Gorbachev Under Fire in Soviet Journal

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has come under direct public criticism for the first time, accused in a leading literary journal of failing to implement the broad political, economic and social reforms that he launched nearly four years ago.

The article in the current issue of the Leningrad journal Neva puts into print many of the serious complaints voiced in recent months by Soviet intellectuals disappointed with the pace of reform and by Gorbachev’s compromises with the party bureaucracy.

But that criticism has either been kept general in tone, directed toward current policies rather than the man who has made them, or it has been voiced privately.

Publication of such a frankly critical article by an avowed supporter of perestroika , as Gorbachev’s program of political and economic restructuring is known, underscores the broad, crucial and increasingly sharp debate now under way over the country’s future course.

It also demonstrates, rather dramatically, the extent to which Gorbachev has opened the Soviet political system to debate on fundamental issues. In the past, not only would publication of such an article have been impossible, even though it was clearly intended to provoke debate, but the author submitting it to a journal would probably be questioned by the KGB, the Soviet security police, about his or her politics.

Now the talk of the town, the 27-page article was written by Sergei Y. Andreyev, described by Neva as a 34-year-old biologist at a Siberian research institute and a frequent writer on political topics.

In a broad and very pessimistic assessment of the country’s current political and economic situation, Andreyev accuses Gorbachev of a lack of firmness in carrying out perestroika, of failing to end the bureaucratic resistance to it and of eroding popular confidence in the reforms by his habit of “wishful thinking” in public.

After almost four years, perestroika has resulted largely in a deepening of the Soviet Union’s political, economic and social crisis without even halting the prolonged national deterioration, Andreyev argues in a lengthy analysis of the country’s domestic situation.

“Whether some people like it or not, the conclusion is quite unambiguous: under the existing circumstances, perestroika cannot succeed or even continue,” he contends.

None So Pessimistic

While many commentators have written recently about the difficult straits through which perestroika must now pass, none has been so pessimistic as Andreyev--and none has so directly faulted Gorbachev’s leadership.

The economic reforms, which were intended to encourage factories to produce goods in demand and to increase the overall productivity of Soviet industry, have been so widely sabotaged within the bureaucracy that they are nearly dead, according to Andreyev.

And with their failure will come, he asserts, the collapse of all the other reforms as well.

In the Soviet Union today, “real power” is not exercised by the Communist Party leadership under Gorbachev, Andreyev continues, analyzing the reason for the failure, but by a “new class” of party, state and industrial bureaucrats who “appropriate the common wealth they did not produce.”

They form an effective “dictatorship,” which rules in its own interests, is intent on retaining power and is able to frustrate whatever reforms Gorbachev puts forward.

“The life of the top party leader seems hard enough to make him admit that even the best beginnings can be derailed by clever sabotage,” Andreyev says of Gorbachev, the party’s general secretary. “But then he throws up his hands and sidesteps the issue.”

Andreyev believes the Supreme Soviet, the country’s Parliament, must map out national policies, including the economic development strategy, he says, and the party, which has been the decisive political force for 71 years, must then work within those guidelines.