Gorbachev Proposes Secret Ballots, Election Contests : Tells Party Ideas Aren’t Just Slogans

Mikhail S. Gorbachev called today for sweeping democratic changes in Soviet society--allowing secret ballots, giving voters a choice of candidates at some levels and promoting non-Communist Party members to high-level jobs.

“Some comrades find it hard to understand that democratization is not just a slogan but the essence of the reorganization,” Gorbachev told the 307-member Communist Party Central Committee.

Gorbachev, who summoned the Central Committee to push his reorganization plan, hammered home the theme of a radical departure.

“We are often asked if we are not maneuvering too sharp a turn,” Gorbachev said. “We have begun reorganization and will not look back.”

Review of Procedures

In a speech that lashed out at his political opponents in the old guard, Gorbachev called for multiple-candidate elections to regional party posts and suggested a review of the parliamentary election procedure.

He also proposed new laws to put teeth into his programs of reform, including legislation allowing people to sue the government and one that is rumored to give the state-run media guaranteed access to officials.

But Gorbachev also sounded a clear warning that the party is not abandoning the principle of “rule from the top” and that any broadening of elections will not include the Central Committee or its ruling Politburo.

The 55-year-old Gorbachev, whose speech to a full meeting of the Central Committee served as a summation of his nearly two years in power, included a frank acknowledgement that he still faces stiff opposition from the political machine built by the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Spoke in the Wheel

“There are quite a few people who are slow in throwing off the burden of the past, who are adopting a wait-and-see attitude and openly putting a spoke in the wheel,” Gorbachev said.

The party secretary continued to lay much of the blame for the nation’s economic and social problems on Brezhnev. He also made critical allusions to the late Nikita Khrushchev and Josef Stalin but did not name any of the three former leaders.

Communist Party officials from the Politburo down to the factory level are currently selected by the party leadership and ritually endorsed by a show of hands at party meetings.

While it seems unlikely that anyone out of favor with central authorities could win election under the proposed change, such a system would mark a significant change in the intra-party election procedure.

One Name on Ballot

Under the current system, citizens elect delegates to the Supreme Soviets, or parliaments, of the 16 republics and the national Supreme Soviet in Moscow. Traditionally, they receive a ballot with one name on it.

Gorbachev also urged the promotion of non-party people, women and youths to leading jobs to bring new faces into leadership.

Gorbachev departed from the tradition of blaming economic and social woes on low- and middle-level bureaucrats and workers and, instead, questioned the basic tenet of socialism: state ownership of property.

“A simple and lucid thought is becoming increasingly entrenched in social consciousness; a house can be put in order only by a person who feels that he owns this house,” he said.

Gorbachev said immediate and radical changes are needed because the country’s leadership has “failed, primarily for subjective reasons, to see in time and in full the need for change.

“The problems which have accumulated in society are more deep-rooted than we first thought,” he said.