Ussr Government

More than billions of dollars in low-interest loans, more than shipments of meat and grain, more than sales of advanced Western technology, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will be bidding today for a broad Western pledge of support that he can use to build critical momentum for his stalled program of economic reforms.

Into the tiny guardhouse of the Zotov Bread Factory rushed a worker in shirt-sleeves despite the cold rain. "Open the gate," he commanded, gesturing toward the truck waiting outside to carry freshly baked loaves to the capital's stores. "People are left without bread!" People are left without bread.

After months of bitter wrangling, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his principal rival, Boris N. Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation, may be near a crucial agreement on how to share the country's natural resources and industrial base, Yeltsin said Monday.

The newly benevolent view of religion in the Soviet Union, part of that country's democratic reforms, was reaffirmed recently at Western religious conferences and at an unprecedented meeting of World Council of Churches leaders in Moscow. A long-awaited proposal for a Soviet law on freedom of conscience is scheduled to be debated next month by the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, according to the New York-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation headed by Rabbi Arthur Schneier.

Five years ago, "Stalin's Funeral" would have been a sensation. Written and directed by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet Union's best-known modern-day poet, the new film depicts life under Josef V. Stalin as a nightmare, which culminated in hundreds of deaths in the frenzied crowd outside the Moscow hall where the dictator's body lay in state in March, 1953.

The KGB is searching Moscow cemeteries for the unmarked mass graves of people executed during the purges of dictator Josef Stalin, the Tass news agency said Wednesday. The report represented the first public admission by the security police organization that there are believed to be mass graves in the capital. Others have been reported in more remote parts of the country. An estimated 20 million people died in purges during Stalin's rule from the late 1920s to his death in 1953.

As the international community and the people of the Soviet Union demanded to hear from Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the leaders of the hard-line group that ousted him Monday said the Nobel Peace Prize laureate is safe but implied that they would not permit him to speak for himself.

The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia pledged on Friday to respect the right of all Communist parties to choose their own paths, saying they have no intention of imposing their systems on anyone. Analysts said the declaration, in a joint statement at the end of a visit to Yugoslavia by Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, formally invalidated the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine of limited sovereignty that justified Soviet intervention if Communist states deviated from the path mapped by the Kremlin.

For more than 50 years, the United States has championed the cause of Baltic independence, steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania by the Soviet Union and granting their representatives the sort of diplomatic presence they were denied by much of the rest of the world.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, taking a calculated gamble, moved Wednesday to derail the political career of his nemesis, Boris N. Yeltsin, by accusing the maverick Communist of betraying socialism and advocating "the breakup of the Soviet Union" in his attempt to become leader of a more powerful Russia. In an episode of high Kremlin drama, the Soviet president took the floor for the first time at the Russian Congress of People's Deputies for an impassioned, occasionally angry, speech.