Gorbachev Says Foes of Reform Must Not Win

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, defending himself from internal critics on the left and right, said in a speech made public Tuesday that overcoming resistance to reform is still the main task facing the Soviet Union in the years ahead.

He warned that disaster would follow if the Soviet Union were to abandon his drive for economic and social restructuring, or perestroika, because opponents are frightened of sweeping economic and social changes.

Gorbachev also said that, at a Communist Party conference called for June, delegates will consider electoral and judicial reforms.

Gorbachev’s remarks, in which he depicted himself as an embattled leader reaching out for allies, were delivered last Friday to editors, publishers and cultural leaders. A text was distributed Tuesday by the official Tass news agency.

Gorbachev charged that some ultra-liberal critics are too impatient and lack the staying power needed to push through a program of reforms, and he upbraided conservatives for opposing greater democracy in Soviet life.

At times, the Soviet leader appeared to be carrying on a public debate with his second in command, party ideologist Yegor K. Ligachev, who has criticized the public airing of past mistakes in Soviet history, particularly of the Stalinist era.

Yet Gorbachev also chided editors for following their personal convictions rather than the Communist Party line, declaring: “The Soviet press is not a private shop. . . . Our people are for perestroika . . . so let us follow our line for perestroika. “

In his hourslong address, the Kremlin chief made a biting critique of shortcomings among party officials, ordinary workers and bureaucrats. While applauding a breakthrough in international relations and achievements in agriculture and machine-building, he said that the reform drive was just reaching its most difficult stage.

“The task is indeed a daunting one,” Gorbachev said. “We are just leaving the period of stagnation. . . . We perhaps have not realized completely how widespread various negative phenomena--parasitic attitudes, leveling of pay, report padding, parochialism, illegal actions--became in the years of stagnation.”

‘Enjoy All the Benefits’

“Deplorably, a widely current attitude is that one can work ten times less, a hundred times less than others, can do nothing at all, and at the same time enjoy all the benefits in the same degree as people do whose work makes a large contribution to the country’s development,” he added.

Some milkmaids, he said, earn 600 rubles a month (about three times the average Soviet monthly wage of 200 rubles) despite low milk production on their farms, he said, yet they resisted efforts to tie their pay to output of milk.

In contrast, he said, other workers who produce eight or ten times the average output are criticized for getting more pay than those who don’t work so hard, Gorbachev complained.

While he praised the Communist Party for serious changes for the better, Gorbachev said that too often its officials have lagged behind the times and “there is a lot of inertia and passive attitudes.”

During one portion of his speech, Gorbachev seemed to challenge a view advanced by Ligachev, who has complained of too much reporting in the official press on negative events and setbacks in Soviet history, such as the crimes committed during Josef Stalin’s purges of the 1930s.

“One cannot agree with those who suggest that we forget history or use only a certain part of it,” Gorbachev said. “We understand full well now that such a point of view is unacceptable.” Soviet people, he added, must have a profound knowledge of the causes of both major achievements and the tragic events in Soviet history, he said.

Sees Self as Centrist

Picturing himself as a centrist, he said he was frequently criticized by some persons on the right and some on the left.

In a clear reference to Boris N. Yeltsin, who was ousted as party chief in Moscow after a sharply critical speech at a party plenum last October, Gorbachev said those who mouth “revolutionary” phrases do not have the staying power for the long and difficult tasks ahead.

Yeltsin was counted as a proponent of the Gorbachev program but was sacked after he criticized the party leadership for the slow pace of reform.

Gorbachev acknowledged that the firing of Yeltsin “was viewed by intellectuals, especially the young people, as a blow to perestroika. This is the greatest delusion.”

‘Stubborn, Lengthy Work’

Without mentioning Yeltsin by name, Gorbachev said that “representatives of the ‘revolutionary’ phrase have neither composure nor readiness to assume responsibility, the onus of stubborn and lengthy work in order to move our society to new frontiers.”

Turning to critics who claim his reforms are undermining the foundations of Soviet socialism, Gorbachev asked: “By what are they being undermined? By people’s movement, by their activity aimed at handling more confidently the affairs in the country where they are the masters?

“Already now we see that questions of democracy in Soviet society will be the main, central problems. We shall cover everything here, including the electoral system, judicial reform, the perfection of control organs in the country, etc.,” Gorbachev said.

The Tass text provided no details of what specific reforms might be implemented after the June party conference, but Soviet officials already have implemented some electoral changes and are working on judicial reforms.

Local-Level Choices

Voters were given a choice of candidates in several thousand of the Soviet Union’s 52,000 local electoral districts in June, 1987.

In an interview published last week in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the deputy head of the Central Committee’s propaganda department, Nikolai V. Shishlin, said that multi-candidate elections should be held even for senior Communist Party posts and that no party official should be kept in office for life.

Officials also are engaged in a debate on how best to ensure that defendants’ rights are protected in criminal investigations and court cases. The chairman of the Soviet Supreme Court, Vladimir I. Terebilov, said in an interview with the party newspaper Pravda in December that the reforms should include stronger legal defense for citizens and less pretrial detention.

The audience for Gorbachev’s remarks included such outspoken editors as Vitaly A. Korotich of Ogonyok magazine and Sergei P. Zalygin of Novy Mir, a literary journal, as well as conservatives such as Viktor G. Afanasyev, the editor of Pravda, and Grigory Y. Baklanov of Zhanya magazine.