Gorbachev: Fashioning a Pedestal for Mikhail the Great?

The most dramatic event of the 27th Soviet Communist Party Congress that opens Tuesday in Moscow will be Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s speech, which will give important clues about how far he will go in criticizing the past and in opening it to freer discussion. The most important event at the congress, however, will be the naming of a new Central Committee.

Westerners often assume that the party general secretary is selected by the governing Politburo, but this is not the case. Officially, the general secretary and the Politburo members are all elected by (and removable by) the party’s Central Committee. About 25 of the 295 members are workers, peasants and symbolic appointees, but the vast majority are on the Central Committee because they hold top posts in its staff, the government, regional party organs, the military and the diplomatic service.

Usually the Central Committee meets only a few times a year in sessions that last one or two days. Normally it rubber-stamps Politburo decisions, but in 1957 it overrode the Politburo to retain Nikita S. Khrushchev as party leader. Everyone knows that it can happen again.

It is extremely difficult to believe that Gorbachev was the Politburo’s choice last year. When Konstantin U. Chernenko died, the Politburo had only 10 members; three of them (Grigori V. Romanov, Viktor V. Grishin and Nikolai A. Tikhonov) have since been retired--Grishin only last week--and one (Andrei A. Gromyko) has been moved to a ceremonial post. No one who was on the Politburo last March has been promoted to a better job. It is hard to see a majority for Gorbachev on that Politburo. Yet it supported him because the members knew that he could--and, no doubt, would--appeal any decision against him to the Central Committee, which had already crowned him heir-apparent. Indeed, that deal probably was made a year before, when the ailing Chernenko was elected.

Nevertheless, even the Central Committee that favored Gorbachev is not likely to favor radical reform. It was elected in 1981 at Leonid I. Brezhnev’s last party congress, and is composed of the top officials of the time. As of this year, its voting members average 66 years of age.

Lately Gorbachev has been talking about the “revolutionary task” of bringing Russia to world levels of technology, and about Russia as part of Western--and especially European--culture. When Peter the Great moved to modernize Russia and integrate it into the West, he encountered large-scale opposition, and he responded with violence. The more Gorbachev tries to transform Russia, the stronger the opposition that he, too, will face.

If Gorbachev is serious about reform, he faces a delicate problem. He wanted to replace as many Brezhnev officials as possible with his own men before the 27th Congress, so that they could be named to the new Central Committee. Yet a Central Committee member who is removed from the Politburo (even a man like Romanov) remains on the committee until the next congress. The more officials Gorbachev retires, the more disgruntled people there are on the committee that has the power to remove him.

So the intelligent political strategy in this situation is to remove as many officials as possible and to follow a cautious policy line. In fact, Gorbachev has hinted at major change in foreign and domestic policy, but he has done relatively little.

Now, however, a new Central Committee will be elected, and it in turn will elect a new Politburo and Secretariat. The number of members selected for the first time will depend on the size of the new Central Committee (a real unknown), but they probably will comprise 50% to 60% of the total. Together with the old members who supported Gorbachev, they will turn the Central Committee into Gorbachev’s political machine.

Gorbachev will now have the political ability to begin, with some gradualness, to introduce the policies that he really favors. We will see whether the hints of “grandiose” change (to quote his Time magazine interview) or the caution that he has exhibited in actual policies represent the real man. My reading of him is that his dream is to stand on Lenin’s Mausoleum at the age of 69 to usher in the new century in triumph and have people whisper about Mikhail the Great.