Political Debate Expands: Soviets in Happy Turmoil

Suddenly, political debate has exploded across the Soviet Union.

Debates are raging about government policies, about national priorities, about the very future of the country.

Feuds within the ruling Communist Party are flaring up. Leaders, and would-be leaders, are competing for public support. Alliances are being forged as reformers and conservatives maneuver for position.

New issue-oriented political groups are forming. Petitions, protests, rallies and even approved public demonstrations have become almost commonplace. The long-insipid Soviet press has a new zest with readers lining up by the dozens to buy the hottest newspapers and magazines.

And that great political bastion, the Communist Party, is undertaking a vast reorganization that will transform it from an inward-looking, de facto government back into a political party--still fully in charge but knowing it will have to canvass hard to win support.

The whole country seems to be in turmoil, and quite happily so.

“We’ve discovered politics, and it seems that it’s better than sex,” Yuri Glushko, 36, a research mathematician, commented Sunday. “Everywhere I go, people are talking politics, politics, politics. It’s really becoming a national obsession. . . .

“The reason is simple: many people, probably for the first time in their lives, are able to see those forces that will determine where they live, what work they will do, what their children will study, what food they eat, what clothes they wear, what they will see at the cinema or on television, what they will do for fun.

“Politics matter a great deal in any society, and in a centrally-planned economy such as ours they matter even more. And now--I will say it again--for the first time in their lives many people are getting a sense that they can participate in the decision-making, which is what politics really comes down to.”

And what makes all this ferment more than an interesting way to assess the internal workings of the Soviet Union is the popular expectation that quite soon, within a few months, actual participation in top levels of government will be open for non-Communists. This would be a historic reversal of past party policy, which has treated non-members with suspicion.

Last week’s party conference’s acceptance of the far-reaching reform proposals of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Communist Party’s general secretary, mean a full scale effort to revitalize the system of popularly elected local and regional councils with a national parliament at the top of a new governmental structure.

Competition in Elections

The new councils, called soviets, will get decision-making powers, and people who are not members of the Communist Party will probably stand as good a chance to win election as party members in the competitive, multiple-candidate, secret ballot elections that are planned. Some of those outside the party will then be elected council officials, posts now reserved for party people.

“Today, we are a debating society, nothing more really, but now we can see the possibility of becoming the nucleus of a political action group before the elections next spring,” Svetlana Romazanov, a government administrator, commented during a meeting Sunday of an informal political discussion group in northern Moscow. “Imagine what it would be if we could put our candidate into the elections and even get her, or him, elected.”

The Soviet Union has always had politics, of course--real politics, not just the campaigns and rhetoric of the Communist Party--and everybody knew it, sometimes talked about it and occasionally even took part.

But until preparations began for the recent special party conference, Soviet politics were conducted almost entirely behind closed doors with public participation unwelcome.

“Politics were always ‘party business,’ and that shut out the nine out of 10 of us because we were not party members,” Tanya Bobkov, 40, an English teacher, remarked during the discussion group’s Sunday meeting.

‘Couldn’t Do a Thing’

“So, you might know what was going on--who was fighting whom, what the issues were and how it might work out--but generally you could not do a thing, not a damn thing, about it unless it happened that the battle was at your work collective and you were feeling particularly brave or foolhardy.”

With the conference, however, Soviet politics went public.

On prime-time television, people saw many delegates to the conference--workers, managers, farmers and intellectuals with whom they could identify--passionately debating real issues:

Why was there not enough meat? Why were other foods also rationed? Why were manufactured consumer goods so shoddy and in such short supply? Why did economic planners continue to ignore the environmental damage done by big industrial facilities? Why did governmental ministries still involve themselves in local decision-making despite promises of autonomy? Why were women’s rights still little more than slogans?

“Some of the delegates were asking very tough questions--you know, the kind they used to arrest you for--and those who were being a bit more polite were also raising the issues that are on people’s minds, like why the hell did we go into Afghanistan and what do we tell the mothers whose sons died there,” Semyon Orlov, 41, an electrical engineer, said as the discussion group analyzed the conference and its impact.

Emerging Alternatives

Composed of both members and non-members of the party, the group is one of several hundred nationwide that are emerging as an alternative to the Communist Party’s structure and formality, but not necessarily its ideals.

“We are beginning, just beginning, to ask the questions that need to be answered if we are ever going to be a democratic country,” Orlov continued. “I know that many people in the West say that socialism is the antithesis of democracy, that we Russians can never be democrats. I don’t agree, and I hope that I am proved right.”

Watching on television, the country also saw the stonewalling of many apparatchiki, party and government officials, who in the tradition of Soviet political triumphalism reported progress in everything and only bright vistas ahead.

Several party officials were clapped into silence by the delegates themselves, disgusted by their rhetoric, and television cameras focused on laughing delegates when one hapless provincial party leader declared that the country’s political system was being “further perfected,” although it had just been described by the previous speaker as fatally flawed.

“The broadcasts turned our whole nation into that proverbial village where everybody interacts, back and forth and all the time,” the mathematician Glushko commented. “Once the party decided to turn on the television, it turned ‘on’ the people. . . .

‘At Times I Was So Angry’

“We saw some guys who are supposed to be our leaders, we saw those ordinary delegates, who did a much, much better job of speaking for us and then we reacted ourselves, almost as if we were present. . . . At times I was so angry I was shouting at the television and starting to throw things, and at times I stood up to cheer a really great speech.”

What Soviet citizens were seeing was real debate, among not only conference delegates but the party’s top leaders, most of whom were no more than names in a newspaper or fleeting images on the television news before the conference.

In one dramatic confrontation, Boris N. Yeltsin, the ousted first secretary of the Moscow party organization, outlined an alternative program of reform--ideas on how to proceed much faster with the changes that almost all agree are needed here.

But Yegor K. Ligachev, the party’s chief ideologist and Yeltsin’s principal opponent, then denounced those proposals as “adventurist” and Yeltsin’s goals as unachievable.

And Gorbachev, after first praising Yeltsin’s energy and imagination, then sided with Ligachev, who had disclosed, almost in passing, that he and three others widely viewed as conservatives in the ruling Politburo had ensured Gorbachev’s election to the top party post in 1985.

Not Seen Since 1920s

Not since the 1920s, when V. I. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, encouraged open party debates, had ordinary Soviet citizens seen such high-level give-and-take.

“I think this has electrified the country,” said one Western ambassador, who prides himself on his skepticism about all developments here, especially those within the party. Yet, if galvanizing the people was one of Gorbachev’s goals, the ambassador added, then the Soviet leader had succeeded.

Even the variety of opinions among people on the street was “just amazing,” the ambassador said, recalling his previous tours when most people refused to speak about politics. “Six months ago, most people really didn’t give a darn, and now they are arguing with each other and anyone else who passes by.”