Ligachev’s No. 2 Position Secure, Gorbachev Declares

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev said Wednesday that Yegor K. Ligachev, the Communist Party’s chief ideologist and a conservative opponent of Gorbachev’s radical reforms, will retain his position in the party’s ruling Politburo despite calls for his replacement.

Gorbachev, in a rare public discussion of internal party politics, told a news conference that Ligachev is not blocking the reform program, known as perestroika, and that his position as the party’s No. 2 official is secure despite recurrent rumors that he would soon be ousted.

But Gorbachev, the party’s general secretary, said that Boris K. Yeltsin, the former party chief in Moscow, will be asked to explain his public demand this week that Ligachev be replaced.

Yeltsin, who lost his own position in the Politburo after clashes with the conservative party bureaucracy, said that Ligachev should be removed as a Central Committee secretary “because the processes in the party are too slow, because the party is still lagging behind, because the process of democratization is not developing . . . and Comrade Ligachev is the main person responsible.”

Ligachev’s removal would be up to the party’s policy-making Central Committee, Yeltsin said, “but of course it would be possible to develop the (reform) process more actively with someone else in that post.”

While such sentiments have been expressed by other liberals in the party, Yeltsin made his comments in interviews with ABC and the British Broadcasting Corp., and that use of the foreign news media has drawn considerable criticism.

“We at the Central Committee will demand from Comrade Yeltsin explanations as to what it is all about and what he is after,” Gorbachev said, speaking emphatically.

“As for Comrade Ligachev and his resignation, no such problem exists, either at the Central Committee or in the Politburo. That is all. That is what you should proceed from, and that is the way it will be.”

Gorbachev’s comments were carried quickly and prominently by Soviet news media in a major political innovation here: He had both discussed internal party politics in a public forum and submitted to the questioning of Soviet and foreign reporters.

Never before had a Soviet party leader held a formal news conference in Moscow, although they have done so abroad and given interviews here.

“Our leaders have always thought it unseemly to submit to such public questioning,” a prominent Soviet journalist remarked. “Gorbachev, however, thinks it is quite proper, and having so many foreign journalists here for the Soviet-American summit gave him a chance to start this.”

Behind Gorbachev’s statement apparently lies a compromise between Gorbachev and Ligachev based both on a mutual commitment to maintain party unity and on the scope and pace of the reforms that will be put to a special party conference at the end of June.

According to well-informed party sources, Gorbachev and Ligachev reached that compromise in a showdown earlier this year, when Gorbachev mustered his supporters and won acceptance for a far-reaching set of “theses” that will be the basis for discussion at the party conference, which is intended to broaden and accelerate the reform program.

Liberal supporters of the reforms have complained that they are being methodically squeezed out of the conference. With more than two-thirds of the 5,000 delegates chosen, party bureaucrats already may have won effective control, according to party sources, putting Gorbachev’s “partisans of perestroika” at a clear disadvantage at the conference.

But Gorbachev, while acknowledging the success that conservatives have had in winning places at the conference, expressed confidence that it will endorse the theses and that perestroika will move forward.

“Perestroika will win out,” Gorbachev said. “We may have isolated retreats, maneuvers and even setbacks, but this does not and will not change the main direction of our society’s development.”