Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, March 19, 1991                   TAG: 9103190125
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

GORBACHEV, CRITICS WIN SOME IN VOTING

Voters supported his union referendum on a nationwide level even as some of his strongest critics won far more fervid endorsements of greater autonomy in such republics as Russia and the Ukraine.

Initial returns from the vote on Sunday were skimpy but certain enough to show a series of often contradictory victories by both Gorbachev and the insurgent separatist republics engaging him in a struggle for power.

The vote count is expected to take about a week. Initial numbers suggest the more rural and eastern republic voters gave Gorbachev's referendum majorities exceeding 90 percent in the most loyal areas. This was enough of a cushion to withstand weaker support in the more insurgent-minded areas like the city of Moscow, where the union question was approved by little more than half the voters.

Muscovites, indeed, were far more interested the ideas of a popularly elected mayor, favored by 80 percent, and a popularly elected president of the larger Russian republic, which 78 percent supported.

Gorbachev asked the nation's voters to rule on this question: "Do you consider it necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics, in which the rights and freedoms of people of any nationality will be fully guaranteed?"

Supplementary questions were on the ballot by some areas. The question on direct presidential vote in Russia, for instance, was a pointed effort to show that Gorbachev was elected president of the Soviet Union only by Parliament, which is dominated by Communists.

The nationwide results underlined the deeply muddled state of government and politics, with both Gorbachev and his critics in the democratic opposition now likely to claim popular mandates for moving in divergent directions.

Six of the 15 republics - Moldavia, Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia - boycotted the vote, although small minorities in them voted anyway.

The major republics' appetite for autonomy has never been clearer. But it is also clear the average Soviet citizen is concerned that the center must hold amid the daily grappling between the Kremlin and the provinces.

The referendum results sketched the nation's great network of ethnic, separatist, and democratic yearnings that swept to the fore thanks to Gorbachev's easing of seven decades of totalitarian communism.

Paradoxically, the results also measured the still far from overwhelming popular blessing Gorbachev has won for protecting central controls against what he regards as the excesses of some of these same yearnings.

Before the referendum, Gorbachev had warned that creating a popularly elected Russian presidency would be "fraught with great danger" and could even obviate the renewed union he has been describing.

Gorbachev sidestepped the chance at facing popular election to the federal presidency last year.