Soviets May Retake Rights From the Party

By all accounts, next week’s conference of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party--the first in four decades--will be the major test of General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s strength among his constituents, not all of whom have been as receptive to perestroika and glasnost as he would like.

One of the conference agenda items will be the role of the party, a topic that has personal meaning for virtually every Soviet citizen.

The Communist Party is the backbone of the Soviet system. Its slogans, its campaigns and its directives have been ingrained in Soviet life since the days of Lenin and have left their mark on every aspect of Soviet society. Gorbachev is asking the conference delegates to reassess the role of the party, which, in his view, has overstepped its bounds by usurping power that belongs in the hands of the government and by running roughshod over the rights of Soviet citizens.

Last month Pravda published a series of theses, set forth by the party’s Central Committee, that would limit the function of the party and increase that of elected government bodies (soviets). In brief, the theses said that the party must not overstep its role as defined by the Soviet constitution, that it must stop giving orders to the soviets and government agencies, and that it should introduce glasnost into its own inner workings.

The delegates will discuss this set of proposals at the conference, and then, presumably, if enough of Gorbachev’s supporters carry the day, pass resolutions that will place realistic limits on party activity.

Gorbachev is right in trying to stabilize and normalize the role of the party, since its relationship to the people whom it governs is far from clear. Lenin, who was forced to deal with economic crises and his own ill health during the early years of the Bolshevik state, never turned his attention completely to defining the role of the party in the new state. From Stalin’s time to the present, that role has been grossly understated in Soviet law, thereby creating a situation in which the party amassed more de facto power than was granted it on paper.

Only slightly more than 6% of the population belongs to the Communist Party. The official reason given for this is the difficulty of attaining the coveted membership. The unofficial reason is indifference.

Despite the small membership, the party’s presence is ubiquitous. Every day Soviet citizens pass larger-than-life party placards on the street exhorting them to “Move Forward Toward Communism”; the message is received with approximately the same attention that we accord billboards in America. Parents sign their children up to be Pioneers not because they want them to become imbued with the principles of communism but because it is an organized social outlet. University students are required to take a seemingly endless number of courses in the history of the Communist Party, philosophy (with heavy emphasis on dialectical materialism) and political economy, all designed to mold the good communist adult. Every working place, from factory to institute, has its resident partorg , or party organizer, whose job is to see to the ideological upbringing of its workers. This is done primarily through weekly political information meetings--attendance is mandatory--at which the workers are provided with summaries of world events from the party point of view. It is also the partorg who sees to it that all workers participate in subbotniks , a party-organized activity that requires each worker to give a Saturday of free labor to the state. The party also conducts media-blitz campaigns designed to highlight an area of Soviet life that needs strengthening or improving. Both Yuri Andropov’s campaign against laxity on the job and Gorbachev’s campaign against alcoholism were put into motion and waged by the party.

Although the party is omnipresent in Soviet life, most Soviets are remarkably adept at ignoring it--except when they find themselves the victims of its abuse. Every Soviet who is not among the elitist 6% that belong to the party has at one time or another fallen victim to it--has been passed over for an apartment, for instance, or a vacation at a resort on the Black Sea, or a place for her child at a preferred school. A constant source of complaint in the workplace is that undue preference is given to party members when it comes time for promotion.

Perhaps the most serious point of contention these days between party and non-party members is that the former are often immune from arrest, thus putting them above the law that historically has dealt harshly with Soviet citizens.

Traditionally, most Soviets have had little recourse in dealing with party abuse, both because no one dared to buck the system and because there was no real channel for lodging a legal complaint. Under Gorbachev both obstacles are gradually being removed. Soviet citizens are being encouraged to express their concerns openly, and the legal system is being revamped, making it easier for them to bring their grievances to court.

The greatest irony to the party reforms that are being proposed is that most are already part of Soviet law. Over the years the party has either ignored those laws or abused them. This fact implies something very important about the whole process of democratization in the Soviet Union. Many of Gorbachev’s reforms are aimed at recovering rights that were granted to Soviet citizens on paper but ignored in practice.

Gorbachev is not seeking to change the theoretical basis on which the Soviet system was founded, but to forge a closer link between theory and practice in his country. How far he has come in gathering popular support for his efforts will be seen next week.