A Big Step Toward Legitimate Pluralism : Soviet Union: Gorbachev and his reformers did not get all they wanted from the Central Committee session. But they got enough to emerge the victors.

The task of describing, never mind analyzing and interpreting, the Soviet political system becomes more difficult by the day. It is also, however, infinitely more fascinating. Within less than five years the Soviet system has moved from being highly authoritarian to one in which a substantial element of de facto pluralism exists and in which political pluralism is at last becoming legitimized.

A crucial step toward legitimized pluralism was taken last week when the Central Committee gave its reluctant agreement to the proposals of Mikhail Gorbachev that the Communist Party give up its guaranteed monopoly of power and open the way to party competition. A number of political parties other than the Communists already exist in some Soviet republics. But now that the way has been opened for the Supreme Soviet to rescind Article 6 of the Constitution, which made the ascendancy of the Communist Party a significant part of the fundamental law of the land, a growth in both the number and size of other parties can be expected--in Russia as well as in the peripheral republics.

One of the major ways in which a competitive party system could emerge in the Soviet Union is through a split in the Communist Party itself. Such splits are already beginning to occur on an ethnic and territorial basis (with the Lithuanians leading the way), but the Party Congress--which has now been advanced from October to this summer--will bring out as never before the fundamental ideological differences within the Communist Party and could hasten a division with reformist and conservative wings forming separate parties. There could even be a three-way division among radical reformers, centrists and conservatives.

Gorbachev and his reformist advisers did not get all they wanted in Moscow last week. The language of the resolutions was fudged and watered down in order to achieve the remarkable feat of getting every Central Committee member except Boris Yeltsin to vote for a package that went against the convictions of many of them.

Gorbachev also wanted--against all the traditions of the Central Committee--to televise the proceedings of the plenum. This would have made it harder for members to defend the Communist Party’s monopoly of power and to express their distrust of the people, given that the people would be watching. While Gorbachev and his allies lost on this point, the speeches of participants in the debate have been published in the Soviet press.

Not the least of the points on which Gorbachev had to make a tactical retreat was in his desire to ease the path of acceptance of more consistently reformist proposals to be presented to the 28th Party Congress by securing the removal of at least one of the remaining conservatives on the Politburo. A senior official in the ideological department of the Central Committee said at the beginning of the week that Gorbachev would remove the conservatives in the leadership “step by step” and indicated that a resignation could be expected. It did not happen, but there is to be another Central Committee plenum within a month.

Gorbachev also failed to get the Central Committee reduced from its normal size of around 300 members, plus at least half as many candidate members, to a mere 200 full members. It emerged after the meeting that the revamped Central Committee would be a body of between 300 and 400 members.

All this indicates the constraints upon Gorbachev’s power and it helps to explain why his supporters believe that a strengthened state presidency is necessary. One of the fundamentally important points to come out of the plenum was acceptance of the need to move to a new-style presidential system in which the president would not only have greater powers than accrue to that office at present, but would be elected directly by the people. A president elected by universal adult suffrage would have a legitimacy and authority that a leader who becomes head of state purely on the say-so of a Communist Party forum (performing the functions implicit in its “leading role”) could not.

The details of the latest political reforms will have to be settled in the Soviet legislature--the Congress of People’s Deputies and especially its inner body, the Supreme Soviet. But it looks as if a directly and freely elected president and competition between political parties in elections to both local soviets and national legislatures are on the way.

That is a dramatic change in the Soviet political system. It means that even if the reformers did not get all they wanted last week, they emerged the victors. Given the problems of everyday life in the Soviet Union, it is not a foregone conclusion that Gorbachev will be the winner in a popular election for the presidency, but it is highly unlikely that he will be defeated by a more conservative Communist candidate. If he were to lose such an election, it most likely would be to an advocate of more radical change who was not tainted by the compromises forced upon Gorbachev by the need to carry a more conservative group of colleagues with him and by the economic failures and intra-ethnic unrest that beset him.