Soviet Conservative Warns of Rise of Capitalism : Ligachev Urges Party to Challenge Radicals Opposed to Socialism

Challenging President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s determined acceleration of political and economic reforms, the Soviet Union’s leading conservative has warned that some liberals are seeking a return to capitalism and pushing the country into chaos.

Yegor K. Ligachev, a senior member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo, said that “a bitter struggle for power is raging in various parts of the country,” and he called upon the party to recover the political initiative from radicals wanting to end socialism.

To Ligachev, this is a modern renewal of the Marxist “class struggle.” He contends that many intellectuals and most from the newly rich segments of Soviet society are pushing for a political and economic program that will benefit them--without regard for the country’s vast proletariat and the muscle it has developed through the party and the trade unions.

Most Support Perestroika

Ligachev said that while most people support perestroika, as Gorbachev’s reform program is known, “others stand for turning toward capitalism and bourgeois democracy, for the introduction of private property into the economy and a multi-party political system.”

The way that the reforms are being carried out, he continued, implicitly criticizing Gorbachev, has shaken the faith of many in socialism and left them confused about what the country’s future.

Ligachev spoke Wednesday at a Kremlin meeting of the party’s policy-making Central Committee, but his comments, which seem certain to spark new political controversies, were published Friday in Pravda, the party newspaper.

His combative remarks appeared to constitute his return to the main political forum after several months of unusual quiescence. And it made clear that the removal from the Politburo of two other leading conservatives, Ukrainian party leader Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky and former secret police chief Viktor M. Chebrikov, and their replacement by firm Gorbachev supporters was far from a total victory for the Soviet president.

‘Democratic Games’

“The main threat to perestroika comes from those pushing us onto the capitalist path . . . and those who play ‘democratic games’ with them,” Ligachev declared. “It does not come from those branded as ‘conservatives’ for their belief in socialism and the people and their faith in the principles of internationalism.”

Leonid I. Abalkin, the Soviet Union’s new deputy prime minister for economic policy, said in a separate interview published Friday that the government is about to embark on a program that would attempt to pull the country out of its acute economic crisis within the next year.

Outlining plans to reduce the budget deficit by half, to limit economic growth to 1.1% and to shift money out of new investment into consumption, Abalkin told the government newspaper Izvestia that the program, in fact, was the first step toward “market socialism” and even greater reforms.

‘Extraordinary Measures’

“Today, everyone must have a clear understanding that the extraordinary situation will require extraordinary measures for its rectification,” he said in the full-page interview.

Economic growth would be curtailed, he said, by cutting industrial expansion and increasing consumption. The government plans to reduce its 1990 budget deficit to the equivalent of $96 billion, about half of that forecast for this year, and to finance that through 15-year bonds that pay 5% a year, more than twice normal bank rates.

To raise more money and consolidate its past debts, the government would issue other long-term bonds, including an $8-billion series that would allow purchasers to buy coveted consumer goods, including cars, refrigerators and furniture.

Abalkin, acknowledging that these all were interim measures, said the government was buying time to work out more profound reforms.

“If we are to talk of success, it depends on whether the Supreme Soviet accepts our proposals,” he said wearily. “And, if so, it depends on the government’s resolution to stick to them.”

The government has little choice, Abalkin said, but to adopt tactical maneuvers until a full set of economic reforms has been enacted--and political support for such a strategic shift has developed. These considerations, taken together, mean only limited reforms until the next five-year development plan, which is two years away.

Demands for bolder moves were politically destabilizing, he continued. “Ultra-leftist appeals immediately cause dangerous pressures from the right,” Abalkin told Izvestia. “And so, I ask, ‘Do we always know what we are doing?’ ”

Conviction and Confidence

Ligachev, though no real rival to Gorbachev for power, spoke at the party’s two-day Central Committee plenum with the conviction and confidence of one of the party’s principal leaders.

Far from bending to Gorbachev’s declared intention to broaden and accelerate the reforms, Ligachev called for a calm reassessment of the political situation, a reorientation of perestroika along what he called “socialist lines” and a reassertion of the party’s “leading role.”

At the grass-roots level, he said, people are increasingly demanding “a genuine rebuff to the anti-socialist, nationalist and separatist forces” that have gained political ascendancy in recent months. Perestroika is doomed, he warned, unless the reformers and the party as a whole broke with the unidentified “nationalists, slanderers and separatists” at work in the country.

Ligachev’s challenges to Gorbachev in the past have been oblique, focusing mostly on the most radical of trends or perhaps extreme liberals in the leadership without directly attacking Gorbachev’s positions.

But his speech to the Central Committee left no doubt that he--and other conservatives--blamed Gorbachev and his conduct of the party’s reform effort for the country’s deepening political and economic crises.

Once No. 2 in the Kremlin hierarchy, Ligachev was shifted a year ago to responsibility for agriculture to remove him as a potential rival to the Soviet president.

Ligachev spoke after the chief Soviet prosecutor, Alexander Sukharev, told the Central Committee that an investigation had cleared him of allegations of involvement in high-level corruption during the now-discredited rule of the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Slander Charged

Accusing two top corruption fighters of “spewing out a deluge of slander and demagoguery” in their accusations of him, Ligachev said that they--both leading liberals elected to the new Soviet parliament--had “deluded and duped thousands of people and their electors.”

Although he had received letters and telegrams of support from across the country after he was accused of protecting grafters and accepting bribes himself, Ligachev said that he had suffered greatly during the months he was under suspicion.

“The scars, of course, remain,” he said, thanking the prosecutor for his clearance.