Gorbachev Ousts 110 From Top Policy Body : Supporters of Reforms Brought In

The Soviet Communist Party realigned its top policy-making body Tuesday, retiring nearly a quarter of the members of its Central Committee and bringing in younger supporters of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his reform program.

Dozens of older officials associated with the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev--figures such as former Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko--and his now discredited policies were effectively purged in the move. The changes are meant to free Gorbachev from the restraints imposed by conservative criticism in the committee and to allow him to act more decisively.

Under increasing pressure to take bolder steps in implementing his reform program, known as perestroika, Gorbachev won a sizable victory in maneuvering a total of 110 officials into resigning--voluntarily, it was said--from the Central Committee and its Central Auditing Commission with full declarations of support for his policies.

251 Full Members Now

Seventy-four of the committee’s 301 full members resigned, along with 24 candidate, or non-voting, members. Twelve members of the auditing commission, which serves in a watchdog capacity on the party, also quit. Twenty-four alternate members of the Central Committee were promoted to full membership, reducing the committee to a more manageable 251 full members.

In all, a fifth of the total membership was removed from the party’s top policy bodies.

Never had there been such a change in the Central Committee between party congresses, which are generally held every five years, party officials said. They predicted that it would send immediate signals of change across the country.

‘Serious Regrouping’

“There is a very serious regrouping of forces within the party and within society as a whole,” Gorbachev, the party’s general secretary, told a special meeting of the Central Committee in the Kremlin, according to a text of his speech released by the Soviet news agency Tass. “This is required by new tasks.”

Gorbachev has come under increasing criticism from many of his own liberal supporters for what they see as drift and lack of leadership, particularly in managing the country’s economic problems. Last month’s parliamentary elections, in which scores of senior party, government and military officials were defeated, showed growing popular impatience with the party and with the results so far of perestroika.

Consequently, the recent compromises forced on Gorbachev by the party’s conservative wing have chafed badly as he has pushed for bolder reforms and a faster pace of change but been unable to win full Central Committee backing for them.

The election results, where reformers defeated veteran party officials across the country and some party officials running unopposed were nevertheless rejected by the voters, prompted the Soviet leadership to take a hard look at the party and its policies, Soviet sources said, and to move boldly to regain public confidence.

Although already removed from executive positions in the party or government in Gorbachev’s rejuvenation of the whole political structure over the past three or four years, the former officials--Politburo members, Cabinet ministers, party secretaries, regional party leaders, military commanders and others--had remained in the Central Committee where they became an important element in what reformers called the “braking mechanism” that they blame for slowing change.

Known as “dead souls” after a novel by the 19th-Century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, the retired officials had by their very presence in the Central Committee deprived the party’s whole reform effort of much of its vitality in recent months. This added to the impression of many here of a growing inertia within the party and government.

As the party’s principal policy-making body between congresses, the Central Committee is the major forum for political debate with virtually all reforms requiring its approval. In addition, it appoints and removes members of the Politburo and of the party secretariat, including its general secretary.

“Since the beginning, perestroika has been associated with the work of the party and its steering bodies,” Gorbachev said at the meeting. “Much depends on them today in terms of how it will fare further. People are discussing the subject in their personal conservations and in political meetings, expressing their question.”

In reviewing the question of the “pensioners” in the party’s top bodies, the Politburo had decided to recommend acceptance of their resignations on grounds that their age and health no longer permitted full participation in politics, Gorbachev said.

Younger Replacements

At the same time, the Politburo proposed their partial replacement in the Central Committee by younger individuals in order to assure the smooth development of the whole reform program.

“This should be regarded as a serious and important milestone in the course of perestroika, “ Vadim A. Medvedev, the party secretary for ideology, said, summarizing the daylong Central Committee meeting for reporters. “It shows that our party is realistically assessing its work and is quite critical of its own activities.”

The new Central Committee members include some of Gorbachev’s closest advisers on domestic and foreign policy. Among them are Yevgeny P. Velikhov, Konstantin V. Frolov and Valentin A. Koptyug, all vice presidents of the Soviet Academy of Sciences; Valentin M. Falin, chief of the party’s international department; Yevgeny M. Primakov, director of a major foreign policy think tank; Yuli V. Kvitsinsky, an arms control specialist and ambassador to West Germany, and Mikhail F. Nenashev, chairman of the State Publishing Committee and a leading political philosopher.

Other new members include regional party leaders who have taken the lead in implementing reforms as well as several workers and farmers who have spoken enthusiastically about the reforms at recent party meetings.

From Brezhnev Era

The list of those dropped, however, was a veritable “who was who” of the Brezhnev era, from 1964 to 1982, which is now criticized as corrupt and venal as well as politically bankrupt and economically stagnant.

There was Gromyko, who served as foreign minister not only under Brezhnev and later Gorbachev but under three other Soviet leaders as well.

There were other former Politburo members and candidate members from the long Brezhnev era --Boris N. Ponomarev, Nikolai A. Tikhonov, Mikhail S. Solomentsev, Vasily V. Kuznetsov, Pyotr N. Demichev and Sergei L. Sokolov.

And there were such prominent figures as Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, the former chief of staff, and Marshal Viktor G. Kulikov, longtime Warsaw Pact commander; the party’s former propaganda chief, Mikhail V. Zimyanin, and Yuri V. Zhukov, the longtime foreign policy commentator who had justified every twist and turn of Soviet diplomacy.

But ideology chief Medvedev acknowledged that the Central Committee still does not include a majority of the regional party leaders, due to the sweeping changes among the officials around the country at those levels. Of the party first secretaries in the country’s 15 constituent republics, six are not members of the Central Committee, and of first secretaries of the 150 major regional party committees, 88 are not on the committee.

Fear of Packing Committee

The absence of so many new leaders from the top policy-making bodies of the party “cannot but affect the work of the Central Committee,” Medvedev said. Proposals had been made for their election, he said, but they had not been acted upon, perhaps out of fear of packing the Central Committee with too many ardent reformers.

There had been widespread speculation that Gorbachev would ask the Central Committee to call an early party congress--the next is not due for two years--so that the whole leadership could be revamped, but there was no mention of this possibility by Soviet officials Tuesday.

Remaining in the Central Committee through Tuesday’s crowd of resignations was Boris N. Yeltsin, the former Moscow party first secretary, who had been ousted as a candidate member of the Politburo a year ago for criticizing the reforms as too slow.

Yeltsin was criticized at another Central Committee meeting last month for raising the possibility of discussing a multi-party system for the country, but this apparently only added to the dimensions of his victory in the parliamentary elections where he received 89% of the vote in the capital’s at-large constituency.

“The Yeltsin question did not come up at all,” Medvedev told journalists.

The elections were heatedly discussed at the meeting, party officials said, with the Leningrad party leader, Yuri F. Solovyov, who as a candidate member of the Politburo was the most prominent loser, analyzing the reasons for the losses suffered by party officials.

“The workers are in favor of more decisive implementation of perestroika, “ Medvedev said. “They expressed opposition to conservative trends, to conservative vestiges within the party and to the administration-by-command system. That is beyond any doubt now.”