Gorbachev’s Legal Reforms Meet Unexpected Opposition

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s proposed constitutional reforms, intended as the first major step toward restructuring the country’s whole political system, are encountering stiff and unexpected opposition.

Many members of the country’s intelligentsia, normally strong supporters of Gorbachev’s reform program, see some of the far-reaching changes embodied in proposed constitutional amendments and a new election law as undemocratic and even a dangerous step backward. They argue that too much power will be concentrated in the hands of top party officials, notably its general secretary, who will also serve as state president.

Soviet specialists on constitutional law, including some who participated in the preliminary drafting of the amendments, have criticized aspects of the proposed legislation as poorly written, ill conceived and even contradictory. The powers of new parliamentary bodies are unclear, they contend, as is the authority of a proposed constitutional commission.

And the new populist movements in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, joined recently by nationalist groups in the republics of Armenia and Georgia, have objected to what they see as the sharp curtailment of the autonomy of the country’s constituent republics, some of which are demanding recognition of their “sovereignty.”

Although there is little doubt that the Supreme Soviet, the country’s Parliament, will enact the new laws at the end of this month, perhaps rewriting them to meet some of the criticisms, so strong are the objections that Gorbachev may have to employ his full political power to force them through and maintain the rapid pace of change he desires.

Reflecting the leadership’s impatience with the criticism, the party newspaper Pravda said Sunday in a long, front-page editorial that, in achieving political reforms, “the main thing today is practical deeds.”

People should realize, Pravda argued, that “we are just starting work on reforming the political system, and it is better not to slow this down.”

The changes, first outlined by Gorbachev at a special Communist Party conference in June, are meant to pull the party out of the country’s day-to-day administration and to strengthen the whole governmental structure through increasing the power of popularly elected legislatures, known as soviets.

The reforms envision a major devolution of political power from the center and an unprecedented sharing of that power by the Communist Party with people and organizations not only outside the party but even critical of it. A major element in the reforms will be a shift to secret ballot elections with multiple candidates for each post--elections that the party’s candidates could lose.

Although the broad goals of the reform quickly won wide acceptance, the actual legislation, published only in late October, has in the words of the government newspaper Izvestia contained “more questions than answers.”

Fundamental Issues

And the nationwide discussion ordered by the Communist Party leadership with the aim of strengthening support for the changes in advance of their adoption has, as a result, already developed into a much broader debate, raising such fundamental issues as the nature of socialism, what the goals of the reform program should be and even Gorbachev’s own political style.

Among the most contentious issues are Gorbachev’s desire to combine the position of party leader and legislative chairman at various levels, the inclusion of representatives of various “public organizations” in the Supreme Soviet, giving certain classes of people a greater voice than others, and the party’s failure to allow enough time for full discussion of such far-reaching changes.

“In the context of perestroika, such questions as state structure, especially the constitution and the electoral system, are of crucial importance,” the human rights campaigner Andrei D. Sakharov said in an interview published here before he left on a visit to the United States a week ago. “I am worried by such haste in so serious a matter. The constitutional and the electoral law define the country’s political structure for years to come, and any mistake here is fraught with unpredictable consequences.”

‘Loss of Face’

But to defer the political changes, as proposed by Sakharov and other critics who want more time to study their implications, would mean not only delaying the crucial national elections planned for next spring but also a loss of face for Gorbachev, who seems intent on accelerating, not slowing, perestroika, or restructuring, as his reform drive is known.

Yet the protests against the changes could have major repercussions if, for example, representatives of several republics vote against the changes or if intellectuals turn against Gorbachev as a result.

“This will not suffice!” Anatoly Butenko, a Moscow State University professor and prominent writer, told a weekend meeting of the Moscow Tribune, a political club that includes some of the country’s most liberal intellectuals. “The vast majority of the people are not party members, and they took no part in any of this. The party decided everything, even though they talk constantly now about democratization . . . I do not think we can go along, and I do not think we should.”

Estonian Concerns

In Estonia, the republic’s Parliament will convene in a rare emergency session Wednesday to debate the “declaration of the sovereignty of the Estonian people,” largely in response to constitutional amendments eliminating a range of rights that the country’s republics now have, including the theoretical right to secede. More than 300,000 Estonians have signed petitions objecting to the changes.

The Estonian Parliament will be asked to declare the constitutional amendments undemocratic and to demand their withdrawal, according to officials of the new Popular Front of Estonia, and to assert the republic’s right to approve or veto national laws. Asked during a television discussion of the issue whether this would provoke a constitutional crisis, a leading Estonian lawyer in the Popular Front replied, “That is exactly what we want.”

Three members of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo, dispatched Friday to answer the criticism and rebuild support for the reforms, spent the weekend in Estonia and the other Baltic republics of Latvia and Lithuania, where similar sentiments are rapidly rising, campaigning for the reforms.

‘Some Excesses’

In Riga, the Latvian capital, Vadim M. Medvedev, the party’s chief ideologist, said that “some excesses and undesirable phenomena had surfaced” during the debate, and he warned Latvians against questioning of socialism or taking strong nationalist positions. They should have “a sober and businesslike attitude toward the solution of vital issues, abandon words . . . and pass over to practical and constructive work.”

In their efforts to allay the fears that regional autonomy will be diminished by the constitutional changes rather than enhanced as the three Baltic republics want, Nikolai N. Slyunkov and Viktor M. Chebrikov, both secretaries of the party’s Central Committee, counseled patience, describing these proposed changes as initial steps in a long process to build a democratic political system here.

“There were mistakes, which we are energetically rectifying now,” Slyunkov told Lithuanians during a walking tour of Vilnius, the capital, promising further measures, including greater political, economic and cultural autonomy, to resolve the Soviet Union’s difficult problems of ethnic relations.

Nationalist Sentiments

But the constitutional amendments appear to be adding to nationalist sentiments in other regions of the country as well.

In Georgia, tens of thousands of people reportedly jammed the center of the capital, Tbilisi, on Saturday, according to dissidents, who said the main focus of the protest, which later moved to the city’s race course, was a demand for “Georgian independence, Georgian sovereignty.”

Zviad Gamasakhurdia, a longtime Georgian activist, said that Moscow’s refusal to respond to such regional complaints as the construction of hydroelectric projects regarded as ecologically unsafe had “finally awakened people to how powerless we are in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia and how much less power we will have” under the constitutional changes.

“We have formed a new party here, the National Democratic Party, to fight for the independence of Georgia,” he said by telephone from Tbilisi. “The people support this--that is why we had 100,000 at the demonstration and rally--because they know that without such power we cannot solve economic problems, ecological problems, employment problems. . . . Gorbachev’s reforms do not solve our problems, but only make them worse.”

‘Less Democratic’

But the objections go beyond such nationalist issues. Taken together, the proposed measures would “make the Soviet Union a less democratic state,” Igor Gryazin, a legal scholar in Tallinn, said in an interview with the newspaper Sovietskaya Estonia last week.

Political authority would be concentrated in Moscow, Gryazin asserted, the decisions of elected regional and local officials would be subject to the veto of higher authorities, minorities would have less representation in the new legislative bodies and courts would be made virtual departments of the executive branch.

And what perhaps rankles the critics most of all is the secrecy in which the constitutional amendments and electoral law were drafted and the short time--a month--allowed for public discussion.