Gorbachev Will Call on Party to Yield Power : Meeting Opening Today to Get Reform Program

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev will open a special conference of the Communist Party today with a call for the party to end its 70-year monopoly on power and instead to lead the Soviet Union from within the government, the enterprises and the other institutions it commands.

Gorbachev also will outline a program that, according to senior party officials, will broaden and accelerate the process of perestroika , the political, economic and social reform with which he began to transform the country within weeks of coming to power in 1985.

And he will push the promotion, within a much-reorganized party, of other reformers committed to speeding perestroika and ending the nation’s prolonged stagnation.

Break With the Past

Gorbachev’s speech will be a sharp break with the past, senior party officials predicted Monday in briefing journalists on the special party conference. They said it will offer a vision of a new and much different future for the Soviet Union.

“Our intention is to create a human face for socialism, and that means making over socialism to serve the human being,” Naili B. Bikkenin, editor of the party journal Kommunist, said, reflecting the optimism of most of Gorbachev’s supporters.

The focus of Gorbachev’s speech, according to the party officials, will be the urgent need for a sharp separation of the party as a political organization from the government bodies, economic enterprises and social institutions that until now it has tightly controlled.

The special Kremlin conference, expected to last four or five days, will be a summing up of the first three years of perestroika and the launching of the next phase of reform, according to the party officials, who predicted it will become a turning point in Soviet history.

“The main question to be discussed at the conference is the restructuring of our political system, which is of course obsolete, absolutely obsolete,” Bikkenin said. The party is now “in search of democracy,” he added.

The conference, to be attended by 5,000 delegates from across the country, is expected to issue a series of instructions to party organs, including the policy-making Central Committee, to expand the reform process with all possible speed. Legislation will then be put to the Supreme Soviet, the Parliament, for enactment later this year.

In political terms, Gorbachev is expected to use both his speech and the conference as a whole to renew the momentum of his reform program, overcoming the opposition of party conservatives to the pace and scope of perestroika . He had decided a year ago that he could not wait for the next party congress, scheduled for 1991, to renew his mandate for reform.

Although sharp debate is certain, the major battles have already been fought and decided on most issues, according to informed party sources, and Gorbachev will present the common position of the party leadership.

The selection of delegates turned into a major contest, with party apparatchiks using their positions and bureaucratic skills to win what may be a majority of places at the conference, squeezing out hundreds of pro- perestroika reformers in the process.

‘We Have Been Cheated’

“Frankly speaking, I and everyone I have talked with has the impression that we have been cheated,” Alexander Bovin, one of the country’s most prominent political commentators, wrote in a bitter commentary in the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. “The party bureaucracy took the preparations for the conference into their oh-so-experienced hands and, in fact, crushed the first sprouts of internal party democracy. . . . The party bureaucracy lives on and wins.”

But senior party officials glossed over such complaints Monday, describing the elections as the most democratic the party has ever had and a step toward even freer elections in the future.

However, serious political skirmishing is likely to resume almost as soon as the conference ends, party sources said. They predict that reformers will try to implement all the conference’s instructions and more if they can, while the conservative opposition tries to resist.

“The conference must work out a unified opinion on how we see the role of the party in the future,” Otto Latsis, the deputy editor of Kommunist, said. “This is the most contentious issue.”

Gorbachev’s intention, as explained by party officials and delegates to the conference, is for the party to renounce the huge powers it has amassed and with which it now commands the country, running virtually every office, factory, farm and store, every government body and every school, hospital and community center.

Gorbachev’s Goal

Instead, Gorbachev wants the party to lead the country through the exercise of its political authority, leaving day-to-day management to other institutions and broadly sharing power with those outside its ranks.

“We are going back to Lenin’s methods,” Bikkenin said, referring to V. I. Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary who founded the Soviet state. “Lenin wanted Communists to lead not by strength of power but by strength of talent, strength of knowledge, strength of experience and strength of vision, and to exercise that leadership through its members in the government and other bodies.”

The party is not retreating from power, other spokesmen asserted, but is attempting to increase democracy, to improve economic productivity and to return to the people greater control over their lives.

But Gorbachev does intend, the officials said, to break the chokehold the Soviet bureaucracy has on the nation as a result of the party’s efforts to run everything.

While Gorbachev’s supporters expressed confidence Monday that his proposals would win the endorsement of most of the delegates, much debate is expected on the party’s future role, because Gorbachev’s program would realign the whole Soviet political system.

‘Implications Are Profound’

“These decisions will change our country, all our lives, quite drastically--though not all in one day,” Latsis said. “The scope is great. The implications are profound.”

More than 1.5 million proposals--many that have been published are even more radical than the program put forward by the party leadership--have been forwarded to the conference from around the country.

Among the proposals are calls for the popular election of the Communist Party leader by a secret national ballot; political and economic autonomy for the country’s 15 constituent republics; a memorial to the victims of the dictator Josef Stalin; a full-time parliament that would assume the policy-making role the party has had; a return to family farming after five decades of collectivized agriculture; the sale of shares to finance investment in state and private enterprises, and an end to military conscription.

Gorbachev, who observed with pleasure last month that the nation had become a “vast debating society,” is expected to call on the delegates to acknowledge the popular demand and approve his reforms.

“The key question is the place of the party in Soviet society,” said Yegor Yakovlev, editor of the avant-garde weekly Moscow News, a strong Gorbachev supporter and a conference delegate. “We think it should cease to exercise a monopoly of power and that it should end the anonymous power of the (government and party) apparatus. There must be a differentiation between state and party and a return of government functions to local soviets (elected government councils).”

Party Reorganization

Another conference priority, party officials said, will be reorganization of the party, including measures to make its officials at all levels accountable to both the membership and the public and to limit their terms of office to two, totaling 10 years.

At the same time, the party would place itself under the Soviet constitution and legal system, formally recognizing the equality before the law of other institutions with which it would now be sharing power.

The party, whose 20 million members have long constituted an elite with a greater voice in political affairs, also would reassert the equal rights of Soviet citizens outside the party to participate in governing the country.

The party “theses,” drafted largely by Gorbachev and put forward last month by the policy-making Central Committee, contain the basic ideas for “our political reconstruction,” Bikkenin said. But Gorbachev is expected to enlarge upon them and take them further in his speech.

“Our main aim is ending the alienation of the Soviet people from power,” Bikkenin said. “That alienation began in the 1930s (under Stalin), but it continues to today. We have had formal organs of people’s power, but they have not had real power. The Supreme Soviet functions as a rubber stamp.

‘Reliable Guarantees’ Needed

“We need reliable guarantees against a recurrence of what happened in our past. The party conference is to set up such guarantees by promoting the party’s democracy and the development of a healthier society. These guarantees will not just happen--they will have to be created, and that is one of the main items for the conference.”

Resistance is expected from party conservatives, mainly old-line bureaucrats who used their positions to secure seats at the conference and who fear loss of their power, prestige and privileges.

Georgi K. Kryuchkov, deputy head of the Central Committee’s organizational department, said that most of the conference sessions will be closed because of the likely debate.

“We assume that some discussions will be quite tense,” he told journalists. “We cannot rule out that some presentations won’t have been completely thought out, and participants must concentrate on the essence, not the form (of their argument). We need an atmosphere of complete openness.”

Yuri S. Afanasyev, the editor of Pravda, the principal Communist Party newspaper, said of debate within the party’s ruling Politburo that the issues are largely those of scope and speed.

Heated Debate

“No one there has any doubt about the need for perestroika ,” Afanasyev said, denying speculation of a serious split between reformers under Gorbachev and conservatives under Yegor K. Ligachev, No. 2 man in the party. “There is a heated debate on the concrete forms, methods, means and the time frame.”

Politburo members will sometimes speak two or three times on an issue, he said, and if there is no broad agreement, the matter is put aside for further study and development of a “consensus,” meaning a generally acceptable compromise.

Differences most frequently arise, Afanasyev added, between those Politburo members who came from industry, provincial government and other “outside” positions and those from the party apparatus itself.