Gorbachev Says Backsliders Imperil Reform

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, defending his sweeping political and economic reforms against conservative critics, said in a speech released Wednesday that many in the Soviet Communist Party leadership are failing to cope with increased democracy and other changes and, consequently, are endangering the reform program.

Laying bare the deep divisions within the party hierarchy over the reforms, Gorbachev told a special meeting of the party’s policy-making Central Committee on Tuesday that “some were even beginning to panic and almost perceive a threat to socialism” from the scope and pace of the changes.

Yearning for Old Days

In one of his most candid and uncompromising appraisals of the state of the nation and of its ruling party, Gorbachev conceded that, having begun its reform program known as perestroika, the party is now having trouble coping with the resulting changes and that many of its officials are yearning for a return to the old political system in which they could simply order people about.

“Some of our party committees have found themselves in the position of a military commander whose regiment or division has launched an offensive while he himself is still stuck in his trench, sliding back into it and unable to find any bit of support to get out,” Gorbachev said in the closing speech of the meeting. “And so he sits in the trench while it is time to catch up with the offensive.”

He warned that the party is in danger of losing the popular confidence it needs to govern as people measure the strength of its leader- ship and the effectiveness of its policies by its ability to improve their living conditions.

“The food problem is far from solved,” he said. “The housing problem is acute. There is a dearth of consumer goods in the shops, and the list of shortages is growing. The state’s financial position is grave.”

Demanding the full support of the 20-million-member party, Gorbachev made clear that the purge of 110 retired party officials from the Central Committee and the companion Central Auditing Commission on Tuesday was intended to consolidate broad support for the reforms and to end conservative opposition from within the leadership to the new policies.

“The party organizations and our cadres have, in many cases, proved not ready for such a turn in the development of the democratic processes in society,” he said, speaking of last month’s parliamentary elections.

“The activity of some party committees and Soviet (state) bodies in their approaches, in their style and in their methods of work, in understanding the processes at work, is also not always keeping pace with life. This is also true of the Central Committee of the party and of its Politburo.”

Debate within the party had sharpened considerably after the losses suffered by many senior party officials in the parliamentary elections, and Gorbachev said that some conservatives are now urging abandonment of the basic reforms.

“Some have already gone as far as to say that, in a manner of speaking, both democracy and glasnost (political openness) are very nearly a disaster,” Gorbachev said. “The fact that the people have begun to act, that they no longer want to remain silent and that they insist on their rights is perceived as taking perestroika too far.”

Those party officials who continue to oppose the reforms, now into their fifth year, face replacement, Gorbachev warned.

‘Personal Responsibility’

“Every member of the party and state leadership has his own weight of personal responsibility in every aspect of his work, particularly when carrying out the decisions of the Politburo and the government,” he said. “Wherever personnel changes have become necessary, where without them our common cause is suffering, they must be carried out without the slightest hesitation.”

Referring to the broad realignment of the Central Committee, a move unprecedented in scope, the president said, “Reality led us to the necessity of taking this decision.”

Gorbachev’s blunt comments made clear the depth and extent of the continuing struggle within the party over the reforms, which are forcing the bureaucracy to yield much of its long-held power to popularly elected bodies, newly autonomous enterprises and civic organizations operating beyond party control.

“I, for one, comrades, see this as a success of restructuring,” Gorbachev told the Central Committee. “This is also the view of the Politburo. We are moving toward the power of the people, involving the working man in all the economic and social processes.”

The elections, debated fiercely through the daylong meeting, showed that many sections of the party were not prepared for the process of democratization begun by the leadership, Gorbachev said.

“We increasingly come across the inertia of old thinking, the desire to resort to old methods, to hold back what is now under way,” he added. “From the very start of perestroika, however, we said that the party had to live and work in conditions of democracy. It can act only in this and not in any other way.”

Gorbachev appeared more determined than ever to push his reforms through--and more committed than before to the most radical of changes.

“Despite all difficulties, we are pursuing and will pursue the line for radical and deep-going restructuring of our entire national economy,” he declared, outlining further reforms despite the quite evident problems, including shortages, inflation, over-spending on defense and capital construction and mismatches between centrally planned sectors and market-oriented areas of the economy.

And he was particularly scathing in his criticism of bumbling government officials, some of them ministers, for their mismanagement of the Soviet economy, implying that their incompetence, more than anything else, had necessitated the changes that the bureaucracy is now opposing.

He told how the Health Ministry had imported 30 million badly needed syringes from abroad, but depended on another ministry to manufacture the needles for them. The needles were never produced because of a management failure in the second ministry, but health officials nevertheless shipped the needle-less--and therefore useless--syringes around the country.

‘Ugliest Facts’

“People see all these ugliest facts of mismanagement,” he said, “and they justly demand a strict punishment of the culprits, not because of a desire for vengeance but to assert that it is unacceptable and impossible to throw the people’s resources to the winds.”

In the future, he said, such cases would be publicly exposed, whether in Moscow or in outlying areas, “so that the people would know about all the measures taken.”

But he also complained that many Soviet people, cushioned by more than 70 years of socialism, “have forgotten how to work. They have become accustomed to the fact that they are paid only for reporting to work on time. Society can no longer reconcile itself to this, and it should be loudly stated.”

While people are understanding about the country’s broader problems, they are increasingly impatient, Gorbachev said, over shortages of consumer goods that should be plentiful, poor services, dirty cities, increasing crime and corruption.

Most of these problems do not require an order from the Politburo or a major capital investment to resolve, he said, and the failure of local leaders to respond to popular demands was undermining support for perestroika nationwide.

Gorbachev returned again and again to the need for the party to earn popular confidence after the defeat of so many of its local leaders in the elections.

“The people are not content with how the overdue problems are being solved,” he said. “Many of the reasons for perestroika not yielding the results on which we all counted are rooted in the activities of the central bodies . . . . “Much has to be pondered, both in the Central Committee and Politburo and in the government, so that their work meets the scale of tasks now being tackled by the country.”