Ligachev Denounced by Moscow Newspaper

The leading conservative within the Soviet Communist Party’s ruling Politburo was fiercely attacked Thursday by an avant-garde liberal newspaper as an opponent of most of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms.

In a harshly critical Moscow News article reflecting the intense politicking now under way within the Soviet leadership, Yegor K. Ligachev was depicted as a foe of democracy; a Communist who regards the people as instruments of the party and government, and a politician whose ideas of reform are limited to improving what has not worked and shows no promise of ever working.

To Ligachev, “the people are immaterial, as are questions of democracy and the power of the people,” Vitaly Tretyakov, deputy editor of the weekly newspaper Moscow News, wrote in a two-page profile, which is accompanied with a photo showing Ligachev giving a Nazi-like salute.

With a crucial meeting of the party’s policy-making Central Committee scheduled to open Monday, the profile seemed to be an attempt to discredit Ligachev and his supporters in advance of a debate that could decide the future of perestroika , as Gorbachev’s reforms are known, and perhaps of his leadership.

That debate, likely to last two or even three days, will range across the country’s multiple crises, including ethnic violence in Armenia and Azerbaijan, the threat of Lithuanian Communists to break with the Soviet party and an economy that only gets worse. Also on the agenda is a new party platform that most political observers expect will seek to broaden and accelerate perestroika .

“If the country’s leadership, including Ligachev, is prepared to give up the imperial mindset forthwith,” Tretyakov said, “democracy may still have a chance of winning in the months to come. Then democracy will have to arm itself with real, not ephemeral power. There are indications, however, that the tendency to compromise has gone too far, beyond the danger point.”