Reforms at Stake : Gorbachev’s Test: Taming Huge Party

If Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev is to succeed in revitalizing the world’s second-largest economy, he must gain increasing control over the huge and inherently conservative bureaucracy of the Communist Party.

There is no evidence of organized political opposition to Gorbachev, but the Soviet leader has acknowledged the existence of rising resistance to reforms from within the party, a political machine whose power extends across two continents and into every corner of Soviet society.

Whether Gorbachev can tame the party apparatus “is really the crunch question,” said a Western ambassador in Moscow. “Out there is a nomenklatura-- a party and state bureaucracy--of about 20 million people, the majority of whom are probably fearful of change, first, because it affects their own positions, and, second, because they’re being asked to do things many of them don’t know how to do.”

Consigned to Oblivion

A quarter century ago, then-Kremlin chief Nikita S. Khrushchev failed to capture control of the middle and lower party echelons through which the leadership manages Soviet society. As a result, he saw his more limited reform program--and his own name--consigned to oblivion as an aroused party apparatus lashed back to protect its power and privileges, and replaced him in 1964 with Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Gorbachev, who appears to have absorbed this lesson, is widely regarded as a much more skillful manager and politician than Khrushchev. But Soviet and Western observers hold divergent views of his chances for success in carrying out a more complex program of reform in more complicated times.

Impressed with Gorbachev’s skill and speed in consolidating his hold on the Politburo, the party’s highest ruling body, and the forcefulness with which he has pressed his reforms, Western analysts tend to be more sanguine about his prospects than many Soviet intellectuals, who are his most ardent supporters.

“The further downstream he goes, the rougher things are going to get. But what we have seen so far is a juggernaut,” said a senior U.S. government specialist in Soviet affairs. But, added the specialist, “I don’t know anyone who thought a year ago that we’d be where we are now” on the path to change.

In contrast, a number of Soviet intellectuals interviewed in recent weeks emphasized that the changes now taking place--the current thaw in curbs on literature, the partial relaxation of press censorship, an ambitious outline of economic reforms to take effect next year--are fragile at best. They rest on a still-thin constituency of liberal-minded economists, historians and writers, most of whom live in Moscow, and a relative handful of visionary politicians--Gorbachev chief among them--who have managed to seize and hold the pinnacle of power.

How long Gorbachev and his allies will hold that power, and how effectively they will use it, are worrisome questions among these intellectuals. In varying measure, they voice apprehension that bureaucratic resistance to change may prove too strong and the society too set in its passive ways to demand it.

“The opposition is not weak,” said a Soviet economist who is close to Gorbachev’s advisers. “It is not some mouse on the carpet. It is a well-oiled bureaucratic machine.”

“Believe me, we can feel them breathing on our necks,” the economist insisted. “They are making lists,” he said, of those whose careers will suffer when the tide eventually turns, as they evidently presume it will, against the reformers.

The party bureaucracy’s institutional interest in preserving power conflicts head-on with Gorbachev’s goal of releasing the nation’s creative and productive energies by giving a large measure of autonomy to the factories and farms that party bureaucrats have spent their careers controlling.

Familiar Patterns Favored

By the same token, many directors of factories and farms--especially those middle-aged and older--prefer to follow old, familiar patterns of reliance on directions from local party authorities rather than shoulder the unfamiliar burdens of real management.

Moreover, Gorbachev and his allies in the leadership lack important advantages enjoyed by the leaders of China and Hungary, two Communist countries that have had some success in carrying out liberalizing reforms. In both cases, the path to reform was laid open by internal upheaval--the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 in China and the Hungarian uprising of 1956--that shattered the Communist parties of the two countries and weakened their conservative apparats.

Powerful ‘Apparatchiks’

The hundreds of thousands of apparatchiks who make up the Soviet party bureaucracy, by contrast, spent the 18 years of the Brezhnev era consolidating their power and privileges, to the extent that collective farm directors, for example, feel compelled to check with local party officials before sowing crops or reaping the harvest, regardless of what weathermen and their own agronomists may tell them.

Many of the party bosses who run the country’s 157 provincial regions--some of them larger than most West European countries--came to think of themselves, as a Soviet journalist put it in a recent conversation, as “princes” of independent fiefdoms.

In addition, pragmatic leaders in China and Hungary had broad public support for reforms that began with agriculture and essentially allowed small landholders to resume old ways of family farming that quickly improved their standards of living and the nation’s food supply.

In the Soviet Union, the half a century that has passed since 25 million peasants were forcibly squeezed onto collective farms--at a cost of millions of lives--has left few memories of alternative methods and seemingly little enthusiasm for trying them. There is little incentive to experiment because even those farmers who earn more money find that there are no additional consumer goods to buy in the countryside.

Reform From Top Down

In the absence of grass-roots pressure for change, reform in Russia from Peter the Great to Josef Stalin and Khrushchev has traditionally come from the top down. Gorbachev’s Soviet Union is no exception.

“What is distinctive about Gorbachev’s USSR,” noted Joseph S. Berliner, a leading U.S. authority on the Soviet economy, “is the absence of any substantial, committed groups with a strong interest in bringing (economic reform) into existence and making it work.”

In testimony to the congressional Joint Economic Committee in September, Berliner, an emeritus professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, pointed out that the personal power of many party officials derives from their traditional responsibility for ensuring that factories and farms meet production quotas dictated by the central planners in Moscow.

Under industrial reforms that go into effect in January, such quotas are no longer to be mandatory and industry is to be given--at least on paper--new freedom to manage itself.

‘Genuine Autonomy’

“If such targets are no longer assigned by the center, and enterprises achieve genuine autonomy over their affairs, the power of party officials will be greatly reduced,” Berliner said.

“The sole constituency for the new economic system consists of some economists, some scientists and liberal intellectuals, and some party and military officers who recognize that their country is bound to decline in world affairs as long as the old economic system prevails.”

“It is a constituency of conviction, however, rather than of personal interest. These are not the people whose active cooperation is required to make the reform a success. That will take the commitment of the mass of managerial, governmental and party officials whose personal interests and ideological convictions still wed them to the system Gorbachev now proposes to eliminate.”

Gorbachev voiced a similar view in his speech last Monday marking the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. In a remarkably frank passage warning of opposition to perestroika, his reform program, he acknowledged a “certain increase in the resistance of conservative forces who see perestroika simply as a threat to their selfish interests and objectives.”

“Nor can one really doubt that conservative forces will seize on any difficulty in a bid to discredit perestroika and provoke dissatisfaction among the people.”

When Gorbachev assumed power in March, 1985, on the death of Brezhnev’s feeble and limited former aide, Konstantin U. Chernenko, he appears to have done so on the slimmest margin of support in the Politburo. The playwright Mikhail Shatrov, who has had close ties with Soviet leaders, told the Finnish weekly Suomen Kuvalehti earlier this year that Gorbachev was elected by a majority of one, with then-Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko casting the tie-breaking vote.

In the absence of a Stalinesque dictator, which Gorbachev clearly is not, the Soviet leadership works by internal political consensus, avoiding showdown votes on policy issues so as not to accentuate divisions and foment factionalism.

To shape the consensus to fit his own convictions, Gorbachev has had to change the people who define it. Despite his narrow initial majority, he has managed to do this with a speed and adeptness that has surprised many Western analysts.

Complete Turnover

In 2 1/2 years, the Politburo, which has no set structure or size, has undergone nearly a complete turnover, with the removal of five Brezhnev-era figures identified with the old conservatism, including Grigory V. Romanov, Gorbachev’s most serious rival for power at the outset.

Only three holdovers remain from the Brezhnev Politburo--Gromyko, Ukrainian party boss Vladimir I. Shcherbitsky and Mikhail S. Solomentsev--while Gorbachev has managed to bring in half a dozen allies whose vigor and sophistication are on a par with his own.

Among them are Alexander N. Yakovlev, the party propaganda and culture chief who has been a guiding force behind the policy of glasnost, or greater openness; Premier Nikolai A. Ryzhkov, the head of government, and Nikolai N. Slyunkov, the party secretary in charge of economic administration.

As a first and crucial step toward securing his hold on the nationwide party bureaucracy, Gorbachev has moved loyalists into the Central Committee Secretariat, the party’s top administrative staff in Moscow, whose 21 departments supervise the government, regional party organizations and, in effect, the whole of Soviet society from heavy industry to the Bolshoi ballet.

The number of party secretaries who oversee this work has grown to 12. They include such key Gorbachev allies as former U.S. Ambassador Anatoly F. Dobrynin, now in charge of foreign policy; Vadim A. Medvedev, who supervises relations with Moscow’s East European partners and other Communist countries, and Anatoly I. Lukyanov, a law school classmate of Gorbachev’s whose duties include control over the flow of internal documents and policy papers and supervision of the KGB, the security and intelligence agency.

Freedom of Movement

While all these changes appear to have given Gorbachev substantial freedom of movement in foreign as well as domestic policy, Western analysts and Soviet officials say the need to maintain a consensus in upper party ranks still constrains him.

“Gorbachev has shown himself to be an extremely forceful and dynamic leader, but there is still a collectivity to this leadership,” a senior U.S. Soviet specialist noted. “He has not gotten everything he wants, when he wants it.”

Moreover, signs of divisive tension at the top continue to emerge regularly in the Moscow rumor mill, in veiled disputes and satirical jibes in the official press and in authoritative leaks to the Western press about infighting in the leadership.

Gorbachev’s chief constraint is embodied in the formidable person of Yegor K. Ligachev, the blunt-spoken former party boss of Siberia’s Tomsk oblast, a vast frontier province he is reputed to have ruled with an iron hand, until former KGB chief Yuri V. Andropov (who was also Gorbachev’s mentor) brought him into the leadership when Andropov succeeded Brezhnev in 1982.

As the Politburo’s second-ranked member, Ligachev presides over its weekly meetings in Gorbachev’s absence. In an apparent effort to circumscribe his authority, Gorbachev has stacked the Politburo with Central Committee secretaries like Yakovlev and Slyunkov, allies whose responsibilities for ideological and economic matters overlap Ligachev’s duties.

‘Excesses of Press’

But Ligachev continues to differentiate himself from the Soviet leader by attacking what he calls “excesses” of openness in the press, pressuring some of the boldest editors to restrain their current efforts to expose Stalin’s crimes and by indirectly questioning the more liberal, market-oriented elements of economic reform.

Western analysts believe that while he appears to share Gorbachev’s basic belief in the need for reforms to preserve the Soviet Union’s military strength into the 21st Century, Ligachev, by staking out a more conservative attitude, has tried to position himself to assume the leadership if Gorbachev is deemed to blunder or fail.

“Ligachev is very nervous about the use of market forces in the economy, about the decentralization of certain kinds of economic decisions,” a senior Reagan Administration Sovietologist in Washington noted. “Gorbachev is at base a maximalist. Ligachev is a minimalist.”

Tumultuous Meeting

The clearest sign of potentially disruptive tension in the leadership was a tumultuous Central Committee meeting on Oct. 21 that seemed to throw Gorbachev off balance as he met two days later with Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

According to Soviet officials, who have offered accounts of the incident that vary on crucial details, Boris N. Yeltsin, the Moscow city party boss and a close ally of Gorbachev, bitterly accused the party leadership of dragging its feet on reform while publicly cheering it on. As Ligachev reportedly shouted him down, Yeltsin, a non-voting member of the Politburo, offered to resign.

The tensions that produced this dispute almost certainly persist, and may yet affect the balance of power at the top.

Warnings Issued

In his 70th anniversary speech, Gorbachev carefully staked out a moderate position, warning against both the conservative enemies of reform and its overzealous proponents.

Rejecting criticisms attributed to his protege Yeltsin, Gorbachev said it would be wrong to “succumb to the overly zealous and impatient . . . who voice their disappointment with what they regard as a slow rate of change, who claim that this change does not yield the necessary results fast enough.”

While he contends with infighting at the top, Gorbachev is engaged on a second front with the lower party apparatus, mindful, perhaps, of the problem Russian rulers have always faced in translating directives into action.

“The czar himself is powerless against the bureaucratic body,” the British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859. “He can send any one of them to Siberia, but he cannot govern without them, or against their will. On every decree of his they have a tacit veto, by merely refraining from carrying it into effect.”

To recapture control of regional and local party machines that slipped from Moscow’s harness in the placid Brezhnev years, Gorbachev has continued a process begun by an ailing Andropov in 1983 of replacing lower-level party secretaries with men who are younger, better educated and presumably more obedient.

Replacement Process

Before his death in 1984, Andropov, aided by his new personnel chief, Ligachev, replaced about 20% of the 157 regional party leaders. The process slowed in the Chernenko interregnum, but since Gorbachev came to power in 1985, replacements have risen to about 60% of the old Brezhnev appointees.

In an effort to break internal bonds of cronyism and corruption, the Kremlin has put a number of provincial party organizations under the thumb of local party activists who were brought to Moscow and groomed for the role as “instructors” on the Central Committee staff. In other cases, new provincial party leaders have been imported from elsewhere in the country.

Despite this reshuffling, however, there is little outward evidence that the party machinery outside major cities is embracing perestroika with much warmth. If the arms-length attitude of the provincial press toward the leadership’s parallel policy of glasnost is any measure, enthusiasm for reform is low.

Glasnost implies an open discussion of the problems perestroika is supposed to solve. To the dismay of editors in Moscow, central newspapers like Izvestia and Pravda now seem like paragons of boldness and candor compared to the reporting on social and economic problems in most provincial papers, whose editors, one prominent Moscow journalist grimly observed, are “waiting to see whether we survive.”

Lukewarm Attitudes

Gorbachev himself has shown increasing impatience at the lukewarm attitudes of many local and regional party organizations.

“Two and a half years is long enough,” he warned in a meeting with Leningrad workers last month. “We were tolerant and democratic. But those who continue to wait must go. I mean the people who head work collectives, districts and cities.”

Despite the many changes at the top, Western analysts believe Gorbachev has still not secured a clear majority on the Central Committee, whose 307 members are drawn mostly from the middle ranks of the political elite. The usual function of the Central Committee, which meets two or three times a year, is to endorse Politburo decisions. But it has the power to settle deadlocks in the Politburo and to change the leadership, as it did in 1964 when it replaced Khrushchev with Brezhnev.

Some Western analysts in Moscow estimate that no more than a third of the Central Committee is clearly aligned with Gorbachev. Another third or more are left over from the Brezhnev old guard, and the allegiances of the remaining third are ambiguous.

Decisive Test

In what may be a decisive test of his power, Gorbachev, according to Soviet officials, will try to shift this balance by changing the makeup of the Central Committee at a nationwide party conference next June, the first such meeting the Soviet Communist Party has convened since 1941. Gorbachev asked the Central Committee last January to approve the conference, but not until last June did it consent.

Ordinarily, membership in the Central Committee is changed only once every five years, by a party congress, but the next one is not scheduled until 1991. Party rules governing the authority of the conference next June are vague, leaving it up to the conference itself. This means that its outcome will be decided mainly by Gorbachev’s ability to influence the selection of its several thousand delegates, either by summoning up grass-roots support in the party or simply by rigging local party elections in his favor.

Demands from the top to “democratize” the party by electing local leaders by secret ballot among multiple candidates will probably help this process along. So will a current “purification” of party ranks, as official newspapers call it. According to Soviet Russia, the past two years have seen the removal from party rolls of “thousands of people in every region” who failed to measure up to current standards.

In the absence of clear-cut public support for Gorbachev’s program, however, some reformers fear that such maneuvering may have only limited utility, particularly if conservative forces, as some fear, play on worker discontent to provoke violence as a way of intimidating the leadership.

Nationalist Riots

The fear is not far-fetched. According to Western diplomats, there is evidence that local party officials helped foment two days of nationalist riots in Kazakhstan last December, when Dinmukhamed A. Kunayev, a Politburo member and Brezhnev crony, was replaced as Kazakh party secretary by an ethnic Russian, Gennady V. Kolbin.

A veteran Soviet economist with ties to Gorbachev’s advisers sees his program, in fact, as representing only one of four streams of thought in the Soviet party. It is not necessarily the one that will prevail.

One, the economist said, is the old Brezhnevite view that “really, everything is OK.”

“This requires neither brains nor courage,” he said. “One only has to check when (political) holidays are coming up, congratulate each other on our successes and spread the honors all around. This worked very nicely for a number of years, but it is a dead end.”

Another view, that of the neo-Stalinists, holds that what Soviet society needs is not a decentralized economy with more freedom but stricter central control with more discipline.

“Sure, we need more order everywhere,” the economist observed. “But by what means? Sooner or later it would mean turning to tried and true methods of screwing the bolts down, and we know how well this worked in the ‘30s and ‘40s. We have considerable forces preaching this path. It is their breath that we feel on our necks.”

Economic Change Alone

A third school, he said, believes that the Soviet Union’s problems can be solved by economic means alone, with no need for relaxing censorship, digging up Stalin’s crimes or other political reforms.

The fourth, seemingly a minority view, but the one currently dominant in the Politburo, is that economic reforms are needed but that they can succeed only with the support of a population imbued with a new sense of participating in its own political system. This in turn is seen as requiring more open discussion of the problems the nation faces and more effective ways of letting people express their views without threatening the party’s hold on power.

While the party must not surrender its position as the guiding force in society, according to this view, its role must be limited to making long-term, strategic decisions. Day-to-day management of the society would be left in the hands of professional factory and farm directors and local officials who, while still subject to party approval, would be chosen in authentic, multi-candidate elections.

“This can happen only if we are able to make a passive society demanding,” the economist said. “It will be a long and painful process.”

If it works, it would not be the first time that a minority point of view became the guiding vision of Russia’s destiny. One of the ironies of the Bolshevik Revolution 70 years ago was the name itself. Derived from the word bolshinstvo , Russian for “majority,” Lenin’s radical leftist splinter party in fact was a tiny minority among socialists--but one that was led by a masterful tactician of political struggle.

Gorbachev’s supporters can only hope that his talents are no less than Lenin’s.

A team of Times reporters spent a month traveling through the Soviet Union, interviewing scores of Soviet citizens, for this portrait of the world’s other superpower on the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The reporters are William J. Eaton, The Times’ current Moscow bureau chief; Robert Gillette, Moscow bureau chief from 1980 to 1984; Dan Fisher, Moscow bureau chief from 1977 to 1980, and Stanley Meisler, The Times’ Paris bureau chief.