Gorbachev Calls Party Meeting : Surprise Leadership Session Will Deal With Major Reorganization

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, seeking to recover the diminishing momentum of his reform drive, on Wednesday called an unexpected meeting of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee.

On the agenda of the surprise session, scheduled to open here Friday, will be plans for the party’s top-to-bottom reorganization, including probable changes in the composition of the 300-member Central Committee and perhaps of the ruling Politburo.

Gennady I. Gerasimov, the chief government spokesman, said the meeting will be “devoted to the reorganization of the party apparatus, including the Central Committee itself.” Gerasimov spoke at a briefing at the United Nations, where he was accompanying Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who was abruptly summoned back to Moscow for the session.

“It is kind of a revolution,” Gerasimov said, characterizing the scope of the planned changes.

Gorbachev has been frustrated by opposition within the party to his plans for political, economic and social change and now appears ready to appeal to the nation for support.

“Any of the current burning (national) problems underscores the necessity of radical change,” Gorbachev said, speaking at a dinner here Wednesday night for East German leader Erich Honecker. “It is needed in the party, in the state, in agriculture, in industry, in personnel policy, and most of all, the people’s mentality--in their attitudes to work and to one another and to themselves.”

No U.S. Comment

At the United Nations, State Department spokesman Charles Redman said the United States had no comment on Shevardnadze’s hasty departure. Another department spokesman in Washington said later: “It strikes me as something that is internal politics. We have no speculation.”

Gerasimov said the basic changes, which involve both the restructuring of the party and changes in its personnel, had been decided at the special party conference three months ago and would now be implemented by the Central Committee.

The Central Committee met in late May, again just before the party conference and then a month later, each time with the expectation that there would be important changes in the top party leadership.

But each time the Politburo composition remained the same, leading Soviet and Western analysts alike to speculate on Gorbachev’s true political strength.

The suddenness with which this week’s meeting was called--party officials at Central Committee headquarters said they were informed only at midday Wednesday--raised further questions about how secure Gorbachev was in his position.

“There is no crisis,” one party official told foreign correspondents Wednesday evening. “Don’t worry--Gorbachev is in charge, and it is his meeting.”

Neither these officials nor other Soviet sources could explain, however, what prompted the sudden move. A major Central Committee meeting had been expected in November, preceded perhaps by one in late October before meetings of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s Parliament.

But the major puzzle was what was so pressing that it could not be deferred until early next week, when Shevardnadze was scheduled to return from the United Nations, where his meetings were described only Tuesday as vital to implementing the new orientation in Soviet foreign policy.

Dramatic Move

Indeed, although Gerasimov described Friday’s meeting as planned since the party conference, the session seemingly was being held on less than two days’ notice. No spokesman explained what had occurred late Tuesday or early Wednesday to cause Gorbachev to move so dramatically.

Gerasimov denied speculation that the meeting was connected with the continuing unrest in the southern Soviet republic of Armenia and the adjacent strife-torn region of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan.

“It has nothing to do with that particular situation,” he said.

News of the meeting reached Shevardnadze, a key Gorbachev ally in the party Politburo, only after he had scheduled dozens of diplomatic discussions at the United Nations for the rest of the week.

Gen. Dmitri T. Yazov, the Soviet defense minister, was in the midst of a weeklong visit to India, and Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, the armed forces chief of staff, had just arrived in Stockholm for an important series of talks.

Khrushchev Recalled

Comparisons were inevitably drawn with the hurriedly convened Central Committee meetings that twice considered the late Nikita S. Khrushchev’s reforms and, on the second time, replaced him with Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Only last week, a leading political scientist who had assisted Khrushchev and who now advises Gorbachev wrote in a thinly veiled warning in the influential newspaper Literary Gazette that Gorbachev could be removed through a conservative conspiracy, just as Khrushchev was ousted.

At the United Nations, where speculation surged through the corridors in the wake of the announcement that Shevardnadze had been summoned home, a veteran Eastern European intelligence expert said he saw the move as an ominous one for Gorbachev.

“This is the Cuban missile crisis all over again,” the expert said. “That was Khrushchev’s downfall, because the Soviet military blamed him for accepting defeat. The same situation applies today, with the military refusal to accept a defeat in Afghanistan. The difference may be that Gorbachev is stronger than Khrushchev and the military weaker than in 1962, but nobody knows for sure.”

Confident and Determined

But Gorbachev, appearing on the nightly television news program “Vremya” and speaking at the dinner for Honecker, appeared to be fully confident and determined to press ahead with his program of political, economic and social reforms, known as perestroika.

“The further we go along the path of perestroika , the more certain we are about the correctness of our choice,” he told Honecker, who has expressed some reservations about the Soviet reforms.

Rejecting criticism that he is forcing the pace and expanding the scope of reforms beyond the country’s ability to carry them out, Gorbachev said the Soviet Union could not afford “to move step by step, first coping with one problem and then another.”

“The country cannot be shaken out of stagnation by isolated, disjointed measures,” he said, finally making clear his support for those reformers wanting the party to take far-reaching, even radical steps to bring change. “If we work in the old manner and rely solely on commands, directives and paper shuffling, then, of course, it is hard to count on success.

“But it is another matter if we are able really to activate the democratic potential of society,” he added. “We shall rely on the people’s vital interest in the improvement of their material and cultural life and on their patriotic resolve to raise the authority of their motherland and the prestige of socialism in the world.”

Impatient on Reforms

Since his return from a trip to the Siberian center of Krasnoyarsk, where he was repeatedly confronted by angry Soviets wanting to know when perestroika would improve their lives, Gorbachev has appeared increasingly impatient with those government and party officials he believes are slowing--and perhaps blocking--the implementation of his reform program.

“We do not conceal that there are many difficulties in perestroika and that transition to its practical realization has created far from simple problems,” Gorbachev told Honecker on Wednesday. “Some of them have been foreseen, others have not.

“But this all fits, on the whole, with our ideas of the processes under way in the country,” he said. “The most important thing is that we see ever-broader sections of the working people joining in this process of improving life and bringing things up to date.”

Staff writers Norman Kempster and Don Shannon contributed to this story from the United Nations.