Kremlin Calls Special Session of Parliament

Amid strong indications that Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev is pressing forward with his initiative for sweeping reform, the Supreme Soviet will hold a rare special session Saturday, only 24 hours after the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee conducts its own urgent meeting today.

The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, in announcing the meeting Thursday, gave no reason for the extraordinary session of the country’s 1,500-member parliament, which would be the first of its kind in more than a decade. Nor did it disclose the agenda.

But Gorbachev is expected to open the Central Committee meeting with a strong plea for vigorous new measures, including the party’s own reorganization, that will strengthen his reform program.

Vadim Perfilyev, the government’s deputy spokesman, said Thursday that the Central Committee meeting will be a further step in putting into action decisions made at a special party conference three months ago to broaden and accelerate the country’s political, economic and social reforms.

Growing Opposition

There were strong signs that Gorbachev will address the Supreme Soviet in an appeal to the nation for greater support for perestroika, as his reform program is known, in the face of growing opposition within the vast Soviet bureaucracy.

Normally, the Supreme Soviet’s sessions are scheduled a month in advance, and one had already been called for Oct. 27. At noon Saturday, members of the Supreme Soviet’s two houses will meet jointly in the Kremlin’s Grand Palace.

Increasingly impatient with the slow implementation and even outright obstruction of the reforms, Gorbachev has made clear in recent speeches his intention to force faster, more sweeping changes on the country despite opposition.

But Perfilyev and other Soviet officials were unable to disclose the agenda of the Central Committee meeting, which itself has not yet been formally announced here.

Soviet spokesmen also were unable to explain why this Central Committee meeting--likely to last only 1 or 1 1/2 days--had been convened so dramatically, bringing top Soviet officials, including Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov and armed forces Chief of Staff Sergei F. Akhromeyev hurrying home from around the world on less than 48 hours’ notice.

Speculation Dampened

However, they again attempted to dampen the inevitable speculation about a crisis sparked by opposition to Gorbachev and his reform program.

“There are certain questions to be settled,” Perfilyev told a regular news briefing, describing today’s meeting as a follow-up to the party conference in late June that charted the course of perestroika and to another, apparently inconclusive, Central Committee meeting in late July.

The focus of political debate in recent weeks has been on the country’s economic strategy, a key issue not only for Soviet development in the near and medium term but a fundamental question that will determine in large part the character of Soviet socialism.

“Any one of our current burning problems underscores the necessity of radical change,” Gorbachev told the visiting East German leader, Erich Honecker, in a speech published here Thursday.

And in a speech to senior Soviet editors and party theoreticians a week ago, Gorbachev said he wanted to push forward with the reforms that had been endorsed by the party conference in June.

Those measures include a top-to-bottom reorganization of the 20-million-member party, and Soviet officials have indicated that this will be one item on today’s Central Committee’s agenda.

Gorbachev also may ask for approval of much wider political reforms, including constitutional changes that would establish a Supreme Soviet with full legislative powers and headed by a president with broad executive authority.

First outlined at the June conference, these proposals have inspired few and have been criticized on various grounds, among them the concentration of both party and state power in one leader, even if he were Gorbachev.

The present Supreme Soviet, elected through single-candidate, yes-or-no ballots, is to be replaced under the reform plans by a new 2,250-member, tricameral Congress of People’s Deputies, formed largely through national multi-candidate elections, which are also part of the reform package.

This congress would then elect a new, smaller Supreme Soviet, which would have real legislative authority and which would elect a national president by secret ballot. Gorbachev is expected to be elected to the new post and will retain his post as party leader as well.

Present plans call for enactment of these changes by the present Supreme Soviet later this year after public discussion. Nationwide elections would follow next spring.

Gromyko May Retire

Under one scenario discussed by Soviet and foreign analysts here Thursday, President Andrei A. Gromyko, the 79-year-old former foreign minister who now heads the Supreme Soviet, would retire, making way for Gorbachev.

This would permit Gorbachev to put into political effect part of the proposed constitutional changes earlier than next April, the current timetable. As president as well as the party’s general secretary, Gorbachev would be in a stronger position to resist any attempt by conservatives to replace him as they did the late Nikita S. Khrushchev.

As the political drama increased, other rumors spread that major changes were coming in the party leadership, although there was no greater evidence for this than there was before previous Central Committee meetings in May, June and July. At those times, changes were forecast but none occurred.

Conservatives retain a strong voice in the ruling 13-member Politburo, and Gorbachev might want to replace some of them with his supporters.

In addition to Gromyko, such aging Politburo veterans as Mikhail S. Solomentsev, 74, head of the party’s watchdog control commission, and Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky 70, the party leader in the Ukraine, might be retired. Both are holdovers from the conservative and now-disgraced era of the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Another possible target for change is the Central Committee itself. Nearly a quarter of its 300 members are “dead souls,” former party and government officials who have retired or lost the key positions that brought them election to the party’s policy-making body 2 1/2 years ago.

Soviet and foreign observers quickly noted that Gorbachev apparently was moving while Yegor K. Ligachev, No. 2 in the party hierarchy and regarded as the voice of conservatism within the leadership, was still on vacation.

Ligachev, while committed to the broad principles of perestroika, has argued increasingly for step-by-step reforms as well as for retention of the old ideological basis for many of the country’s past policies.