Gorbachev, Under Fire, Offers to Quit : East Bloc: At heated weekend meeting, he uses ploy to get backing he sought.

Communist Party conservatives attacked Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms during a weekend meeting, prompting the Kremlin leader to suggest he could step down, official accounts showed today.

But the offer, which foreign analysts in Moscow said was almost certainly tactical and aimed at demonstrating Gorbachev’s underlying strength at the head of the party, was not taken up, the accounts indicated.

The attacks came Saturday at a meeting of the Party’s policy-setting Central Committee in Moscow, Estonian Prime Minister Indrek Toome said in an interview with the republic’s youth newspaper Noorte Haal.

“There were speakers who expressed their dissatisfaction with the Central Committee’s present perestroika policy,” Toome was quoted as saying by the newspaper in its Sunday edition, obtained by a Reuters correspondent in the Estonian capital of Tallinn today.

“As an argument, they used the fact that we are praised and flattered by the capitalist world and that this was a pretty clear sign that something was wrong,” Toome said in the interview.

“Gorbachev could not control himself after that, and said: “If that’s the opinion, we will discuss the matter, and I am not clinging to my post’,” said Toome, who attended the Moscow session although he is not yet on the Central Committee.

Estonian party chief Vaino Valjas said that the leadership had come under fierce attack by Alexander Melnikov, party chief of the Siberian industrial city of Kemerovo.

“The tone was very accusing, and not just against the Central Committee and the Politburo,” Valjas said of Melnikov’s speech in a television interview broadcast Sunday in Estonian. A transcript of the Valjas interview was obtained by Reuters in Tallinn.

“Gorbachev interrupted him very fiercely, with all the force of the General (Party) Secretary, saying he could not agree with Comrade Melnikov,” Valjas said.

“Mikhail Gorbachev stuck very firmly to his line. Gorbachev said: ‘It’s my life’s work. It’s my way of seeing things and I am not giving up.’ ”

In a related matter, few Soviets walked off the job today despite a call by human rights activist Andrei D. Sakharov for a two-hour general strike to demand an end to Communist Party domination, according to reports reaching Moscow.

Sakharov and several other parliamentarians on Sunday urged the national strike to pressure the Congress of People’s Deputies to vote on rescinding Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which guarantees the Communists the “leading and guiding role” in society. They also want the Congress, which opens Tuesday, to act on several key reform laws.

On the streets of the capital today it was business as usual. Stores and transport operated and no pickets were in evidence.