NEWS ANALYSIS : Bruising Battle a Turning Point in Soviet History

In the Kremlin battles that shape the future of the Soviet Union and much of the world around it, Mikhail S. Gorbachev has prevailed once again in his unrelenting determination to bring about political and economic reform.

At a time when his domestic popularity had declined sharply and his political grip seemed to have slipped to the point where rumors of his resignation were credible, the Soviet president led the Communist Party on Wednesday into giving up its long monopoly on political power.

Confronted with a deepening political, economic and social crisis in the country and the belief of many that his reforms are largely responsible, Gorbachev persuaded the party’s policy-making and largely conservative Central Committee that perestroika must be broadened and accelerated, not curtailed or slowed.

After three days of debate, the 250-member committee voted to accept Gorbachev’s new platform for the party, at least as a basis for discussion at the party congress planned for early summer, and only one person--populist Boris N. Yeltsin, who thought it not radical enough--voted against it.

Although the full extent of that victory will not be clear until the platform is published, Gorbachev’s supporters within the leadership were already speaking of the party’s decision to share power as a turning point in Soviet history.

“This was a step of exceptional magnitude in our party’s history, a landmark,” Alexander N. Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s closest supporters in the party’s ruling Politburo, said, asserting that in importance the adoption of the new party platform exceeds all the reforms undertaken in the past five years.

But the debate was bruising.

Gorbachev was attacked by conservatives for ideological errors, by local party leaders for mismanagement, by nominal supporters for attempting to do too much and go too fast and by one old and embittered Byelorussian politician for overweening political and personal ambitions.

“Our discussion was not just a series of friendly embraces,” Yakovlev told journalists at the end of the meeting. “There was not a paragraph in the platform on which we did not have a debate or a discussion or an argument. There were heated and emotional debates, and sometimes it moved beyond the limits of a polite and friendly discussion.

“There are people who still very closely associate themselves with old-time methods, old-time customs and who very highly evaluate the stability and comfort of days past. Then there are people who welcome the changes and support them, and there are also people who are less patient, who are eager to see more rapid changes and who tend to take more radical attitudes.

“The task of a politician in any country is to take those attitudes and strive for a consensus,” Yakovlev continued. “Otherwise, he would not live up to his role as a political leader because we cannot just brush some of the opinions aside and turn a deaf ear to others. This is not the way things are worked out in a democratic society.”

In anticipation of just such a prolonged and sharp debate, the Central Committee meeting had been scheduled to last two days, rather than the normal one. Instead, it ran three, still finishing three hours later than planned Wednesday evening.

The conservatives forced changes in the platform--Yakovlev called them “minor” but acknowledged the rewriting had continued to 4 a.m. two days in a row--but they could not defeat it.

“There was no alternative, absolutely none,” eye surgeon Svyatoslav Fyodorov, who attended the meeting as an observer, said as he left the Kremlin on Wednesday evening. “Gorbachev let them say what they wanted, but it was really, as you Americans say, their last hurrah. Even as they spoke, they knew they had no alternative.”

But few, even among Gorbachev’s liberal supporters, appeared to understand the logic for move--his carefully weighed political bet that the party’s image would be enhanced if it stood ready to take on all comers in the political arena, that the power it has held for so long was corrupting it and that only through offering to give it up did the party have a hope of retaining it.

The conservatives, anticipating Gorbachev’s move to free the party from such political responsibility, had begun their attacks on him within the Central Committee in December, according to two senior party officials. They reached a level during this plenary meeting that had not been heard since Nikita S. Khrushchev was ousted in 1964.

The criticism, according to accounts published in the party newspaper Pravda, came from across much of the Soviet political spectrum: from conservatives who thought he was going too far, from radicals who accused him of timidity in not moving faster, even from liberals who, like others, have been dismayed by the failure of perestroika to resolve the country’s problems.

The old-line conservatives, traditional in their orthodoxy, said plainly that they could not accept many of the basic concepts in the reforms--the party’s decision to give up its “leading role” in the government and society, the inclusion of privately owned enterprises in the mixed economy, the readiness to let the country’s constituent republics go their own way, the reduction of the country’s military might through unilateral moves, the setbacks suffered by socialism in Eastern Europe.

Others, regional and local party officials, who clearly fear loss of their power--even their jobs--under the new system, focused on the need to restore order and discipline amid the chaos created, they contended, by early reforms. Those reforms were poorly conceived and haphazardly executed, they charged.

Many of these officials will probably not survive the forthcoming government and party elections, and Gorbachev spoke several times of the need to “renew” the Central Committee and the Politburo at the party congress, which is planned for June or early July.

For Gorbachev, the question remains, as it has after each of these political battles in recent years, of what he will do with his enhanced authority, with the broadened reforms. He has repeatedly sought and obtained greater powers to push through even more sweeping reforms only to find new obstacles that must be cleared.

The paradox of his leadership has, as a result, become his ability to win such showdowns in the Kremlin but his inability to reap those victories in the factories, on the farms and in the troubled provinces.

“After this, I do not think that he can continue to blame the conservatives for compromising his program,” a Soviet political commentator remarked Wednesday evening. “He has what he asked for, and now he must make it work.”