Gorbachev Intensifies His Powers

In the last two months there have been important changes in the Soviet Union’s highest bodies of state and party leadership. Although extremely consequential, the nature of the changes is not always evident to foreign observers.

While the one-party system has been preserved, the role and responsibility of Communist Party organs is significantly altered. Their strength is being cut by as much as 50%, and many previously important divisions and departments are being eliminated.

The role and responsibilities of the administrative bodies, including the Supreme Soviet and the Council of Ministers, are meanwhile being widened. Reelection conferences are being held in all party organizations, down to the district and city level. In December they will reach the level of the regional party committee, and many functionaries--including even those on the Central Committee--are retiring voluntarily, without waiting for the reelection campaign to reach them.

Preparation of major constitutional reform is under way. We are told that the reform is to create a new political system for the country, one that would combine certain elements of the old, traditional system with those borrowed from the American and French presidential ones and from the Western parliamentary democracies.

No one, however, can predict precisely how this complicated system will work, with just one party wielding all the power in the political arena.

Discussion of the forthcoming reforms has caused serious apprehensions and provoked well-founded criticism. Much of this legislative rush reminds me of the entirely hasty and not exactly successful reforms by the late Nikita S. Khrushchev.

But one thing is clear: Along with the enhancement of real democracy--multiple ballot elections, time limits on holding important posts, widening of public access to information, reduction of bureaucracy--a further centralization of power is taking place; leadership becomes more authoritarian and President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is concentrating it increasingly in his own hands. As both the state and party leader, he depends less and less on on the possible changes in moods and sympathies of the several hundred members of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, a considerable number of whom joined that body under the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Not everyone likes nor understands the changes taking place. Some worry that centralization and intensification of authoritarian trends may impede the solution of ethnic problems and in the future endanger democracy itself. “As long as Gorbachev is in power, we are OK,” as one said, “but the new authoritarian structures could be used to bring on new dictators and new dictatorships.”

These are not entirely unfounded apprehensions, especially under the continuing one-party system, with poorly developed traditions of democracy and independent public organizations. But today’s system, with all its complicated and even cumbersome structures, still helps in fighting against the established bureaucratic elite.

The current changes were launched by the extraordinary plenum of the Central Committee, convened on Sept. 30. It took the session just one hour to make changes in the Politburo and the Central Committee secretariat, the most substantial and significant ones since the spring of 1985 when Gorbachev was chosen as the party’s general secretary.

On Oct. 1, an extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet also took only an hour to elect Gorbachev the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, making him de jure as well as de facto head of the Soviet state. As reorganization shifts to district, city and region levels, we can look forward to major changes and rejuvenation of party personnel along with new leadership of the local soviets, or legislative councils.

In addition to further strengthening Gorbachev’s personal power and influence, as well as consolidating the positions of his most active proponents, what do all these changes mean, and why have they been conducted just now and with obvious haste? Several reasons can be advanced:

-- The people who became alternate and full members of the Politburo in the 1970s, who were inseparably tied to Brezhnev’s leadership and who bear major responsibility for all the corruption of the “stagnation era,” have been retired.

-- The influence of those in the party leadership who saw Yegor K. Ligachev-- formerly the No. 2 man and now relegated to agricultural problems--as their leader rather than Gorbachev has been eroded. These people are for the restructuring and acceleration of development, but against glasnost (the policy of political openness) and democracy, for they think that a free press can undermine the authority and power of the party machine.

-- The role of the Committee of State Security, or the KGB, in the formulation of the political course and the solution of ideological problems is decreasing. Its new chairman, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, has failed to win Politburo membership, whereas his predecessor, Viktor M. Chebrikov, must now focus on implementing parts of the new legislation (the Press Act, the Militia Powers Act, the KGB and Internal Troops Powers Act and others) that were approved two years ago but which were noticeably slow to be enacted.

Many of us looked for significant changes in the Central Committee after the 19th party conference in June. But the conference proved to be a far cry from what the active proponents of perestroika, or restructuring, expected. The very process of electing delegates to the conference showed the strength of the conservative party apparatus, which used its power to secure a massive majority at the conference. Among 5,000 delegates there were as many as 1,200 active supporters of perestroika , but they kept their silence. About 3,000 more delegates favored moderate but not radical reforms; it was these moderates who set the tone of the conference, applauding all declarations against the mass media and protests against “denigration” of the party’s past activities. But Gorbachev’s authority did not suffer; the conference adopted some good resolutions, including the one on glasnost and democratization. However, barely 1,000 delegates took those resolutions as a program for their work.

Hardly a month passed after the conference before the bureaucracy struck a heavy and wholly unexpected blow against glasnost by severely limiting the circulation and subscriptions to all the most popular publications. In the face of public outrage and protests from subscribers, the Ministry of Communication’s explanations about an acute shortage of newsprint were not very convincing, since what is happening is more a realignment of public interest in certain publications than overall circulation growth.

Our bookshops brim with books that no one buys, but that are still issued in millions of copies. Subscriptions to some popular magazines and papers, which tend to distance themselves from the restructuring, are also declining. Small wonder that the limits, introduced Aug. 1 but subsequently withdrawn, were perceived as limits on glasnost and thus as a political decision directed against criticism and democratization.

The country’s economic situation deteriorated markedly last summer. Less and less food and consumer goods could be found on the shelves. Sugar rationing was introduced everywhere, candies and chocolates all but disappeared; meat, cheap clothes, even soap and detergents seemed to be on the way out. This causes growing dissatisfaction among masses of workers and state employees; the local bureaucracy in many cities and areas skillfully directs that discontent against “Gorbachev’s pseudo-restructuring.” Any changes for the better in the quality of consumer goods are hard to detect. On top of all this, the 1988 harvest yielded less than 1987’s, which does not promise any improvement in food supplies.

Ethnic unrest worsens, meanwhile, in the trans-Caucasian republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan and in the Baltic republics--Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

These accumulating problems can only be resolved through a more radical approach to perestroika, but instead there is only talk and resolutions, with hardly any action--much less radical action.

The experience of the last two or three years shows that the opponents of perestroika have no leader, no one strong enough to challenge Gorbachev. But at the same time it became obvious that there was a gap separating Gorbachev--who in just three years has managed to become one of the world’s leading politicians, both domestically and abroad--and his closest associates who, for all their sterling qualities, still have to learn the difficult art of being in power.

This fact required not merely stronger positions for Gorbachev’s team in the Politburo and other governing bodies, but also radical increases in his own power to guarantee that perestroika would become irreversible. Therefore the trend toward greater authoritarianism in the state and party leadership is essentially directed against the influential conservative bureaucracy, and will encourage the growth of activism at the grass-roots level.

The changes in the highest echelons of power will also lay the groundwork for the real redistribution of power between the party and the state’s local government organs, the soviets, in the spring of 1989. This will inevitably lead to the elimination, from middle-level governing bodies, of aged and incompetent people who dominated this echelon in the Brezhnev era and maintain dominance even now.

The bulk of the party cadres grew flabby in the last 20 years, becoming addicted to a host of privileges and a leisurely tempo of work. This large group constitutes the so-called “braking mechanism” in perestroika. After its rejuvenation, this group will become something quite opposite: the main conductor of the reforms into the masses.

This past year witnessed many important events in our country. But 1989, by all indications, is going to be even richer, both in key events and noteworthy changes.