President Mikhail Gorbachev, acknowledging that anti-government strikes cascading across the USSR could destroy the Soviet state, Tuesday proposed a ban on rallies, public protests and independent labor actions.
Gorbachev also demanded a general moratorium on ”political actions that might destabilize the political situation in the country.”
Attempting to prove that a market economy is not anathema to, and may even flourish under, authoritarian control, the new Gorbachev program mandates a series of market-oriented reforms.
The one-year, anti-crisis plan will be debated in the Supreme Soviet, the nation`s standing parliament, but Gorbachev`s plan was scorned immediately in every corner of the USSR.
In the southern Soviet republic of Georgia, the radical nationalist president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, led the parliament Tuesday in a formal declaration of independence.
The nation`s vital coal sector, now in the sixth week of a crippling strike, lost more mines Tuesday in the Ukraine, Siberia and the northern Russia as additional workers laid down their tools.
An estimated 300,000 of the USSR`s 1.2 million miners already on strike have put about one-third of the country`s 600 shaft and open-pit mines out of business.
And in the western republic of Byelorussia, workers at 60 factories-including the tractor plant visited by Gorbachev in March-shut down for a three-hour warning strike Tuesday with calls for the resignation of the Soviet president.
Gorbachev ”believes there is a serious danger to our statehood, that there is a danger of the collapse of the economy, that there is a danger to the institutions of power, law and order and, consequently, to every member of society,” said Vitaly Ignatenko, the president`s spokesman.
Ignatenko said the Soviet president unveiled his plans during a meeting Tuesday of the Federation Council, which includes the leaders of each of the 15 Soviet republics, the Cabinet of government ministers and invited specialists.
As evidence of the rupture in relations between the central Gorbachev government and the republics, only nine presidents of the 15 republics attended.
First-quarter economic figures for the USSR, released Tuesday, indicate that the nation`s fiscal crisis already was deepening before the miners went on strike six weeks ago.
The Tass news agency said that national income, the name given in the Soviet Union to a compilation of statistics resembling the U.S. gross national product, fell by 12 percent in the first quarter.
An economic specialist assigned to a Western embassy in Moscow said most analysts think the Soviet economy could contract by as much as 20 percent in 1991, and that a compression of only 15 percent is ”nearly apocalyptic.”
Gorbachev`s anti-crisis plan, by focusing on labor unrest, shows that his administration fears that the rigid, centrally controlled system of supply and manufacture could be shredded by independent labor action, idling hundreds of thousands of workers beyond those who choose to go on strike.
Among new economic measures in the proposal are a transition to free-market prices for consumer goods by Oct. 1, accompanied by laws on
compensation to citizens with a social security-type program and an anti-inflation policy.
State-run enterprises that continue to operate at a loss would suffer a change of management or be privatized. Foreign trade of Soviet-produced goods would be freed from the monopoly of state control.
Steps would be taken to help make the ruble a convertible currency on the world market, and legislation would be proposed allowing foreign investors to easily repatriate their profits.
Factory workers and troops would, under the plan, be called up to help with harvesting and food processing, and centralized control of grain and other staples would be strengthened.
It remains unclear how much weight the proposals will carry, particularly as even Gorbachev conceded that the USSR has been paralyzed by a ”war of laws” in which republics and local governments ignore many presidential directives.
For example, before a huge demonstration in Moscow on March 28, Gorbachev`s Cabinet of Ministers imposed a three-week ban on rallies in the capital. Last month, the Supreme Soviet legislature also ordered strikers back to work, but the coal miners ignored the ruling.
In a new enforcement regime, Gorbachev proposed that federal subsidies be withheld from republics that refuse to cooperate with the central government or fail to contribute to the national budget.
In addition, the Soviet central bank would be granted even more power over the flow of rubles to withhold credits from rebellious republics.
Tass said the Soviet president urged the leaders of the republics to
”put aside our feuds. We cannot allow our country to slide into catastrophe.”
But even as Gorbachev was issuing those words, the parliament in Georgia was cheering its unanimous approval of a formal declaration of independence.
