The Conference CALLS : Convention Controversy Stirring the Soviets’ Side

The political world is topsy-turvy. For the moment it seems East is West and West is East.

Time was when American politicians and political conventions were rambunctious, dramatic and full of passion or unpredictable maneuvers. Lusty battles made them exciting. By contrast, meetings of the Soviet Communist Party were bloodless, censored, predictable rituals of ideological conformity. They were excruciatingly dull. Kremlinologists strained to read between the lines of hackneyed speeches for snippets of titillating nuance.

Now, roles are reversed.

In America, after the long primary season, national political conventions are an anticlimax. The real action has already occurred; the convention is for show. It is a political performance orchestrated to project a winning image for the candidate and to display a party unity that embraces all factions. Indeed, the promise of titillation at the Democratic Convention in Atlanta lies in seeing how much Jesse Jackson disrupts--not the predetermined outcome, but the show of harmony.

For the explosive drama of old-time American political conventions, look beyond the old Iron Curtain to the newly beleaguered Communist Party of Josef Stalin and Leonid I. Brezhnev. For genuine spice and excitement in this convention year, the extraordinary recent Communist Party conference summoned by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev must be the envy of American political organizers. It was riveting both because it was full of surprise and spontaneity and because its actions signaled that real change is occurring.

Ironies abound. Where American party conclaves have become exercises in playing it safe, with the top candidates shying away from candid talk on tough issues for fear of offending the electorate, Gorbachev built popular appeal at the party conference with a brash and daring invitation to draw the most uncomfortable issues into the limelight. Suddenly, ordinary Russians discovered politics and wallowed in the experience.

There, paraded on Soviet prime-time television, were all manner of strange and forbidden things: the Communist Party denounced as the problem, not hailed as the solution; a two-term limit proposed to curb arbitrary power of incumbents; delegates accused from the rostrum of taking bribes; party regulars deriding the uncontrolled sniping of the press; many delegates ignoring grand themes to insist that the nation’s No. 1 problem was food.

There, on camera, was a party official from the Ural Mountains telling the assembled comrades that some old guard hard-liners should be fired and ticking off the names of Andrei A. Gromyko and three other prominent figures in the hall. For Russians, a stunning moment. There, too, out in the open, was an industrial manager telling government ministries to go chase mice or starve to death, and a leading actor, toe to toe with Gorbachev, arguing against reining in the press.

Not open revolution, to be sure. But rough and tumble enough to give the lie to the lingering suspicion in America that for three years Gorbachev has been staging some giant Potemkin charade to trick the West for his own and Soviet advantage.

For Gorbachev is doing no less than trying to inject the habits of democracy into a society whose conservative, authoritarian traditions date back five centuries to Ivan the Terrible. He is attempting the most delicate task for any authoritarian ruler--to disperse power without shattering the whole structure of power. And he is using the techniques of modern Western democratic leaders to achieve his ends, so that the very tactics of the battle serve his cause.

First, Gorbachev has dared more boldly than previous Soviet leaders to use the print press against the power hierarchy, the party apparatchiks. For months, he has mobilized newspapers and magazines against the crimes of the Stalinist past, seeking to discredit Stalin’s legacy of arbitrary terror and a bloated, centralized system. He is also using the press to reach for an alliance with the urban intelligentsia against the bureaucratic legions still clinging to privilege and the closed system of power.

Second, Gorbachev has dared unleash public protests and mass demonstrations to put pressure on the hierarchy. When party conservatives began to stack the party conference with hard-line delegates, Gorbachev’s minions sanctioned popular demonstrations to fight back. Stormy debates blossomed at Moscow party meetings. A party secretary in distant Sakhalin was forced out by one such session. Protesters marched in other cities. In Estonia, 40,000 people formed a new Popular Front to promote Gorbachev’s reforms. In power game terms, Gorbachev was using outside pressure to bend insiders his way.

Finally, with modern media tactics, Gorbachev used Soviet television to offer his country an object lesson in democratic politics. The party conference, with its public arguments and finger-pointing, became an existential demonstration to his people. By example, Gorbachev showed that he was seeking to stimulate free-thinking, sanctioning dissent against the previously sacrosanct rule of the party bosses.

But does all this add up to democracy? Not as we know it. Not even Gorbachev claims that. He calls it demokratizatsiya --democratization--a process, a trend, not the full reality. He wants multicandidate elections but not a multiparty system (though it may eventually be hard to draw the line). When his economic adviser, Leonid I. Abalkin, suggested publicly that demokratizatsiya was not possible with a one-party system, Gorbachev thundered back that Abalkin showed a lack of faith in the communist system. And he flatly rejected proposals for a purge of the party’s old guard.

On other important points, Gorbachev has compromised. In his drive to bolster the role of popularly elected local governments, Gorbachev has agreed that regional party chiefs could head the regional governments. It also seems clear that his new Soviet presidency will have great personal power, including the authority to deal directly with the Soviet military and KGB, bypassing the checks of the Politburo. Even so, the changes he is pursuing are radical for the Soviet system.

From afar, inevitable questions arise: Can he make it? How much time does he have? The conference has bought him more time and if the new system is established next year, his political survival will be assured for five years. More fundamental is the question of whether his reforms--for example, his push for the genuine rule of law and protection of individual rights--will be carried out or whether the apparatchiks will simply drag their feet and the Soviet public grow too cynical to care.

Politically, the dangers to Gorbachev come from opposite directions--the danger that change is coming too slow in some areas and too fast in others. In the economy, reform is stillborn. Gorbachev has been unable to deliver so far, to free up economic enterprises and cooperatives fast enough to provide more goods, even food, to give ordinary Russians a personal stake in his perestroika .

On the other side, his policy of glasnost has given vent to bursting nationalistic feelings in minority republics like Armenia, Estonia and Lithuania. Now they threaten to outrace Gorbachev’s own tolerance for change and offer the old guard a rationale for restoring repression, with dire warnings that otherwise the Soviet state will splinter or crumble.

In short, as the party conference made clear, Gorbachev is taking risks, both for himself and Mother Russia. For the moment, his own survival does not seem in imminent peril; he emerged from the conference with new momentum. But it made clearer than ever that he is engaged in a balancing act, defying political gravity by threatening to crack the very pyramid of power on which he sits while dislodging the armies of bureaucrats who form that pyramid.

His risk is either that the power hierarchy will lash back and crush him or that the process he has begun will lurch out of control, bringing chaos instead of national revival. It is this gamble by Gorbachev--to confront his nation’s problems and to tackle the power structure head-on--that made the Soviet party conference last month seem so momentous, and the American political conventions seem so pale by comparison.