Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 11, 1991 TAG: 9103110148
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
Inspired by the thousands of miners across the country who have been on strike for 11 days to demand Gorbachev's resignation, more than 200,000 shouting protesters filled Manezh Square, outside the Kremlin, in one of the largest demonstrations since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Here, and in similar mass demonstrations from Leningrad to Vladivostok, protesters rallied in support of Yeltsin and the radical democrats who are struggling to turn their fragmented movement into a united political power and take the initiative from conservatives, who have made a comeback in recent months.
In Manezh Square, the crowd roared support for a battle cry that Yeltsin had made at a smaller meeting Saturday. Organizers said that Yeltsin was sick and could not attend the three-hour, outdoor rally, but his tape-recorded words were played to the demonstrators.
"Democracy is in danger - it's time we went on the offensive," Yeltsin said. "It's time to do what the miners have done, to roll up our sleeves and show them our fists."
"Vremya," the nightly news on state television, and the official news agency Tass said the rally was attended by "hundreds of thousands," and the crowd covered more of the square than earlier demonstrations, which had been estimated at 200,000.
Similar demonstrations were reported in the Siberian industrial centers of Novosibirsk and Omsk, Irkustk in Eastern Siberia and Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains and a half-dozen other major cities.
In Leningrad, wire reports said, 70,000 people demonstrated outside the Winter Palace in freezing rain.
"Let's declare war on the leadership of the country, which has led us into a quagmire," Yeltsin told his supporters in the message played at the Moscow rally.
"Gorbachev pretended to support us and we believed him; that was a mistake. . . . The time has come, on the basis of the democratic movement, to create a powerful organized party."
Speakers at the Moscow demonstration appeared more determined to outline a course for reform than at previous rallies, where radicals used their microphone time more to criticize Gorbachev and Communist Party hard-liners than to set out their own goals.
A new populist political party was being created, speakers said, and activists would immediately start agitating for grass-roots support at factories, mines, collective farms and other work places in villages and cities across the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union's largest republic.
by CNB