THE MOSCOW SUMMIT : Soviets to Focus on Crisis at Home : Conflict Over Restructuring Pits Gorbachev Against Conservatives

With the U.S.-Soviet summit behind him, Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev turned Thursday to a mounting domestic crisis whose outcome he acknowledges could determine the future of the Soviet Union.

To broaden and accelerate his political and economic reforms, Gorbachev has called a special Communist Party conference for later this month. But he has encountered increasing opposition from conservatives within the powerful party and government bureaucracy.

For Gorbachev, the party conference is already shaping up as a showdown with the conservatives: His supporters are calling it a make-or-break test for perestroika, as the policy of political and economic restructuring is called. And he appears to be strengthening and consolidating his position as much as possible in advance.

Summit a Political Plus

The five-day summit with President Reagan was an important political plus for Gorbachev in these preparations, according to well-informed Soviet sources, who said that to his domestic audience, the Soviet leader seemed to be a man in complete control.

Gorbachev, the Communist Party’s general secretary, had brought the President of the United States, whose past pronouncements cast him as the country’s archenemy, to Moscow, where Reagan declared in Red Square that the Soviet Union is not the “evil empire” he had once denounced but a partner in the search for world peace.

In dealing with the United States, Gorbachev on the one hand struck a careful balance of dialogue, flexibility and cooperation that appealed to a people tired of superpower confrontation. At the same time, he offered pride and firmness to a nation proud of its power and international standing.

“More tangible results would have been better for Gorbachev,” a senior Soviet foreign policy commentator remarked Thursday, referring to the Soviet failure to obtain U.S. agreement on new arms control proposals or on a broad declaration of “peaceful coexistence.”

“But the image value of Reagan recanting his rabid anti-Sovietism in the middle of Red Square surpassed almost any piece of paper short of an arms reduction treaty,” he said, adding: “The Soviet people are a peace-loving people--peace sells here in a way that it never would in the United States--and Gorbachev, to them, appears to be bringing that peace.”

Gains Consolidated

Summing up his talks with Reagan, Gorbachev himself said after the President’s departure Thursday that the “real achievements” of their meetings had been the consolidation of the improvements in Soviet-American relations and new steps toward peaceful coexistence.

“We have not been able, perhaps, to discuss everything with due thoroughness and go as far as we wanted, but we have still gone a few steps up,” Gorbachev told a meeting of peace groups from around the world that gathered in Moscow to mark the summit.

“There has been ever more realism and ever less rhetoric, though we haven’t been able to get rid of the latter completely.”

But Gorbachev, looking as much to his domestic as to his foreign audience, firmly reiterated the Soviet determination to decide its own policies, including human rights, regardless of pressure from the United States.

The Soviet Union, he declared, “will not accept any advice on how we run our affairs. . . . We do not need anyone else’s model. We don’t need anyone else’s values.

“All the peoples in the world seek ways to a better life, and it is not right not to trust a people, to suspect it of being unable to find this road,” Gorbachev continued. “Therefore, we reject any lectures addressed to us, and we are not going to teach anyone. The world is not a school where there are teachers and pupils. We all go to school in life and history, and history will show whose values are of a higher standard.”

The human rights problems that Reagan focused on so frequently during his visit “do take place,” Gorbachev acknowledged, “but this is not the (general) situation. This is not an overall picture of Soviet society.”

Reagan’s strong push on human rights required a matching Gorbachev response, according to Soviet officials, and he seemed determined to affirm his independence when he spoke Thursday.

But the summit, with its unprecedented television coverage, cast a strong glow over Gorbachev that was clearly intended to enhance his whole reform program, not just the foreign policy initiatives.

“The summit is an element in the preparation for the party conference,” another Soviet foreign policy analyst, who frequently advises Gorbachev, said as he reviewed the summit and its impact. “If people know that the relationship with the United States is stable, that the country is secure from foreign threats, then they will turn their attention to our domestic problems.

He added: “Reagan has helped us clear the deck for what needs to be done here, and that is the radical transformation of the whole political, economic and social system. . . . The summit has reassured people that they need not worry about threats from abroad, and it has even enhanced Gorbachev’s prestige as a man who can deal with the world and win us true respect.”

The focus of the party conference, however, will be on domestic policy changes, not foreign issues.

Gorbachev’s plans for the radical transformation of the country’s political and economic system are encountering strong conservative opposition throughout the powerful Communist Party and government bureaucracy, and the special party conference will be crucial in his efforts to broaden and accelerate change.

As endorsed by the party’s ruling Politburo and last week by the policy-making Central Committee, the proposals would take the party out of day-to-day administration of the government, the economy and most other aspects of Soviet society in an effort to broaden democracy and increase productivity.

The proposals, drafted by Gorbachev as party “theses,” would reverse a 70-year pattern of accumulating all power to the party and, for the first time, would place the party under the constitution and a strengthened legal system.

“Every party official, every government bureaucrat, everyone who has the least bit of power feels threatened,” a member of the Central Committee said privately this week. “And that means that each of them, plus all their friends, relatives, supporters and political vassals, if you will, opposes any change in the system . . . because they all would lose.

“Only the people support these reforms because, as Reagan would say, they want to get the party, the government, the bureaucracy off their backs. We are counting on such popular sentiments.”

Gorbachev’s liberal supporters are complaining, however, that they are being squeezed out as delegates to the conference, more than two-thirds of whose 5,000 participants have already been selected. Some of the most outspoken advocates of the Gorbachev reforms said this week that they have been deliberately excluded by party officials.

The dimensions of the crisis were dramatized by Boris N. Yeltsin, a former member of the ruling Politburo, who called for the replacement of Yegor K. Ligachev, the party’s No. 2 official, as chief ideologist--and then Gorbachev’s unexpected defense of Ligachev, who has been his persistent critic.

And in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, demonstrations by tens of thousands of people not only continued to demand the transfer of an Armenian-populated region of Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia itself but the dismissal of Ligachev as a symbol of conservatism in the party.

Meanwhile, intermittent strikes are continuing around Moscow and in other cities as various workers, from bus drivers to miners to assembly-line workers, demand better working conditions, higher pay and shorter hours--and guarantees that they will not lose their jobs under the economic reforms.