Dissidents Launch New Soviet Political Group : Founders Intend to Challenge ‘Autocracy’ of Communist Party Rule; 60 Reported Detained

MOSCOW — Although surrounded by policemen and threatened with arrest, a group of Soviet dissidents Monday launched a new political movement intended to challenge the Communist Party’s 70-year-old rule of the Soviet Union.

As security officers encircled the cultural club where they were meeting outside Moscow, the dissidents hurriedly approved a manifesto declaring Communist Party “autocracy” the “main source of the people’s troubles.”

The solution, it said, is a multiparty system with contending ideologies and policies.

“No one has the right to decide for the people what direction to take,” the Democratic Union asserted in its founding declaration. “Only the people themselves, according to their sovereign rights, can choose on the basis of agreement and free elections.”

Despite the brave words, the movement faces an uncertain future. Few groups in recent years have so boldly declared their opposition to Communist rule and demanded such a fundamental change in the country’s political, economic and social system.

Democracy ‘Not Just a Slogan’

“We define the content of our activity as political opposition to the present order,” the group said. “We are unified in adherence to the idea of democracy, which is not just a slogan and an empty call.”

The meeting’s participants demanded a multiparty political system, free elections, independent labor unions and a mixed economy that would let private entrepreneurs and even foreign capitalists compete with state monopolies.

But Soviet authorities, while more tolerant of dissident activity than before, clearly wanted to establish the limits of glasnost , the new political openness advocated by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev as part of broader reforms meant to make the political and economic system more effective.

Over the weekend, policemen, including agents of the KGB, the state security agency, had detained more than 60 of the 150 participants, who came from 14 cities around the country for the three-day conference, according to Yuri Mityunov, one of the organizers.

Mityunov said the authorities prevented the final session from being held first at a north Moscow apartment and later at a country cottage 25 miles southeast of the city. The session finally got under way at a nearby cultural club, where participants met for half an hour before being ordered by the police to disperse.

Editor Held for Questioning

Sergei I. Grigoryants, editor of the independent political journal Glasnost, was held for questioning. He was to have delivered the closing address to the conference. Five of Grigoryants’ associates were also held.

On Sunday evening, police raided one of the three apartments where special panel discussions were taking place on such subjects as democracy, economic policy and law and order. Nearly 50 people were detained, according to Mityunov and Grigoryants, who said that those from Moscow were released after questioning and that those from provincial cities were held until they could be sent home.

Participants in the two other discussion groups Sunday were searched and questioned briefly, according to meeting organizers. Several were detained but were to be sent home rather than arrested.

The initial session, on Saturday, was also monitored closely by the police, the organizers said, but the authorities did not intervene.

“The government seems to be very nervous about us,” Alexander Bogdonov, an activist from Leningrad, commented. “At the top, when they talk about perestroika (economic restructuring) and democratization, they talk about a program inspired from the upper levels and sent down. Here is perestroika and democratization coming from the grass roots, and they suppress it.”

So far, there has been no official comment on the meetings, though Soviet commentators on Saturday described some of the groups represented as unpatriotic.