Leaders Back Gorbachev’s Reform Plans : Blueprint for Social, Economic Changes to Go to Special Parley

In a major endorsement of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms, the Communist Party Central Committee today adopted a new platform for implementing his economic and social policy changes, the No. 2 Kremlin official announced.

Yegor K. Ligachev told a foreign policy meeting the Central Committee had chosen Gorbachev, the party general secretary, to present the blueprint to an important party conference next month.

“We have every reason to say that today’s plenum has worked out a platform for the party to use in forging ahead to the all-union party conference,” Ligachev said after the 2 1/2-hour meeting of the Central Committee, the party’s 300-plus member policy-making body.

Ligachev said the Central Committee had a “very interesting and lively debate,” and then adopted the theses formulated by the ruling Politburo for the June 28 party conference. These, he said, “thoroughly analyze” developments since an April, 1985, party plenum laid the theoretical basis for the 57-year-old Gorbachev’s reforms.

The platform also makes “a number of important suggestions and proposals relative to the implementation of perestroika, glasnost, democratization and the implementation of a healthy political atmosphere,” Ligachev said.

Sign of Security

The announcement of the plenum results by Ligachev could be one more sign that the 67-year-old ideology chief is not in serious political trouble.

Reports of a major policy dispute between Gorbachev and Ligachev surfaced in Moscow last month. The reports suggested Ligachev had endorsed publication in March of an article in the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya that questioned whether Gorbachev’s reforms had gone too far. Ligachev has given speeches reflecting a more conservative approach than Gorbachev.

Gorbachev is expected to use the June 28 special party conference to tighten his hold on the party apparatus and to rout party officials hostile or indifferent to his ambitious program for perestroika, or economic and social restructuring.

In speeches earlier this year, Gorbachev also has said the June conference will consider reforms to strengthen the legal and judicial systems.

Gorbachev has called for creating a system to replace aging party officials and has been especially critical of the 18-year rule of Leonid I. Brezhnev as a period of stagnation and corruption. Brezhnev died in 1982.

Dmitri A. Lisovolik, chief of the U.S. section of the Central Committee’s International Department, has said the party will consider limiting the Communist Party general secretary to two or three eight-year terms.

Gorbachev said in an interview last Wednesday with the Washington Post and Newsweek that he endorsed the proposal.