Strong Opposition to Soviet Reforms Cited

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s sweeping political and economic reforms are still encountering strong opposition not only from officials worried about their loss of position and power, but also from many other people who fear a fundamental break with socialism and the social turmoil that this would bring, one of Gorbachev’s top aides said Saturday.

Alexander N. Yakovlev, a member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo and an architect of the most far-reaching changes here, said that the whole reform program remains deeply embattled--”in a crisis of development in the form of stagnation”--despite Gorbachev’s recent political victories.

Ideological Challenges

Yakovlev, in a speech published by the party newspaper Pravda, said that, in addition to opposition from government and party officials wanting to retain their privileged positions, the reforms are now being challenged on ideological grounds by party conservatives.

“A most important theoretical and political question is being posed today: Are the effects of perestroika really socialist?” he said.

“Democracy, openness, cooperative ventures, self-financing, the socialist market, self-management, the sovereignty of the people, the pluralism of opinions--all this is penetrating our life deeply.

“It disturbs our life and sometimes deprives certain people of sleep and rest. It gives rise to passions, to sharp emotions and to new, quite real contradictions.”

Speaking to a regional party conference in Perm, where Gorbachev’s reforms were described as little more than slogans and local officials were characterized as “uncomfortable” working in an atmosphere of greater democracy, Yakovlev said that, while party leaders “talk about political transformations, how difficult it is to part with the old power to which we are accustomed.”

The politically important speech reflected not only Gorbachev’s on-going campaign to carry to the grass-roots level, against often strong local opposition, his program of perestroika, or restructuring the Soviet political and economic system, but to win the equally ideological struggle over what is socialism.

Yakovlev, regarded as the principal theoretician of many of the Gorbachev reforms, sought in his speech not only to answer current criticisms of perestroika but to lay the theoretical basis for the even bolder moves that Gorbachev hopes to make next year.

“Not everyone understands that the socialist society is a society of freedom and creativity, a society of a flourishing science and culture, a society of human priorities,” Yakovlev said.

The deeply rooted conservatism of Soviet society was proving as difficult a barrier to change as outright political resistance and ideological opposition, he said, adding that people are nostalgic for the old certainties and cannot see the potential of the reform program.

“Democracy, glasnost (openness) and the pluralism of opinions still frighten us, as if each of us is absolutely sure of himself and always thinks in comfortable cliches,” he continued. “The excesses of democracy frighten us.

“We speak about spiritual revival and moral purification, but we are still suspicious of the clashes of passions that are going on between young people, the intelligentsia, the working class and the peasantry.”

Yakovlev acknowledged that the initial reforms have not ended the widespread shortages and have even driven up prices of some food and consumer products, but he defended economic decentralization and increased use of market forces as the only way forward.

“It is impossible to have a normal economic ‘circulation of the blood’ without a socialist market,” he said.