Battle Lines Drawn as New Soviet ‘Revolution’ Begins

The battle lines are being drawn, and the titanic struggle has begun for the future of the Soviet Union.

Not since the cataclysmic violence in which the modern Communist state was born and shaped has the country gone through such an internal upheaval.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, calls it a “revolution without bullets,” for the radical reforms he is pursuing will, if successful, transform almost every aspect of Soviet life as he attempts to pull the country out of its profound political and economic stagnation.

But so great are the changes proposed by Gorbachev and his allies that they face opposition from within the Kremlin, where critics fear that he is going too far, too fast, risking chaos and even abandoning socialism, and from the vast, entrenched and deeply conservative bureaucracies of the Soviet government and Communist Party.

“Our society will never again be what it was,” Gorbachev declared earlier this month. “It is changing. There are mechanisms working for this change. A great deal is to be done, but the train has already started off, and it is gathering speed.”

This is the Soviet Union, a country caught up in what many are calling its second revolution, that President Reagan is visiting this week.

And that trip itself, marking a substantial improvement in Soviet-American relations over the last three years, is a further indication of Moscow’s changing policies, its willingness to engage and to find compromises meant to end decades of mutual hostility.

“The direct threat of a war involving the major powers has diminished,” the Communist Party Central Committee said last week in summing up the results of what Gorbachev calls “new political thinking” in foreign affairs. “The international position of the Soviet Union has markedly improved, and through heightened trust in our country rather than an increase in might.

”. . . The burden of military expenditure will decline. An opportunity has opened to counter the threat to peace on a broader social and political basis than before.”

These changes, a significant shift from the tension between the superpowers in the early 1980s, will give the Soviet leadership more time and more political space to tackle the country’s political and economic problems.

Gorbachev will attempt to broaden the scope of his reforms and accelerate their pace at a special party conference late next month that is shaping up as one of the first major battles in the revolution he calls perestroika --meaning the restructuring of the Soviet political system, the economy and society as a whole.

How to Move Forward?

“The central question,” he said of the party conference, “is how to move perestroika forward, how to make it irreversible. That is why the questions of deepening economic reform and democratizing the party and society will be the principal ones.”

Already, however, the upheaval has brought changes that Soviet citizens would have found inconceivable two years ago--and that many find difficult to comprehend today.

Gorbachev criticizes, denounces and even condemns the political system that brought him to power as undemocratic, the product of intolerable abuses that began with Josef Stalin in the 1920s and continued through Leonid I. Brezhnev into the 1980s.

He has consulted with Andrei D. Sakharov, the Nobel Peace laureate and outspoken critic of past government policies, on what the country must do to achieve democracy. He has gone back to economic policies rejected years ago as capitalistic and rehabilitated many Communists who were disgraced, even executed, as traitors. He has met with religious leaders to affirm religious freedom after decades of persecution.

Old Beliefs Questioned

Such long-held party beliefs as state ownership and central planning as the essence of socialism are being forcefully questioned by leading Communist theoreticians. The Soviet press, so dull in the past, now delights in challenging the bureaucracy, exposing corruption and championing the little man.

Agriculture, collectivized under Stalin in the 1930s and state-managed ever since, is being handed back to the farmers under Gorbachev. Factories that produced regardless of need, of profit or of loss are being closed if they do not earn their way. The virtual guarantee of lifetime employment is giving way to layoffs, and workers are starting to strike for higher pay and improved working conditions.

Further, the party leadership has decided that for the country to move ahead with the reform program, political power must devolve to much lower levels and that the party must retreat from the day-to-day administration of the country.

Break With the Past

In a dramatic break with 70 years of Communist rule, the party’s policy-making Central Committee said last week that it will exercise its “guiding role” not through orders to the government, enterprises and other institutions but through the activities of its members and the correctness of its policies.

The committee plans to put this and other “theses” to the special party conference in late June as part of a program to accelerate the reforms and make them “irreversible” despite opposition to them.

The personal impact of the changes has been immense as Gorbachev loosens the state’s iron grip on every aspect of Soviet life.

“When I look at myself, what I was three years ago and what I am today are two different people,” Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, chief of the Soviet General Staff, remarked last week. “ Perestroika, glasnost ( political openness) and democracy are developing in the Soviet Union. Altogether, we are taking another look at ourselves and our society.”

Institutions Cracking

But the overall impression from Moscow and from deep in the Soviet hinterland is one of political struggle, even social strife, as some of the country’s long-established institutions begin to crack and splinter under the pressure of the reforms.

“An immense struggle is unfolding within Soviet society,” Fyodor M. Burlatsky, a political scientist and Gorbachev adviser, said last week. “It is taking place on the basis of socialism, but the notions we have had of socialism are changing. . . . All is in flux . . . and the future is at stake.”

What set these changes in motion was the conclusion by the Soviet leadership, shortly after Gorbachev came to power three years ago, that the country was in a profound economic crisis, with decreasing per-capita output, declining productivity and deteriorating living standards.

An Economic Overhaul

Among the implications was the likelihood that the Soviet Union could not remain a military superpower into the next century and would instead slide toward Third World status unless it undertook a major overhaul of its economic system.

But with the consequent decision to reform the economy came the realization that far-reaching political changes would be needed if the country’s decline were to be reversed.

“They are fighting among themselves over a basic question, one they haven’t addressed since the 1920s,” said Ed A. Hewett, a specialist in Soviet affairs at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And it’s the right question: Is there a form of socialism, consistent with the past, attractive to educated people, that will allow the Soviet Union to continue to have great-power status into the next century?”

To Hewett and other foreign analysts, this amounts to a grim acknowledgement that socialism, as practiced by the Soviet Union, the world’s first socialist state, has failed.

Lenin’s Death Turning Point

But to Soviet observers, whatever their position in the current struggle, that is not the issue. In their analysis, the country deviated from socialism after the death in 1924 of V. I. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, and embarked on a course charted by Stalin, his successor, who ruthlessly imposed his own ideas. For them, the task now is to return to the original vision to build true socialism.

“The good name of socialism must somehow be preserved,” a West European ambassador here said. “Thus, we have the rationalization that whatever went wrong in the past 50, 60 or 70 years was not socialist, and could not be socialist simply because it was wrong. To say otherwise would mean abandoning socialism, and that would be simply impossible. And so they are redefining socialism and, if you will, remaking their revolution.”

The deterioration of the Soviet system began decades ago, Soviet and Western analysts agree, but deepened during the two decades of political, economic and social stagnation under Brezhnev, who died in November, 1982, and the two even more enfeebled leaders who succeeded him.

Economic growth had declined from about 5% a year in the 1960s to 3% a year from 1971 to 1975, to 2% from 1976 to 1980 and then to 1.8% from 1981 to 1985, according to U.S. estimates of the Soviet gross national product.

Living Standards Decline

With heavier per capita defense spending than the United States and large investments needed to develop natural resources, the meager growth rates meant that living standards, in terms of diet, housing, health care and production of consumer goods, declined significantly over the last decade.

Economic growth increased 3.9% in 1986 as a result of a good harvest and strict disciplinary measures against worker absenteeism and alcoholism, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, but the growth rate declined to 0.5% last year.

And the Kremlin’s old formulas for economic growth no longer work. The country does not have unlimited manpower with which to launch new development projects, and in a modern economy, where growth is increasingly based on high technology, sheer manpower is not the asset it once was.

Financing Problems

The Soviet Union’s natural resources, particularly oil and gas, are becoming more difficult and more costly to recover, and the declining international price for them has made it harder to finance new investment.

Even with increased efficiency and higher productivity, the prospects for the Soviet economy, in the view of U.S. and other Western specialists, were for slow, gradual improvement at best.

“Out of the end of the century, about the best they were going to be able to do, if everything worked right, would be to stop the scientific-technological gap from widening further,” a U.S. official commented in Washington. “It is going to widen further, at least through the mid-1990s.”

But the fundamental problem, according to top Soviet economists who advise the country’s leadership, is rooted in the simple fact that for decades the producer--whether worker, farmer or enterprise manager--has seen no gain from working harder, longer or better.

Economic Laws Broken

“We have broken the economic laws governing the relationship between management and labor, between production and the market, and so on,” Leonid Abalkin, one of Gorbachev’s economic advisers, said last week. “This is where it all began to warp.”

The problem, Soviet economists persuaded the party’s leadership, was first one of politics, second one of economics, and this judgment led to the broadening of perestroika to include political reforms as a prerequisite.

“The kind of changes that would be required to make the Soviet Union (an economic) juggernaut are generational and psychological, not just administrative and structural,” a U.S. government analyst said. “It is on that scale.”

The “theses” that will be put to the party conference do focus more on a far-reaching political transformation than on purely economic reforms, and the changes they propose are intended to go to the heart of the country’s problems.

But this very determination to deal with the fundamental problems, rather than simply try to make the system work better, arouses opposition.

Retreat From Socialism

Dedicated Communists, some of them still Stalinists, see a retreat from socialism. Government and party bureaucrats anticipate, quite rightly, loss of their power to the people they now rule. And many ordinary citizens, preferring the known to the unknown, fear change itself in a land where change has often been for the worse.

An intellectual from Leningrad talking about Gorbachev said last week: “I see him committed to improving the people’s lot. I am for him, and yet I worry that, out of zealousness perhaps, he may be leading us into trouble.”

Anxiety is widespread, and it reinforces--almost justifies--the resistance that is palpable within the party and government bureaucracy. Gorbachev’s response has been to purge his opponents from the bureaucracy as quickly and methodically as he can, to compromise with his critics in the leadership and to build a popular constituency within the country.

“A purge is already under way” of key party officials by Gorbachev both in Moscow and around the country, said Robert M. Gates, deputy director of the CIA.

Bureaucratic Warfare

Another U.S. analyst, who asked not to be identified, added: “The bureaucrats are acting like they are involved in guerrilla warfare. It’s house-to-house fighting now, and there are a lot of houses in Moscow.”

By U.S. calculations, Gorbachev has replaced about 40% of the Central Committee’s 300 members in the last three years, three-quarters of the Central Committee’s department heads, 10 of the 15 first secretaries of the country’s constituent republics, at least 92 of the 157 regional first secretaries and 72 of the 101 members of the Council of Ministers.

The coming party conference may bring greater changes. The leadership’s proposals call for supporters of perestroika to be promoted and the opponents of the new policies replaced.

But informed Soviet sources doubt that there will be an all-out purge.

Gorbachev has reached an understanding, they believe, with his principal ideological critic, Yegor K. Ligachev, the second-ranking party official, and affirmed the party’s leading role in society and socialism as the basis of reforms. Their differences, these sources say, were a matter of degree--the scope and speed of the reforms, not the necessity or urgency of them.

Party Unity the Key

They also see Gorbachev as wanting to preserve party unity, not at the cost of the reforms but in a desire to avoid internal feuding that would undermine them.

A more important task, Soviet political observers believe, will be consolidation of a “reform constituency” to counterbalance the conservative bureaucracy. Gorbachev advisers, including Burlatsky, suggested last week that a new political grouping might be formed shortly to bring together Gorbachev supporters across the country.

“There is no question that Gorbachev has broad, broad backing from workers, from farmers, from ordinary government employees, not just intellectuals,” a senior Soviet editor said last week. “When we analyze the letters we get from all over the country, the breadth and the depth of that support is overwhelmingly clear.

“The difficulty is that everyone expected bigger results--pocketbook results--much faster, and they are dismayed at how large the task is and how slow the payoff is. What Gorbachev has to do now is translate that unquestionable backing into active support--into votes, if you will--so that it crushes the opposition, just rolls over it.”