May Day Melee in Russia Called Hard-Line Plot

MOSCOW —  Russian democrats on Sunday charged that unrepentant Communists, their allies in Parliament and leaders of the failed 1991 coup masterminded the violent May Day clashes between demonstrators and police that wounded more than 200.

“It was a planned action prepared well in advance,” said Vasily N. Feklunin, an Information Ministry official who witnessed the melee in the Moscow square named after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

Feklunin said a “mobile attack unit” of young men equipped with homemade weapons, including steel rods and crude swords, rushed from the ranks of the mostly elderly Communist and nationalist marchers and hurled themselves at the riot police.

Casualty counts indicate the police were sorely unprepared for the first massive street violence of the post-Communist era: 205 policemen were injured, and 27 were hospitalized with concussions and lacerations. The Interior Ministry said a dozen protesters were hospitalized.

The demonstration, intended to arouse sympathy for the anti-reform cause on a day that in Soviet times was the official holiday of the masses, may have backfired.

“All too clearly we can see Communist tricks at work,” said Vladimir S. Baranov, 34, a teacher. “Communists killed millions of people inside this country and outside it. Never did they stop short of organizing mass disorders to lay the blame on their naive and trusting opponents. . . . They must be stopped.”

Repeatedly Sunday, Russian TV aired videotape showing the phalanx of demonstrators, their faces twisted with fury, attacking cowering riot police with metal pipes, rocks and bottles.

“Beats me where the Commies dug up so many young toughs with iron rods in their hands,” said Andrei I. Maltsev, 25, a factory worker. “It used to be sad and feeble old-timers.”

Despite the video reports, right-wing leaders insisted that truncheon-wielding police had set upon peaceful, unarmed demonstrators.

“None of us had even rocks in our hands,” said Sazhy Z. Umalatova, a leader of the reborn Communist Party. “This is real democracy--Western style.”

Communist lawmaker Viktor G. Astafiev, in a statement read to reporters on the steps of the Russian Parliament, declared: “The bloody slaughter . . . showed how far the ruling regime is ready to go to establish a dictatorship.”

Undeterred, the far-right National Salvation Front, which helped organize the demonstration, vowed to stage another next Sunday, when Russia will celebrate the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany and Moscow’s streets will be jammed with aging veterans.

“We’ll march where we want and how we want,” Umalatova vowed.

Aides and supporters called on President Boris N. Yeltsin to seek the support of Parliament in banning the group and any others responsible for inciting the May Day melee.

“Only with a great deal of naivete can you call this a chance confrontation,” commented the television news program “Vesti.”

A top official in Yeltsin’s office accused the Communists of plotting with the conservative-led Supreme Soviet and some of the former top Kremlin officials who tried to overthrow Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in August, 1991.

Parliament and the prosecutor general’s office launched investigations of the May Day incident. But it was unclear what role the dual probes could play in suppressing the political convulsions racking this fledgling democracy.

Moscow was peaceful Sunday. The city lazed in balmy sunshine on the second day of a three-day holiday weekend. About 1,500 protesters gathered outside government headquarters, but sunbathers, strollers and shoppers seemed to pay little heed.

“Such a nice day they spoiled for the whole country,” Irina S. Kudrayavtseva, 64, a pensioner, said. “Why do they march and fight instead of digging in their gardens and taking their children to a zoo or something?”

Sergei L. Loiko, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this story.