Yeltsin Gets Role at Talks on Reforms

Boris N. Yeltsin, a fallen protege of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, has been elected a delegate to a Communist Party conference that will review reforms in the Soviet Union, a government official said today.

Yeltsin will represent the party organization of Karelia, an autonomous Soviet republic northeast of Leningrad, Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov told reporters at a news briefing.

The selection of Yeltsin could make for lively debate if he speaks at the conference, which runs from June 28 to July 1.

Fired as Moscow Party Boss

Yeltsin, 57, was fired as Moscow party boss and stripped of his post as a non-voting member of the country’s ruling Politburo because of an angry speech he gave last October.

In the speech to the party’s policy-making Central Committee, Yeltsin criticized the No. 2 man in the Soviet leadership, Yegor K. Ligachev, and complained that reforms were moving too slowly.

He gave several interviews to Western television networks during last week’s superpower summit, solidifying his reputation for speaking his mind freely about controversial matters. In one interview, he called for Ligachev to resign because he said Ligachev was blocking reforms.

Gerasimov said there was no requirement in party rules that a conference delegate live or work in the area he is chosen to represent. Yeltsin lives in Moscow, where his job is first deputy chairman of the State Building Committee.

The Karelian Autonomous Republic borders Finland and has a population of 746,000. It has played an important role in the careers of other party officials. The chief of the area’s Komsomol, the party youth organization, from 1940-1944 was Yuri V. Andropov, who went on to succeed Leonid I. Brezhnev in November, 1982, as general secretary of the national party. Andropov died in 1984.

Potential Battleground

The party conference is shaping up to be a battleground for supporters of Gorbachev’s social and economic reforms known as perestroika and the mid-level managers who resist him.

Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a prominent Soviet sociologist, has said “the most pronounced advocates of perestroika were not selected” as conference delegates.

The newspaper of the Moscow city party, Moskovskaya Pravda, complained today that “election of the candidates not everywhere has been conducted in the atmosphere of wide glasnost ,” Gorbachev’s policy of openness on selected issues.