party had lost its grip on power and suffered from a dwindling membership.

While the majority of the party was expected to join a new Social Democratic Party favoring Armenian independence, a small group headed by Yerevan city party chief Sergei Badalian said it would reorganize and relaunch a new Communist Party. The Armenian Communist Party was founded in 1920.

In contrast with the troubled southern regions, Sunday was a day of celebration in the newly independent Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

Lithuanians held an outdoor Mass in the city of Siluva, drawing about 50,000 to the Roman Catholic service conducted by Cardinal Vincentas Sladkedicius, who praised the end of “50 years of Communist slavery.”

The Baltic states were seized by the Soviet Union in 1940. Western nations never officially recognized their forced annexation but began reasserting support for their independence after hard-line Communists attempted to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Aug. 19.

An armored convoy of Soviet troops also pulled out of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on Sunday, the first to heed President Vytautas Landsbergis’ call for withdrawal of all Red Army forces from his state by the end of the year.

Sixteen trucks and nine armored vehicles left an army garrison in northern Vilnius before dawn and were reported by Western news agencies to be headed for the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Poland.

On the edge of the Estonian capital of Tallinn, tens of thousands braved a howling autumn rainstorm to revel in their newfound independence with a traditional songfest.

Some Russians in the northern port of Leningrad celebrated the restoration of their city’s pre-revolutionary name, St. Petersburg, which on Friday won the endorsement of the new State Council created to function as an interim government for the fracturing Soviet Union.

Others, however, mourned the change. The nightly news program Vremya carried footage of elderly residents of the Soviet Union’s second-largest city weeping over what they saw as the erasure of the name associated with the 900-day siege they endured during World War II.

In Moscow, residents of the normally frantic Soviet and Russian capital seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief at a sudden respite in the earthshaking developments that have gripped their city for the past three weeks.

A chill autumn wind chased the usual platoons of strollers indoors, leaving the city streets uncharacteristically silent and empty.

Latest Developments

Here’s what happened Sunday in the Soviet Union: * ONE-MAN SHOW: Azerbaijan held its first popular election for president, but current leader Ayaz Mutalibov was the only candidate on the ballot. The candidate from the opposition Social Democratic Party pulled out last week to protest “undemocratic elections.”

* OSSETIAN STRIFE: Violence between Georgians and inhabitants of South Ossetia seeking to secede from the republic has left an unspecified number of dead and wounded in the past 24 hours. A report said 28 Ossetians, including 12 children, were kidnaped on a bus from Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital.

* NEW YEAR: Soviet Jews celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, in their transformed country. About 3,000 Jews crowded Moscow’s main synagogue, joined by guests from the United States and Israel.

* LENINGRAD MEMORY: About 1,000 veterans and survivors marched through Leningrad to mark the 900-day Nazi siege that began Sept. 8, 1941, and killed nearly 1 million residents by starvation and cold. The city’s name has been restored to St. Petersburg.