Criticize Yourselves, Pravda Tells Election Losers

The Communist Party candidates defeated in the Soviet parliamentary elections last Sunday were advised Saturday by the party newspaper Pravda to take a critical look at themselves and to realize that the people are no longer willing to put up with government by bureaucracy.

Declaring that “the people made a choice,” Pravda in a front-page editorial began laying out the questions that now face the party, scores of whose officials lost in the first contested elections virtually since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution put the party into power.

“Why should the substantial backing of a candidate by a party committee lead in some places to a loss of ballots?” Pravda asked, reflecting on the widespread rejection of party candidates even when they ran unopposed.

Why were so many regional party first secretaries defeated when they had no opposition, Pravda asked of the widespread protest votes.

And why, it asked even more pointedly, did the party’s opposition provoke popular support, as was the case with Boris N. Yeltsin, the radical populist, who drew 89% of the Moscow vote to swamp the 6.7% for the party’s preferred candidate.

While the election could be interpreted as a broad endorsement for perestroika , President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s program of political, economic and social reforms, the party’s alienation from the people was dramatically evident.

At least 31 regional party first secretaries, the country’s powerful political barons, were defeated at the polls; some, running unopposed, aroused such hostility that voters scratched their names off the ballot, forcing new elections next month. Other Establishment losers included top generals and admirals, central and local party officials of lesser rank, factory directors and other managers and writers identified with a politically conservative line.

The full extent of the party’s losses is not known, however, because the government election commission has yet, a week after the voting, to publish the nationwide results. Although most of the 1,500 contests were carried out with scrupulous honesty, several thousand protests have reportedly been received about several, including one involving the Moscow regional party first secretary.

Among those defeated was Yuri F. Solovyev, the Leningrad first secretary, who is an alternate member of the party’s Politburo.

“When a regional party secretary does not get the necessary number of votes to be elected, this is a signal for serious deliberations,” Pravda said in its editorial. “It is no tragedy, of course . . . (but), to be blunt, he has to change his style of work and take a critical look at himself.”

Major Realignment Seen

Although Gorbachev told senior editors of the country’s news media last week that there would be no purge of losers, the Pravda editorial clearly reflects his intention to push the party leadership through a major realignment, reducing bureaucracy to bring it into closer touch with the people.

Nikolai Yefimov, a senior party official briefing newsmen in Havana before Gorbachev’s arrival there today, called the elections “a process of selection,” using a Russian word associated with the biological improvement of a species.

“Dynamic, energetic people are being pushed forward,” Yefimov said. “The elections were part of this renewal of our leadership. We are seeing the emergence of intelligent, thinking people with their own clearly defined political positions.”

The party’s initial analysis of the voting showed that “people voted for perestroika and against things that hinder perestroika ,” he said.

“In many cases, they were also protesting over the failure of local authorities in many areas to solve the problems that concern the people there.”

Nial Bikkenin, editor in chief of the party’s theoretical journal Kommunist, said he thought there would be a Central Committee conference to discuss the election results and the future of those who were defeated.

“Personally, I would resign if I had not been elected,” he said, though he was among the 100 appointed to the new Congress of People’s Deputies.

The Pravda editorial appeared to follow closely the line taken by Gorbachev in his meeting with editors last week.

“Another lesson to be learned, without even waiting for the final returns, consists in the fact that people will no longer put up with red tape, with indifference, with bureaucratic inertia, with the use of power and pressure and with the manipulation of public opinion,” Pravda said. “People believe in deeds, not words.”