Party ‘Democratizing’ Bid Shows Gorbachev Is Dedicated Risk-Taker

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s remarkable call for greater “democratization” of the ruling Communist Party, according to Soviet experts in the West, extends his proposed reforms beyond economics and culture to the most sensitive arena in the Soviet Union--politics, which has been off-limits to debate since the 1920s.

The consequences are unpredictable, the experts say: potentially profound, but also possibly nothing more than superficial window dressing, and quickly reversible after Gorbachev leaves office.

Showing himself to be a dedicated risk-taker if not yet a successful reformer, Gorbachev recently appeared before the party’s 307-member Central Committee to propose multi-candidate party elections with secret ballots.

Few Politburo Shifts

The Central Committee, the highest decision-making forum in the Soviet Union, reacted with some skepticism, according to most Western experts. It passed a resolution endorsing Gorbachev’s ideas in vague and sometimes diluted form. Moreover, the experts noted, Gorbachev engineered fewer changes on the ruling Politburo than had been expected.

But several specialists maintained that Gorbachev got all he really wanted.

“He chose not to do quickly everything he might have,” said Soviet-born Dmitri Simes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Like all good politicians, he recognizes that overkill can generate reaction” that would work against him in the longer term.

The most important question now is whether Gorbachev is using his democratization proposals merely to oust party officials who oppose his radical economic agenda, which is based on greater efficiency and innovation with less centralized control. Or, in much more revolutionary fashion, is he seeking political reform for its own sake?

Arnold L. Horelick, a former CIA analyst who now heads the UCLA-Rand Center for Soviet Studies, insisted that Gorbachev “is not out to change the political system.” Democratization, he said, is an instrument “to serve the larger purpose of economic reform.”

First Seen as Lever

But to Timothy Colton, a professor and Soviet specialist at the University of Toronto, Gorbachev may initially have intended his glasnost (openness) campaign as a lever to push radical economic reforms but has himself changed since then.

“I sense an evolution in his thinking over the past six months toward changing the whole society,” Colton said, “even to giving political and cultural changes primacy as he realizes how difficult it will be to improve the economy very much in a short time.”

The Soviet Union’s cultured elite have responded enthusiastically to Gorbachev’s openness campaign. But there has been no resonance so far from the masses, who appear to remain unconvinced that they will benefit from economic reforms that will upset their working lives, let alone greater political democracy.

Seeds of Conflict

Whatever Gorbachev’s intent, he has sown the seeds of potential political conflict in the Soviet Union for the first time since the early days of the Revolution. V.I. Lenin outlawed party factions in 1921, and the process of centralization culminated under Josef Stalin in 1927 with an end to democratic elections inside the party.

Nikita S. Khrushchev attempted to reintroduce a modicum of reform in the early 1960s, when he forced through a rule limiting the number of terms that party officials could serve. Although it excluded Central Committee members, the rule was nevertheless very unpopular, and Leonid I. Brezhnev threw it out soon after he ousted Khrushchev in 1964.

Gorbachev’s latest initiative, for all its boldness, was hedged. He first spoke of the “essence of proposals and wishes . . . (which) working people are sending” to the Soviet party and government bodies, adding that “it is a question of deepening the democratism of the electoral system.”

Turning specifically to the Communist Party, he said, “Here comrades suggest that secretaries (the chief administrative officers), including first ones, could be elected by secret ballot . . . (choosing from) any number of candidates.”

In Name of Politburo

Gorbachev seems merely to have suggested the sensational reforms and to have done so more in the name of the Politburo rather than himself personally.

“Certainly he was deferential,” said Thane Gustafson, director of the Soviet program at Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies. “He moved crab-like, backing and filling in putting forward the measures.”

Gorbachev added that whatever the results of elections at lower levels, the Politburo and presumably the Central Committee could toss them out.

“The principle of the party rules, under which the decision of higher bodies are compulsory for all lower party committees, including on personnel matters, should remain unshakable in the party,” he said.

Central Committee resistance to Gorbachev’s proposals was apparent in the muted wording of its responding resolution:

--Instead of endorsing secret balloting on multi-candidate slates for party office, the committee said rules should be changed “to enable the voter to express his attitude toward a larger number of candidacies and to participate effectively in the electoral process at all stages.”

--Instead of extending democratization to the Central Committee and the Politburo, the committee called for finding “a timely solution to outstanding personnel questions at all levels.”

--And instead of Gorbachev’s stress on giving more authority to lower party members, the committee said it “attaches much importance to enhancing party control. . . . “

Agenda Laid Out

Gorbachev did succeed in winning approval of his call for a party conference next year to write the reforms into party rules, and he laid out an agenda for incorporating the changes into Soviet law. Both moves were aimed, he indicated, at making “irreversible” the reforms he put forward.

Compromise was also seen as the likely explanation for personnel shifts approved by the Central Committee for the Politburo itself. No new full members were added, although a key Gorbachev supporter, Alexander N. Yakovlev, whose propaganda duties make him de facto “director of glasnost,” was elected a non-voting candidate member.

The disgraced Khazakstan party boss, Dinmukhamed A. Kunayev, was ousted from the top ruling group on charges of corruption. But the last Brezhnev holdover, Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky from the Ukraine, remained despite indirect criticism arising from the Chernobyl nuclear accident and a KGB scandal in that republic.

‘Elaboration Unnecessary’

Soviet Ambassador to the United States Yuri V. Dubinin denied that the Central Committee was unenthusiastic about Gorbachev’s proposals. He and other committee members who attended the meeting in Moscow insisted at a press conference here earlier this month that the democratization proposals were “supported fully and completely” in the committee resolution. “Elaboration is absolutely unnecessary,” they said.

However, a Soviet Foreign Ministry official, Serguei B. Chetverikov, added: “Frankly speaking, we don’t know how it will work. The principle is clear that we will have multiple-candidate elections, but what will be the nomination and election processes we don’t know. There is lots to be done to implement this decision in principle.”

Central Committee resistance would not only be likely but, to some degree, understandable.

Almost 60% of committee members have served since Brezhnev’s reign and are probably worried that any changes will reduce their influence and high living standards, as well as that of the middle-level bureaucracy beholden to them.

Gorbachev’s supporters had earlier called for mandatory retirement from all party jobs at age 70, which would have cut deeply into the conservatives believed to oppose Gorbachev. But the proposal was presumably defeated in maneuvering before the Central Committee meeting and was not mentioned by Gorbachev himself.

Fear of Real Turmoil

The specter that democratization would trigger real turmoil may also have concerned older conservatives in the party.

“Given events in Alma Ata and China, it may not be the time to sell the party on fundamental democratization,” Horelick of Rand-UCLA said.

At Alma Ata, capital of the Soviet Asian republic of Khazakstan, several days of rioting broke out after Kunayev, a native Kazakh, was ousted as party leader in favor of an ethnic Russian.

In China, the trend toward democracy led to massive student demonstrations for even greater progress, resulting in a reactionary crackdown and the firing of several top figures from the Chinese Communist Party.

There appears to be no turning back now for Gorbachev, however. And it could easily cost him his job, as it did Khrushchev two decades ago.

But if Gorbachev were ousted, the changes that he has instituted would probably continue to boil underground. Similarly, the Soviet dissident movement began in the 1960s after the liberalization policies of Khrushchev were reversed by Brezhnev.

With Gorbachev’s “extraordinarily important” speech, as Nobel Prize-winning dissident Andrei D. Sakharov said, “the system has to either go forward or slip back. Now, it is not possible to stand in one place.”

“It is enormously significant that these proposals have now been put out on the table,” Georgetown’s Gustafson said. “These issues which had been closed off for so long are now in the open again, and who knows what will happen.”