Tass Reports Party Squabble : Gorbachev Assails Yeltsin for ‘Personal Ambitions’

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev accused his former protege, Boris N. Yeltsin, of putting “personal ambitions above the interests of the party” and blaming others “for his own major shortcomings,” Tass said today.

The official news agency, in an extraordinarily detailed account of an intraparty squabble, cited Gorbachev’s charges against the ousted Moscow Communist Party chief and followed them with a scathing attack on Yeltsin by other, unidentified party leaders.

The 56-year-old Yeltsin was said to have confessed his guilt and restated his faith in “the party’s general line” and in Gorbachev’s program of perestroika, the restructuring and modernization of the Soviet economy and society.

On Wednesday, Yeltsin was accused of “major shortcomings” in his management of the Soviet capital’s party apparatus and was removed by a plenary meeting of Moscow’s party committee attended by Gorbachev.

Yeltsin, who still holds a non-voting seat on the ruling Politburo, was the highest-ranking Gorbachev protege to lose his post since Gorbachev became Communist Party general secretary in March, 1985.

At a closed meeting of the party Central Committee on Oct. 21, Yeltsin criticized the party’s style of leadership and the slow pace in which perestroika was being implemented. He then offered to resign.

His remarks reportedly drew a rebuke from Yegor K. Ligachev, the No. 2 Kremlin leader, who is believed to be a conservative.

Yeltsin’s speech to the plenary session of the Central Committee, known as a plenum, “was on the whole politically immature, extremely confusing and contradictory,” Gorbachev said in today’s Tass report, adding that Yeltsin “went as far as to say that restructuring was giving virtually nothing to people.”

Communists in Moscow were called to meetings Thursday to hear why Yeltsin was ousted, Tass said. The same day, the ruling Politburo, in its regular weekly meeting, called on Soviets to work for the “democratization of social life and radical economic reform.”

Yeltsin had been among the most vocal advocates of Gorbachev’s drive for glasnost --openness.

He was replaced by Lev N. Zaikov, 63, a Gorbachev ally and Politburo member who once ran the party apparatus in Leningrad, the Soviet Union’s second-largest city.