Communists Try to Defend Top Moscow Role

Its authority openly challenged and its policies increasingly questioned, the Communist Party sought Friday to defend its constitutionally guaranteed “leading role” in the Soviet Union by arguing that moves to reduce its power would slow the country’s political and economic reforms.

The party newspaper Pravda acknowledged in a somber and lengthy editorial over half of its front page that the party is now facing one of its most severe trials as it attempts to deal with the country’s deepening economic crisis and to proceed with the reforms amid growing doubts about its ability to lead the nation and widespread uncertainty about its strategy for change.

Although Pravda admitted the eventual possibility of a different role for the party in the future, the importance of the editorial was its effort to rally the party in advance of a crucial meeting today of its policy-making Central Committee and an equally patent attempt to calm the mounting fears here that the nation is blundering into a dead end.

Many party members “have lost the will to fight in the face of the multitude of constantly arising problems,” Pravda said. “A mood of insecurity and pessimism is now prevalent.”

The current political atmosphere is unusually contentious, adding to the atmosphere of crisis and further undermining public confidence.

The Moscow party committee held a special meeting on Friday evening to urge the party’s ruling Politburo to remain “resolute and firm” in its stand and not to take “hasty and insufficiently considered political decisions.” Rumors had been spread, it said, with the intention of “splitting the party’s Central Committee,” but it gave no details.

Two rallies, each organized by party officials, have been held in Leningrad recently to support the latest reforms. More than 40,000 gathered there this week to support President Mikhail S. Gorbachev against what they said was an attempt to oust him. At the earlier meeting, Gorbachev was denounced for carrying reforms too far. “We don’t let you kill communism with perestroika ,” one banner warned Gorbachev, attacking his reform program.

Open challenges are growing from nationalists in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in the southern republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia and, to a lesser extent, in Byelorussia, Moldavia and the Ukraine.

The party and its top leadership are expected to come in for sharp criticism when the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national assembly, meets here Tuesday for its semiannual session.

Radicals, led by Andrei D. Sakharov, a Nobel Peace laureate, and four other Congress members meanwhile are attempting to organize a nationwide two-hour symbolic strike, modeled on one last month in Czechoslovakia, to demand revision of the constitution to end the party’s preeminent role in political life here.

Rumors of a major political shake-up at the Central Committee meeting abound, having spread across the country more than a week ago--but without any consensus on whether liberals or conservatives would win in the implied showdown today.

The principal item on the Central Committee’s agenda is the economy and the government’s efforts to resolve the present problems in the next year or two, with more fundamental reforms to be phased in over five or six years.

Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov is scheduled to provide the 250 committee members with a preview of the five-year, step-by-step program of economic reform worked out by Leonid I. Abalkin, the vice prime minister in charge of economic policy, and to seek their approval for it.

But the likely debate will be as much about where the country is headed as about how it will get there as the realization grows that 1990 will probably prove to be the decisive year for the success or failure of perestroika and thus a year that will shape the fate of the country for a long time to come.

The role of the party is an essential element of that debate, and there is an unprecedented and growing challenge to Article 6 of the Soviet constitution proclaiming the Communist Party’s leadership of the country.

Similar provisions were recently stricken from the Czechoslovak, East German, Hungarian and Polish constitutions, and the Soviet party is clearly resolved to stay ahead, if it can, of the nation by demonstrating its leadership.

The Parliament in the Soviet Baltic republic of Lithuania voted this week to remove this provision from its constitution and re-establish a multi-party political system there. Armenia, Estonia and Latvia are preparing to do the same.

“The talk is about destroying this obsolete system, making the party a true political and ideological fighting force, acting within the limits of the constitution,” Pravda said. “However, one cannot but notice the obvious: under the cover of ‘ultra-radical’ ideas, attempts are being made to diminish and, if possible, devalue the party’s authority, to elbow it out of the political arena.”

Such radical moves are winning wide support, Pravda acknowledged, but in practice they would mean handing over power to the politically ambitious--people without a clear program for solving the country’s problems or even a commitment to socialism.

The solution, Pravda argued, is not in stripping the party of its pre-eminent political role--at least not now in the midst of transition--by amending the constitution or shifting all power to elected bodies.

The party would not, as the reforms progressed and its own character changed, retain forever this privileged position, Pravda said, and these constitutional provisions could be changed as the whole constitution is rewritten.

“With full certainty, we must declare that we shall not cling to the letter of the concrete formula,” Pravda said in its editorial. “Any constitutional formula or provision, including Article 6, can be revised and modernized, right down to its complete removal. This should be done within the framework of the fundamental and constructive revision of the entire text of the constitution, and such work has already started.

“But in this connection a question arises: Will a revision of just one article be feasible? And on an urgent basis, too? We must sort out the issues without the artificially whipped emotions and irresponsible appeals. We must weigh whether all this pushing will benefit perestroika. “

The party’s proper response is to reinvigorate itself, Pravda argued, and to demonstrate through correct policies its right to lead the country.

“ Perestroika needs the party, but a renewed, active and strong party,” the paper said.

Pravda, attempting to rally party members in advance of the elections that begin on Sunday in the country’s 15 constituent republics, admitted that the party is facing a tough fight but warned against “defeatist attitudes.”