He Might Quit, Party Is Warned by Gorbachev

By MICHAEL PARKS and MASHA HAMILTON

Dec. 12, 1989 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

MOSCOW — President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, confronted with sharp criticism of his reforms, warned the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee last weekend that he would resign if he lost its support for his approach to perestroika , Soviet officials reported Monday.

Apparently stung by conservatives’ harsh attacks on his domestic policies, Gorbachev lashed out sharply when a party leader from the Siberian industrial and coal mining center of Kemerovo criticized his foreign policy as well.

“Even the capitalist world is glad about the policy of perestroika , which should be a clear sign that we are mistaken,” Indrek Toome, prime minister of the Soviet Baltic republic of Estonia, quoted one of the speakers, apparently Alexander G. Melnikov of Kemerovo, as telling the plenum last Saturday.

“Gorbachev could not but react,” Toome said, recounting for the Estonian newspaper Noorte Hall the drama of the 10-hour Kremlin meeting.

Gorbachev, seated on the dais with other members of the ruling Politburo, immediately stood and, interrupting Melnikov, told the committee, according to Toome: “If this is what you think, let us discuss this question. I am not going to cling to power.”

Vaino Valjas, the Estonian party leader, said in an interview broadcast on Estonian Television that “the tone (of Melnikov’s speech) was very accusing, and not just against the Central Committee and the Politburo.”

“Gorbachev interrupted him very fiercely, with all the force of the (party’s) general secretary, saying that he could not agree with Comrade Melnikov,” Valjas said. “Mikhail Gorbachev stuck very firmly to his line. Gorbachev said: ‘It’s my life’s work. It’s my way of seeing things. And I am not giving up.’ ”

Ivan T. Frolov, a Central Committee secretary, the editor of the party newspaper Pravda and a key Gorbachev adviser, said that any implicit threat of resignation was purely rhetorical--Gorbachev’s way of underscoring his commitment to perestroika and his reliance on the Central Committee for support in carrying out the far-reaching reforms.

“Gorbachev made a definitive and emphatic statement about the line he is now taking--the line of revolutionary transformation--as the only acceptable line for him and for the Politburo,” Frolov said. “ . . . But can you interpret this as actually posing a question about his resignation? We journalists must interpret this as a strong conviction and adherence to perestroika .”

The closed-door session had brought into the open the mounting discontent within the party, including its powerful 250-member Central Committee, over the failure so far of perestroika --Gorbachev’s program of political and economic restructuring--to improve people’s day-to-day lives.

Regional party leaders, some of them chosen and promoted by Gorbachev himself, have begun to complain about his reforms--their goals, the way they are implemented, the character of the party and its leadership today. A number of them are starting to call for a different approach to reform, including a stronger adherence to traditional Soviet socialism.

The party is under further pressure now, with growing demands for an end to its constitutional monopoly on political power and concern that it will lose many of the upcoming local and republic-wide elections.

“The situation is dramatic,” the Central Committee said Monday night in a special appeal to the nation for support. “While old things are being broken, new things have difficulty being established. Shortages and imbalances in the market are pressing hard. Society is being hit by strikes and ethnic conflicts.

“Perestroika is now encountering the peak of tension. If we hold on, the movement will continue; if not, we will roll back and down. . . . The leadership realizes full well both the seriousness of the situation and the need for measures to overcome the unfavorable trends.”

But in the resolution adopted Saturday, the Central Committee rejected calls by both radicals and conservatives for tough measures, such as declaring a state of emergency, to get the country through the current crisis.

“Minds are burdened by all kinds of prophecies about possible upheavals,” the party declaration said. “Attempts to suggest unrealistic methods of overcoming the crisis and miraculous recipes are not harmless either. . . .

“One should also not fall for the pleas of those who, while calling for ‘stabilization,’ would like to reverse our development, to plunge the country back into stagnation and degradation.”

The coming year is expected to be decisive in shaping Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms--and determining their prospects for success. This has made them even more controversial among the regional party leaders who feel they are in the front line of perestroika .

Melnikov, whose region in western Siberia was hit by a massive strike of discontented coal miners last summer, argued that Gorbachev’s reforms are “moving away from socialist values,” according to Pravda editor Frolov.

In a speech described as “very sharp . . . and not well reasoned,” the 59-year-old Siberian expressed “his worries about how perestroika was proceeding . . . about specific acts of parliamentary committees, of the central authorities and the Central Committee,” Frolov recalled Monday.

After Melnikov’s outburst, other Central Committee members spoke in support of Gorbachev, according to Frolov and Toome, and the debate turned into a firm endorsement of his policies.

But in an indication of how contentious the meeting was and how sensitive the issues are, Pravda will not publish the text of the debate, Frolov said, although this goes against the party’s avowed commitment to glasnost , or greater openness in its activities.

And this brought a protest, in turn, from Alexander Tikhomirov, a leading commentator on state-run television, who complained in a weekend broadcast that the party’s leadership is trying to hide a crucial debate from the public and even its own members.

“The press has done nothing to describe the sharp polemics at the plenum,” he told viewers of the weekly current affairs program “Seven Days.” “Does it mean that the many people who had the premonition of bitter fighting have been proved wrong?”

Vadim A. Medvedev, a Politburo member and the party secretary for ideology, told a press conference after the plenum that while there had been a lot of criticism, much of it came from “conservatives and dogmatics” who contended that “all the trouble we have now comes from perestroika , and perestroika is an idea imported from the West.”

But some of the criticism was valid, Medvedev said. “The criticism,” he said, “boiled down to this: We should act more resolutely, we should keep abreast of events, we should not lose the initiative in perestroika .”

Meanwhile, an attempt to demonstrate public support for a challenge to the Communist Party’s constitutionally guaranteed “leading role” in society fell flat Monday when few people participated in what was to be a two-hour protest strike.

The strike was called for by radical members of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the country’s national assembly, on the eve of their second session in an effort to pressure Gorbachev and other leaders to schedule a parliamentary debate on Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which guarantees the party’s leading role.

Discussion of the controversial article is not on the agenda, although a number of deputies led by Andrei D. Sakharov, the human rights campaigner, are likely to try to get it included.

But Gorbachev has said the time is not right to consider revising the party’s dominant role in Soviet society, despite the fact that similar changes have been made in recent weeks in East Germany and Czechoslovakia.

In Moscow, factories, shops and public transportation operated as usual, but about 200 researchers at the Academy of Sciences’ Geography Institute did observe the strike.

“Even if only a few people participate,” Sakharov told them in a brief speech, “this symbolic action will still exert pressure on the deputies.”

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