Big Change Expected in Soviet Life : Conference Results Herald Turnabout in Rule by Party : Analysis

After nearly 70 years of absolute power, the Soviet Union’s Communist Party had some trouble accepting the call of its leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, to share its authority with others.

Debate became heated before the 5,000 delegates at the party’s special conference, the first in 47 years, endorsed Gorbachev’s proposals to take the party out of the direct administration of the country and its economy and to turn over those responsibilities to the most qualified people, whether or not they are party members.

That historic and far-reaching decision drastically alters the party’s prolonged drive to consolidate power in its own hands. It also affects the underlying philosophy that its actions and its policies are the expression of the country’s democratic will.

‘Turned Upside Down’

“Everything we know about politics, about power, almost about life itself is being spun around, pulled inside out, turned upside down,” a schoolteacher delegate from the Moscow area commented Saturday.

“Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was telling us that to retain power and to carry out the Communist Party’s program and achieve our goals for the nation, we will have to share power. . . . He is right, we believe him, we accept his arguments--but it is hard, truly hard.”

Gorbachev’s fundamental argument was profoundly realistic in assessing the party’s long years in power and the Soviet Union’s deepening problems. He saw that for the party to retain the nation’s leadership and accomplish its own long-term goals, it had to turn aside from the thrust, born of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, to amass and retain as much power as it could.

Instead of continuing to exclude non-Communists from most decision making in this way, Gorbachev called on the 20-million-member party to recognize that “non-party people” constitute the overwhelming majority of the country and that only with their support and energy can the party achieve its goals. Only one in 10 adults, in fact, belongs to the party.

“The party must understand that democratization is the movement of the times,” warned Yegor Yakovlev, editor of the avant-garde weekly newspaper Moscow News and a conference delegate. “Either the party will achieve this, or democratization will come by itself . . . through other forces and owing to another party.”

Such warnings shocked Communists who believed that the revolution was won when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, that the Soviet state was indestructible and that the country’s political and economic gains under their leadership had long ago become “irreversible.”

And for many delegates the outlook, the approach, the tone as well as the specific proposals were frightening. Their jobs, as party officials, were at stake.

Yet, the vigorous and sometimes dramatic debate at the four-day conference that ended Friday persuaded the delegates of the need for a complete overhaul of the country’s political system.

Beyond Party’s Ability

By concentrating power in its own hands and reserving to the party any decision of importance at every level of the government and its economic enterprises and other institutions, the Communist leadership had created a task that was simply beyond its ability.

The result, by the party’s own analysis, was political paralysis, economic stagnation and social decay of such proportions that the country faced the prospect of losing its superpower status, of slipping back further and further in the ranks of industrialized nations.

“If radical changes in the economic system are not carried out successfully, we will find ourselves left on the sidelines of history,” Nikolai Shemlev, one of the country’s most prominent economic thinkers, wrote before the conference, warning that unless the party acted promptly, “our revolution will ultimately be stifled.”

Gorbachev’s solution, outlined at the conference and eventually adopted, is for the party to retreat from the day-to-day administration of the government, from the management of economic enterprises and from running the other institutions where its “political leadership” had long ago turned into full control.

Under proposals approved by the conference but still to be enacted in legislation and constitutional changes, the nationwide system of popularly elected local and regional councils, known as soviets, will be revitalized to function as true local governments. On the national level, new lawmaking powers will be given to the Supreme Soviet, for years a legislative rubber stamp for the party.

More Power to Soviets

“The various party committees will perform only the functions specific to them as political organizations,” Grigory P. Razumovsky, one of the party Central Committee’s secretaries, said. “The soviets will then assume a major part of the work now done by the party.”

Economic enterprises were given the power last year to operate as businesses, making largely autonomous decisions based on profits and losses, and party officials promised that this authority will be strengthened by further implementing regulations.

All of this does not add up to a true retreat from power. The party is willing to share the power it won with the 1917 revolution and developed across seven decades, but it says plainly that it does not intend to relinquish it.

As part of the change, for example, local party leaders will stand for election as candidates for the chairmanship of the councils. At the national level, a new 2,250-member Congress of People’s Deputies will elect a new president, presumably Gorbachev, who will have broad policy-making powers.

For the first time, this will make party officials accountable to the public, for they will have to compete in contested, multiple-candidate elections for council posts against nominees from many emerging non-party movements; the election of the party leader as the local soviet chairman could become problematic in areas where he has little support.

Amendments Easily Defeated

While most party members agreed with Gorbachev that this was a good way to extend party influence by political leadership, some saw it as violating the party’s declared intention to separate itself from the government. They proposed a number of amendments--easily defeated--that would have imposed further restrictions on the party.

Full texts of the party resolutions have not yet been published, making analysis largely speculative in view of the intense debate and the rewriting of the resolutions on the floor of the conference’s final meeting.

Gorbachev, seeking to reassure apprehensive delegates whose personal power, prestige and privileges rest on their party positions, affirmed repeatedly that the party would remain the Soviet Union’s ruling party and society’s “guiding force.”

“We should not feel shy in front of the people, nor in front of the world,” Gorbachev declared as delegates asked why the party seemed to be in retreat. “We are the ruling party, and in any country the ruling party forms a government--executive power--at all levels.

“We are not abandoning the role of the ruling party in this country. On the contrary, we want to reaffirm it.”

Many Delegates Left Uneasy

Yet, the whole question left many delegates uneasy and unsettled. For them, the party had always been the focus of political activity, and its new role seemed to welcome not only partners but even competitors.

While Gorbachev spoke of cooperation with a patriotic front that would be largely non-Communist, several delegates raised the possibility of other parties.

Leonid Abalkin, director of the Institute of Economics and a key Gorbachev adviser, said that the logical development of truly free elections at all levels of government would be the emergence of opposition parties, which were effectively outlawed in 1922.

And this, Abalkin implied, might be a good thing for the country if it broadened representation in the local and national legislatures and ensured a full debate before any major decision.

These and other questions, Soviet observers said, will be answered only as the new system is worked out over the next year and the first elections are held for the enlarged Parliament in the spring.

Election Timetable

The present timetable calls for the Supreme Soviet to enact new legislation and amend the present constitution at its autumn session, according to party officials. This would permit elections to the new Congress of People’s Deputies in April and to local and regional soviets six months later. Gorbachev could be elected president as early as next April.

“Decisions have been taken on a fundamental change of the whole of our political system,” Anatoly F. Dobrynin, a secretary of the party’s Central Committee, told journalists here Saturday. “Tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, as it were, we will be entering the particularly important stage of implementation.”

Much political infighting probably lies ahead as virtually every political force in the country tries to assess how the changes will affect it.

Typically, the losers in the first skirmishes try hard, often desperately, according to Soviet political observers, in their effort to recover what they lost in the first set of compromises in order to prepare themselves for the second round.

“The party is the leader,” Viktor Afanasyev, editor of the Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, said, explaining how the organization functions politically in a one-party state. “That means the party answers for everything in politics, in the economy, in the ideological sphere and so on.

“Leaders should be elected through democratic methods, but the party must direct the process. Otherwise, it will end up in chaos.”