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

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 2, 1990                   TAG: 9005020200
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

JEERS FORCE GORBACHEV OFF STAND

Confronted by tens of thousands of hostile demonstrators carrying anti-communist banners, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and other top leaders Tuesday abandoned their May Day reviewing stand atop Lenin's mausoleum to a chorus of jeers, whistles and chants of "shame" and "resign."

The leadership walkout followed a tense half-hour during which unofficial political activists, permitted for the first time onto Red Square during the annual parade, made clear their contempt for 72 years of Communist Party rule, such icons as Vladimir Lenin and some of Gorbachev's policies.

Under a sea of pre-revolutionary Russian flags - and a few Soviet flags with the hammer and sickle cut out - marchers cheered the radicals who have taken over the Moscow City Council and yelled, "Down with the CPSU" (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and "down with the KGB."

Repeatedly they took up the cry "freedom for Lithuania," denouncing the economic blockade with which Gorbachev met Lithuania's declaration of independence.

The 59-year-old father of perestroika, face-to-face for the first time with the politicized citizenry his policies have produced, watched stoically while drumming his fingers on the red granite of Lenin's tomb.

"Mikhail Sergeyevich, you hear me?" yelled 18-year-old Fyodor Morulyov, a backer of the nascent Christian Democratic Alliance, into a bullhorn.

"Give the Kremlin back to the church and the people; give Russia freedom," he screamed, his voice blending with a cacophony of protests and demands.

"No to the self-appointed president," said one sign, referring to Gorbachev's refusal to stand for popular election. "State mafia - to the trash heap," another said, with the ousted communist rulers of Eastern Europe listed and the punch line: "U.S.S.R. - when?"

The scene at the Soviet Union's symbolic center appeared to leave many people stunned - from young activists intoxicated with their chance to heckle the Politburo to unsmiling plainclothes KGB men arrayed in rows across the square to control the crowd.

by CNB