Gorbachev Allies Fear He’ll Lose Struggle, Face Ouster

Liberal supporters of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev appear increasingly apprehensive that conservative opponents of his program of radical political and economic reforms will muster enough support within the Communist Party bureaucracy not only to frustrate his plans but to force him from office.

In an indication of the intense struggle going on within the party, the ultra-sensitive question of how long Gorbachev will last is being addressed with unprecedented openness as the reformers plot their strategy and tactics.

Consequently, the impression is growing of an approaching showdown--perhaps even a political cataclysm--at the special party conference at the end of June, as a result of which Gorbachev ultimately could be ousted. He had hoped to obtain at the conference a mandate for broader and faster reform but now faces serious resistance from within the party and government.

Articles and letters generally in support of the reforms are multiplying in the Soviet press, expressing these fears and proposing ways to counter the opponents of perestroika , as Gorbachev calls his reform program.

One of the latest proposals came Wednesday in the avant-garde weekly newspaper Moscow News, with a suggestion that the Communist Party leadership be combined formally with the country’s presidency to ensure that Gorbachev could not be removed by party and government bureaucrats as Nikita S. Khrushchev, another reformer, was in 1964 in favor of Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Melor Sturua, a veteran political commentator for the government newspaper Izvestia, proposed constitutional changes so that the party leader is also president--and is chosen in a nationwide election with a secret ballot.

“I believe we must have a constitutional reform establishing presidential rule and, as a very important provision, the president should be elected not at a session of the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) but in a nationwide direct and secret vote by the people,” Sturua said in the Moscow News article.

While there are many arguments, pro and con, on such a major constitutional change here, for Sturua the conclusive issue is the possible removal of Gorbachev by disgruntled party bureaucrats who might manage to muster a majority on the party’s 309-member Central Committee, which has the power to elect and dismiss the party’s general secretary.

The primary significance of Sturua’s article lies mostly in the problem it is addressing--what if Gorbachev were ousted?--rather than the proposal it is advancing.

Battle Lines Being Drawn

In the political ferment here, however, proposals for reform are immediately identified with those who might carry them out, and vice versa, as battle lines are drawn in the deepening struggle for what virtually all participants now regard as the future of the Soviet Union.

“One of our political cliches used to be ‘life-or-death struggle,’ and now we see it happening all around us,” a journalist at Pravda, the leading Communist Party newspaper, commented this week.

“We are all convinced, and certain in fact, that we are entering a struggle that shapes the future of this country . . . and, to the extent this country has influence and power, that shapes the destiny of the world. We are also convinced--most of us, anyway--that Mikhail Gorbachev alone offers us hope of survival.”

The Soviet press has carried letters in the past month that went so far as to warn of the likelihood of civil war if perestroika , the broad policy of political, economic and social reforms under the current party leadership, should be defeated and Gorbachev ousted.

The newspaper Soviet Culture, which focuses on the country’s intelligentsia, has twice published letters warning that Gorbachev is far from secure because of the mounting conservative opposition to the reforms.

Any leadership change, one letter writer said, “should be left to the people and be the subject of a national referendum.”

“Until this change is implemented, the possibility of the sudden removal of Comrade Gorbachev from his position is quite real,” the letter said, raising the possibility of something so sensitive that politically astute Soviet analysts generally refer to it in the most oblique terms.

But this letter writer, and others, were making a serious point: If Gorbachev should be ousted, popular hope would be lost, political debate would be useless and the advocates of reform might then group themselves into armed contingents to fight for change.

Seen as Too Apocalyptic

While most Western observers read such warnings as too apocalyptic and quite improbable in terms of Soviet history and political realities here, so much has changed that few are willing to forecast either the outcome of the party conference or the broader questions beyond that.

Gorbachev’s position as party general secretary is not at stake at the party conference--nor are the positions of many of his conservative critics who sit on the Central Committee and even on the party’s ruling Politburo.

What will be decided, however, are the party’s broad reform strategy and the scope of Gorbachev’s mandate for further and faster change.

These are the issues, however, that have aroused the party and government bureaucrats to protect their power and privilege, that have mobilized conservatives behind Yegor K. Ligachev, the party’s second-ranking official, and that are rapidly dividing Soviet society as ordinary citizens calculate whether they would gain or lose.

“Everyone is for perestroika until they begin to do the sums in their own lives,” a senior Soviet journalist--and an avowed supporter of the reforms--explained, “and then many are not so certain because they may be losing or, at least, not gaining. . . .

“In a situation as politicized as this, with a policy that is as personalized as perestroika has become in its identification with Gorbachev, a small failure--an impatience, really--can become a big failure, and the sponsor may fail with it. And that’s our fear about Gorbachev--that he is so vulnerable to such politics.”

The reformers failed to win the commanding majority among the 5,000 delegates to the party conference that they had sought for “partisans of perestroika, “ and they found themselves squeezed out of many local party delegations where they thought they had secure places. Even some of Gorbachev’s closest, most trusted personal advisers failed to win seats.

In their places are largely party officials, many skeptical of all reforms and politically more conservative.

The party’s Politburo, attempting to reassert its leadership over the conference after local party organizations ignored its election rules, called Wednesday for the submission of proposals directly to the conference, instead of going through hierarchical channels, in an effort to get around bureaucratic opposition.

Backlash Against Conservatives

Yet, there is already a backlash against the conservatives who were naming one another to conference seats, ignoring party requirements for secret-ballot elections.

Dissident demonstrations in Moscow, Leningrad and Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia, have focused on the conservatives, who have been able to say, “We told you so,” as they did in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

And in Omsk, critics of the local party leadership filled a sports stadium to air their grievances and to protest the rigging of the delegates’ election from that Siberian outpost to the party conference.

“A battle of ideas is on, and not just ideas,” the party newspaper Pravda said this week. “The old, the outdated is stubbornly resisting, unashamed about its choice of means.”