Gorbachev Allies Fear Foes Will Pack Party Conference

By MICHAEL PARKS

May 31, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

MOSCOW — Liberal supporters of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev complained Monday that their conservative opponents are squeezing them out of a special Communist Party conference called to push forward his sweeping program of political, economic and social reforms.

With two-thirds of the 5,000 delegates now chosen for the conference in late June, party bureaucrats appear likely to form a majority, possibly putting in jeopardy Gorbachev’s proposals for a complete restructuring of the Soviet political system.

Fyodor M. Burlatsky, a political scientist who advises Gorbachev, said that many delegates were being chosen from above, not elected by local party organizations as planned, and that most of these delegates seemed to have come from the bureaucracy itself.

Some of the elections “have actually gone rather badly,” he said, with opponents of the scope and speed of the reforms being chosen as delegates. The party’s policy-making Central Committee had called for the election of stronger supporters of perestroika, as the reform program is known, in order to give it further impetus at next month’s party conference.

Soviet newspapers have reported that local party organizations around the country have frequently ignored regulations on the selection of conference delegates--correspondents for Sovietskaya Kultura were unable to find any district where delegates had been elected according to party rules-- and analysts here believe that this may have changed the political character of the conference debates.

The session will consider far-reaching proposals that would take the party out of day-to-day administration of the government, the economy and most other Soviet institutions in order to broaden democracy and increase the country’s productivity.

Put forward by the party leadership and endorsed by the Central Committee last week, the proposals call upon the party, which has had a monopoly on political power for 70 years, to lead the country through the effectiveness of its members and the correctness of its policies.

The proposals have split the party, the government and much of the country into those wanting, with Gorbachev, to widen and accelerate the reforms, and those who fear that they will throw the country into chaos and favor more limited and gradual changes.

Party and government bureaucrats, who would lose much of their present power, constitute most of the opposition to the reforms, according to Soviet political analysts.

‘A Difficult Struggle’

“There is a very difficult struggle between those who back perestroika and those who don’t,” Nikolai Shmelev, a liberal economist, said, adding that he remained optimistic that supporters of the reform would prevail at the conference.

“We are not going to give up this struggle, not at all--too much is at stake.”

The depth of the debate became evident when Boris N. Yeltsin, one of the most outspoken supporters of reform in the Soviet leadership, broke ranks and called Monday for the replacement of the party’s ideology chief, Yegor K. Ligachev, who ranks second to Gorbachev in the Kremlin hierarchy.

In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., Yeltsin said such a decision was up to the Central Committee, but “of course it would be possible to develop the (perestroika) policy more actively within someone else in that post.” (Story, Page 6.)

Supporters of broader reforms demonstrated over the weekend in both Moscow and Leningrad, protesting the election of party bureaucrats to the conference next month.

In Leningrad, more than 2,000 people reportedly gathered in front of Kazan Cathedral under banners proclaiming “Glasnost, Democracy and Pluralism.” The term glasnost refers to Gorbachev’s campaign for greater political openness here.

Alexander Bogdanov, a member of the Democratic Union, which groups political dissidents around the country, said that police broke up the Leningrad demonstration after an hour, confiscating posters and arresting 31 people.

In Moscow, about 80 people marched from the Bolshoi Theater up one of the city’s main streets to a monument of Alexander Pushkin, the Russian poet, to protest the exclusion of popularly chosen delegates from the provisional Moscow delegation. Police did not interfere with the demonstration, participants said.

Closed-Door Meetings

Selection of the Moscow delegates has now been postponed until Friday to “correct the process of selection,” Burlatsky said.

Ogonyok, a popular weekly magazine that has strongly supported the reforms, describes in its latest issue how party bureaucrats are ignoring regulations on the selection of conference delegates, choosing them in closed-door meetings from lists they have compiled themselves without public discussion.

“The primary party organizations have, in most instances, nominated strong advocates of perestroika, but the superior organizations have struck them off,” Burlatsky said, noting wryly that he was one of the rejected nominees.

Several other Gorbachev advisers, including historian Yuri Afanasyev, sociologist Tatyana Zaslavskaya, political scientist Gavril Popov and editor Yegor Yakovlev, have also been rejected, at least initially, by higher party committees, which have substituted their own members.

“There is a gap between political declarations and political decisions on the one hand and political practice on the other,” Burlatsky said. “The elections for the party conference have demonstrated the difficulties in establishing inner-party democracy.”

Burlatsky nevertheless declared himself optimistic about the outcome of the conference. “If Mikhail Gorbachev is elected to the conference,” he said, “then the biggest revolutionary of perestroika has been elected.

“There is not a real danger to perestroika, I believe, not as long as there are revolutionaries of perestroika who hold the balance in the Politburo, in the Central Committee and, even with some losses, at the party conference.”

Protest at University

One of the sharpest contests came at Moscow State University, the country’s most prestigious school, where protests broke out among teachers and students after the school’s party committee named the rector and party secretary as delegates, ignoring the nominations of leading intellectuals who have articulated much of the reform program.

“We want Gavril Popov!” the shouts rang out when the committee decision was announced.

Expected a Fight

Popov, a political economist, told the party’s youth newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, that he had expected a fight. But he said, “Such unpardonable, insolent and flagrant unwillingness to recognize the opinion of rank-and-file Communists and such efforts to ignore this opinion I have never seen before.”

Later, a bit more philosophically, Popov commented, “If I and other candidates like me got our names onto the lists easily, that would have created the illusion that the main problems of perestroika are already solved.

“But the entire struggle is ahead, and obstacles at the first stages prepare people for it much more than easy victories do.”