NEWS ANALYSIS : SOVIET BLOC IN TRANSITION : Against the Flow of History, a New Course : Reform: Gorbachev knows that his changes will reverberate across the vast land.

“Through all the stages of its history, the party has tried to consolidate its power by any means possible,” Ivan I. Antonovich, a ranking Communist Party researcher, noted in an interview Tuesday. And that’s what makes “this period we are living through . . . unique.”

In his most dramatic step against that flow of party history, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has now called publicly for the Communists to yield their constitutional monopoly on power and allow development of a truly pluralistic political system.

In the process, the Soviet leader is turning his back not only on the late dictator, Josef Stalin, whose legacy he has long openly disavowed, but also on V. I. Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet state. And he is setting out on a new and largely unmarked course knowing that the change will reverberate literally through every factory, office and schoolroom across this vast land.

It was Lenin who championed the “dictatorship of the proletariat” 14 years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, when the fledgling Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party split into Bolshevik (later to become Communist) and Menshevik factions.

It was Lenin who said the proletariat would only stay in step if led by a small, dedicated core of revolutionaries, and that “for the center . . . to actually direct the orchestra, it needs to know who plays which violin and where, who plays a false note and why, and how and where it is necessary to transfer someone to correct the dissonance.”

It was also Lenin who declared the “undivided political supremacy” of his party after taking less than a year either to destroy all non-Communist political organizations or render them impotent.

It remains a matter of historical debate whether Lenin meant permanently to relax the party’s authoritarian grip with the introduction in 1921 of his New Economic Policy, which abolished the state’s monopoly over small business. In the same year, the party also created the institution of the Politburo, the handful of top leaders who collectively set national policy. And it outlawed “factionalism,” its term for organized minority opposition within the ranks to the policies decided by the majority.

Whatever Lenin’s intention, after his death in early 1924, Stalin progressively centralizedpower until he ruled as a virtual dictator, ending any pretense of consensus politics, even among the small clique at the top.

By the end of 1927, at the party’s 15th Congress, Stalin had managed to crush a number of top rivals, launch the first five-year plan for economic development and set the stage for the forced collectivization of agriculture, steps that heralded one of the 20th Century’s most costly experiments in social engineering.

Stalin’s great purges of the 1930s, followed by World War II, reinforced the totalitarian system.

Three years after Stalin’s death, his successor as party leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, made his famous “secret speech” to the 20th Communist Party Congress, condemning the dictator’s crimes and launching an earlier period of relaxation. Within months, there was turmoil in Eastern Europe, culminating in the ill-fated Hungarian uprising in November, 1956.

And by 1964, Khrushchev was ousted and his “thaw” reversed by a new leadership headed by Leonid I. Brezhnev.

What Brezhnev gave to the party he headed, if not to his country, was nearly a generation of unprecedented job security. Once in place, a party boss was secure. And there followed a period of extraordinary corruption, cronyism, and stagnation. Whatever idealism remained from the original Communist creed was slowly strangled.

For all his reputation as a fearsome revolutionary, Lenin was still complaining five years after the revolution that he could not control the bureaucracy.

“Suppose we take Moscow, with its 4,700 responsible Communists,” he told the 11th Party Congress in 1922, “and suppose we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that huge pile. Who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing this pile. To tell the truth, they are not doing the directing. They are being directed.”

Ironically, Gorbachev inherited something of the same problem more than 60 years later. The bureaucracy is securely in Communist hands now, but he has found those Communist bureaucrats at least as resistant to change as the non-Communist predecessors who frustrated Lenin.

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union today reaches into nearly every aspect of Soviet life, from management of industry to control of the Bolshoi Ballet. It is not just a Politburo and a Central Committee, or even 19 million individual members.

It is 440,000 cells, or “primary party organizations,” in every factory, farm, school, and military unit--organizations that convey instructions from the top of the party pyramid to the bottom, and that keep tabs on the performance and advancement of people throughout the system.

Party committees parallel government structures at every level, from the village council through the 157 provincial party bosses, some of whom effectively rule over territories larger than most West European countries.

Frustrated in his efforts to reform the system from the top, Gorbachev has already managed to unleash grass-roots forces to aid him in shaking the system out of its lethargy. He has turned the Parliament from a rubber stamp for party policy into a real forum for debate. He has allowed the growth of “popular fronts” that function like political parties in several of the country’s constituent republics.

While there are none yet, Gorbachev now holds open the possibility of rival parties on a national level with his proposal to eliminate Article 6, the constitutional provision that guarantees the Communist Party’s “leading role.”

But Antonovich, vice chancellor in charge of research for the party’s Academy of Social Sciences, said Tuesday that by opening up the election process to non-party candidates, Gorbachev has already effected a creeping revolution that will take hold this spring in local and republic-level elections.

“Who the hell cares about Article 6?” Antonovich said. “Whether it stands or doesn’t stand, the party is out of power.”