Soviet Party Reform Starts Costing Officials Their Jobs

Less than 24 hours after the Soviet Communist Party voted to give up its “leading role” in the government and economy, the Baltic Shipping Co. in Leningrad on Thursday put the decision into immediate effect--and fired more than 200 political commissars on its ships.

The party apparatchiks, who had served as first mates, supervising ships’ captains and enforcing political discipline among the crews, are no longer needed, party officials said, and will be returned to their old jobs as navigators, engineers or electricians or be given new jobs on shore.

This development, reported ever so briefly by the official Soviet news agency Tass on Thursday, was the first of thousands of such actions expected to hit the ranks of the party’s 19 million members, many of whom similarly hold jobs in government, in industry, in education and in culture by virtue of their party membership.

“To say that, as a party, we are prepared to yield power, (that) comes on one level, and it is very profound and will be accepted by our members,” a senior party executive said Thursday. “But when we tell people that they are going to lose their jobs because we are taking this action, that comes on an entirely different level--it is a kick in their gut.”

Months of political struggle lie ahead as the Soviet Union develops its new political system. Some of battles will be waged on the issues. Others will develop around efforts to organize new parties. But many are likely to be intensely personal, as individual party members struggle to survive.

“Dismantling the institution of commissars on ships is just one example of the forthcoming personnel reforms in the Communist Party,” Vyacheslav Trusov, the party leader among workers at the Baltic Shipping line, said in Leningrad.

“The commissars enjoyed little popularity among the seamen. Sailors often dubbed them ‘shipboard bureaucrats,’ saying they were more concerned with meetings, rallies and paper work than people.”

This is just the start, many political observers here believe, suggesting that the future of perestroika, as President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms are known, could be decided here.

“We know we have many members who joined simply because they had to be members to get ahead, to win promotions, to get certain posts that were reserved for party members,” another official at the party’s Central Committee headquarters commented. “Who can blame them? Many are, in fact, adequate-to-good party members.

“What happens, however, to those members who hold jobs that, under our system of nomenklatura, are restricted to approved party members? That system is being abolished, and it affects people’s lives.

“What happens when jobs such as political commissars on merchant vessels or party representatives at factories or schools are abolished, as they will (be)? And what happens if the party people, some of whom are influential or even powerful, don’t go quietly and accept that we are a different kind of party now?”

The Communist Party could lose perhaps a third of its members before regaining a significant measure of support among the people, according to party officials, and of the party members remaining, perhaps a third will declare themselves members of new parties, such as the Social Democrats or the Greens.

Yuri Sorochik, a reformist member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national legislature, predicted a major struggle throughout the party as the latest reforms are implemented and party members decide against supporting the leadership.

“There is a vast middle layer of party officials right across the country who are not going to give up easily,” Sorochik said, “and they still wield a lot of power.”

Similar questions worried many at the three-day Central Committee meeting. Vladislav G. Anufriev, the second secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party in Soviet Central Asia, wondered aloud how the party would lead without its constitutional mandate and guaranteed positions, according to the text of remarks made during the debate, which were publishedThursday. .

“The new platform says that party organizations and Communists cannot control the administration directly, but only through functioning within it as party members,” Anufriev told the Kremlin meeting. “But what if a certain administrator is not a member? There are lots of those today! What will be the party’s role in this case?

“And will the party members be forced, by this logic, to set up strike committees with heavy party predominance so as to have some levers to control the situation?”

The multi-party system, now more theory than reality, appears to offer fewer levers.

“This will not add milk or meat in this country,” A. P. Myasnikov, an excavator operator and one of the workers on the Central Committee, told the plenum. “But it will sharply aggravate the power struggle. We must not forget that in the ranks of many public movements pretending to the role of parties, there are extremist and anti-socialist forces.”

Scores, even hundreds of political groups are expected to appear here in the next year, according to one senior Communist Party official, as local as well as national groups take advantage of the broad definition of political organization.

“This year will be crazy,” the official said. “By the end of the year, we will have 437 parties--in Sverdlovsk alone.”

For now, perestroika has permitted, in broad terms, four political groupings in Sverdlovsk--a city of about a million people in the Urals-- but the actual number of such organizations is approaching 30, according to an activist here who tracks such movements around the country.

The party official made several points: Political groupings will grow rapidly and unpredictably before settling down into stable patterns. Amateurs will predominate at first, until their experience turns them into professionals. And this new Soviet politics will be invented as events develop.

He said he and other professionals at party headquarters anticipate that the party in its present form will remain dominant for some time but face challenges from a new Social Democratic Party on the left and from a Christian Democratic Party on the right.

Such parties, he speculated, will draw most of their members from the Communist Party as political action groups that now number more than 5,000 in various cities and regions draw together.

He said he and his colleagues see the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet (Parliament) as the focal points for opposition groups; within those bodies, the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies already represents the nucleus of a future opposition party along Social Democratic lines.

The party officials also expect that environmentalists will succeed in starting a Green party, again by linking ecological interest groups from around the country, and that two dozen or more ethnic based parties will spring up in the Soviet Union’s constituent republics.

Many local party officials see such groups as quite threatening.

“To avoid losing the result we have already achieved in perestroika, we must realize that it is time . . . in the necessary cases to terminate the activities of all sorts of public movements, political groups and fronts which, declaring themselves the ‘champions of the people,’ destabilize the situation,” N. F. Tatarchuk, the party first secretary from Kalinin, told the Central Committee.

But others were open to the idea of compromising with groups that they could see winning broad public support--even as their own support diminishes.

“We must define the terms in the question of multi-party system with utmost clarity,” Anufriev from Kazakhstan said. “Even now we have hundreds of parties in the most diverse guises.

“We should not bury our heads in the sand like ostriches, but face the reality. The time has come for political alliances, reasonable cooperation.