Soviet Party Meets Today to Confront Rising Unrest

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has summoned the Soviet Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee to the Kremlin today to deal with the upsurge of nationalist unrest that is endangering his reform program and even the unity of the country.

Gorbachev, who is facing perhaps his toughest set of problems since he came to power in 1985, is expected to seek party support for fundamental changes in the Soviet political structure, giving the country’s constituent republics far greater autonomy and developing a new, decentralized federal system.

So sweeping are the possible changes as the country’s historical centralism is reversed that Soviet political scientists say a constitutional convention may be required to rewrite the 1922 agreement that laid the basis for the Soviet Union. This in turn, they say, could become a major vehicle for further reforms.

Draft proposals, published for national debate last month, also call for much stronger protection for the country’s ethnic minorities, many of which have suffered greatly under Soviet rule. Every citizen should “feel at home in any part of the country,” the draft said.

Gorbachev has made clear his hopes that these moves--part of what he calls the “radical transformation” of Soviet socialism--will satisfy the demands of the country’s restive republics, where some nationalists are calling for secession.

Although “nationality relations” is the only announced item on the agenda for the meeting, which could last for two days, the 250 Central Committee members are likely to discuss the country’s increasing apprehension about the future, the increasing concern that economic reforms are not reversing the prolonged downturn and the current composition of the party leadership.

“Mikhail Gorbachev is in the midst of a multiple crisis--the nationality question, the economic mess, the conservative resistance--and now is the time for bold but deft moves,” one of the Soviet leader’s supporters in the Central Committee said Monday.

“He knows that the whole reform effort is at stake. Defeat in any of these arenas is an overall setback, perhaps one from which we would not recover. And that means the future of the country is at stake.

“The nationality issue is just the most visible aspect, but it is really a reflection of the general political, economic and social collapse we are trying to avoid. If everything were going well, would Estonia want to secede? No. Nationalism is a brush fire. It is minor, but it could consume us. We need to deal with it effectively to move on to deeper problems.”

Resistance Inevitable

The proposed changes are likely to be debated sharply. Even though much of their thrust will be to give the republics economic autonomy, rather than political independence, so many vested interests will be affected that resistance is inevitable, according to Soviet political observers.

Gorbachev could move against this resistance on two fronts, according to Soviet political analysts. He is almost certain, they say, to call for an early party congress--moving the meeting up six months or more into the second half of 1990--to obtain a broader mandate for his reforms. He is also likely to move more losers from the March parliamentary elections out of the party leadership, including a member of the ruling Politburo.

Dealing with the nation’s political malaise--a deepening feeling that the reforms are failing and life is only getting harder--will be more difficult. Recent opinion polls show diminishing public confidence in Gorbachev’s program of economic and political reform and in his other policies and an increasing despair over the leadership’s ability to find a way out of the prolonged crisis.

No Leadership Change Seen

“We are clearly moving into a situation whose outcome is hard to predict,” a senior Western diplomat commented over the weekend. “Nothing can be excluded, though I don’t see the makings of a major (leadership) change.”

The dramatic upsurge in nationalism--seen from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, through Byelorussia, the Ukraine and Moldavia, down to the southern republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia--has sapped much of the energy from perestroika , as Gorbachev calls his reform program. After decades of tough suppression by Moscow of all nationalism, the country at times seems almost to be spinning apart.

With brutal clashes that have left nearly 250 people dead in half a dozen places over the past 18 months, the political protests have grown to crisis proportions. On Monday, police reported that a time bomb had killed five people, including an infant, and injured 27 others over the weekend on an intercity bus en route from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi to Baku in Azerbaijan. Political extremists were widely suspected to be responsible.

Gorbachev himself has warned several times in recent months that the Soviet Union’s unity and even its legitimacy as a state are at risk from the nationalist upsurge.

As the Central Committee meets, Azerbaijan is tightening its economic blockade of neighboring Armenia, allowing no resupply of food, fuel or raw materials, to underscore its demand that Armenia recognize Azerbaijani “sovereignty” over the largely Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Baltic Calls for Independence

Millions of Baltic residents have signed petitions calling for the independence of their three republics--and have been warned by Moscow that they are going too far in their demands.

An angry backlash by ethnic Russians, meanwhile, has appeared after months of growing nationalism in the outlying republics. Russian workers have gone on strike in Moldavia and Estonia to protest laws they saw as making them second-class citizens there. This also has given new vigor to the conservative resistance to the broader reforms.

Other incidents likely to be raised at the Central Committee meeting include the attacks on Meskhetian Turks in Uzbekistan in which about 100 were killed over the summer, the killing of 20 Georgians by police last April as officers cleared a central square in Tbilisi and the new “popular front” movements in more than 30 regions of the country.

Against this background, many political activists in the Baltic republics, the Ukraine, Armenia and Georgia are arguing that what the party is offering is “too little, too late.” In their view, the proposals will neither satisfy popular demands nor halt the violence.

For conservatives, who see Gorbachev’s systematic diminution of party power as the cause of the nation’s current problems--political, economic and social--the self-government that he is promising the republics as the next stage of the reforms would irreparably weaken the Soviet Union and thus bring on its ultimate collapse.

Call for ‘Mutual Confidence’

But liberal political scientists, writing over the weekend in the party newspaper Pravda, argued that the Soviet federation “can be durable and effective only if it is based on mutual confidence and the voluntary entry of republics in its composition.”

They called for a new agreement, replacing that of the founding republics in 1922, to “resolve the problem of the distribution of power” between the central government and the constituent republics--an agreement that would reserve to the republics all powers not specifically delegated to the center.

Alexander Kapto, head of the Central Committee’s ideological department, said Monday that the meeting will play a major role in the country’s reform process.

“The process of reviewing the founding political and legal acts of the Soviet Union has begun,” he said.

Under the draft proposals, the Soviet Union’s constituent republics would have the power to question national laws in the courts. They would have the right to use and distribute their national resources. But they would not be able to decide questions of “property relations”--that is, to what extent private property would be allowed.

Councils for Small Minorities

New local councils would be created for small minorities to give them self-government, and national associations would be established to represent the interests of those groups with no homeland territory of their own.

The proposals do not specifically address the current disputes but they lay down guidelines and general procedures for a new policy on federal relations and ethnic minorities.

By official count, the Soviet Union has more than 100 ethnic groups, and a Soviet ethnographer recently enumerated 400. Russians constitute the largest, just over 50% of the country’s 286 million people, and several groups in remote regions of the far north number only 500.

Nationalist activists around the Soviet Union charge that “Soviet” has generally meant Russian--the imposition by the Russian majority of their language, culture and, above all, their political control of other peoples.

The 1977 Soviet constitution proclaims in its preamble that “a new historical community, the Soviet people, has emerged,” with the country’s diverse nationalities being submerged in it.