Balancing Power, Reform a Dilemma for Gorbachev : NEWS ANALYSIS

For the five years that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has led the Soviet Union, he has been troubled by a growing paradox: The more powerful he has become, the less able he has seemed to resolve the nation’s massive problems; the greater the reforms that he has undertaken, the more the crisis has deepened.

Frustrated by his inability to reverse what most here now recognize as the Soviet Union’s collapse as a political, economic and social system, Gorbachev is now seeking even greater authority, the “strong hand” of an executive presidency.

Constitutional amendments that on Monday will be put to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament, would give the Soviet president broader policy-making powers as well as the executive authority that rested largely with the Communist Party before Gorbachev began to separate it from the state, creating a power vacuum that must now be filled.

“Democracy and powerlessness are incompatible,” Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister and one of Gorbachev’s closest allies in the ruling Politburo, said last month as the party’s Central Committee debated the new system. “I strongly support the institution of the presidency. Time does not allow us to procrastinate.”

If the constitutional amendments are adopted, replacing the principle of collective leadership in the Soviet government with that of presidential responsibility, Gorbachev is expected to be elected to the post by the deputies for a four-year term.

This move, proponents of the new presidency argue, will match the dynamism of Gorbachev’s leadership with real executive authority and, in doing so, restore the energy and popular confidence that perestroika --his reform program--has lost here in recent months.

It will also, they believe, resolve at last Gorbachev’s “paradox of power,” in which his grip on the Kremlin has grown stronger while he has remained unable to exert that same control through the whole party and government.

Gorbachev’s conservative foes in the Communist Party’s hierarchy, for example, were long ago stripped of power and reduced to criticizing him from the sidelines.

But after two full purges of the party bureaucracy since Gorbachev assumed the leadership on March 11, 1985, so little has changed in the provinces that the people in many areas are now using mass demonstrations, like those in Eastern Europe last year, to oust officials they regard as corrupt, uncaring or simply ineffective.

Gorbachev is ready to push through another constitutional amendment this week that will be one of his most breathtaking reforms: the Soviet Communist Party’s acceptance of a multi-party system, ending its 70-year monopoly on political power.

Yet the bureaucracy’s leverage on such key issues as price reform, cooperative enterprises and industrial reorganization remains so strong that, in practice, there has been little break with orthodox socialism.

And despite his unrivaled international standing, Gorbachev’s popularity at home continues to decline, and with it his ability to muster support for reform measures.

The vast political changes under perestroika notwithstanding, so little has improved in people’s daily lives--and so much has worsened--that he has an approval rating of just 46% in the latest national public opinion survey, and there are much lower expectations in the success of perestroika .

These contradictions have proved crippling for Gorbachev’s reforms, and two liberal political scientists argued in a pivotal article last August that they justified the “iron hand” of an authoritarian government to bring a peaceful transition from the old totalitarian system to democracy.

To outsiders, all this may appear to be a further contradiction: Amid efforts to democratize Soviet society and to encourage the widest participation in government, Gorbachev seeks and wins greater powers.

But to Russians and many other Soviet people, strong, even authoritarian rule is a system they know and respect, and many political figures have been urging the institution of strong presidential rule since last summer.

“Our state power is skidding again and again, trailing in the wake of events and occasionally losing control over developments,” Boris Topornin, director of the State and Law Institute, said recently, calling for a stronger presidency to fill what he says is often a vacuum of power at times of crisis.

“Our faith in democratic ideals must by no means be shaken by the state’s management crisis,” Topornin said. “Democratization is a major achievement of perestroika that we must especially cherish. But democratization does not at all imply the weakening of state power. Democratic government has to be strong and efficient. If democracy cannot defend itself, perestroika may be aborted.”

A nationwide public opinion survey last autumn by the National Opinion Research Center found that 40% of those questioned wanted the return of a “strong hand,” a further 20% advocated a return to traditional values and only 25% sought greater political liberalization.

Igor Klyamkin, another leading political scientist, argued last month in a provocative essay that the Soviet Union probably could not “move straight from totalitarian rule to democracy” without an authoritarian regime as a transition period.

“Never in world history were the market economy and democracy established simultaneously,” Klyamkin wrote. “The transition to the market economy, at least at the early stages, has always been carried out under not exactly democratic regimes.

“Different forms of authoritarian regimes usually correspond to these transition periods, which are essentially characterized by a disintegration of fundamental values and dramatic changes in motivations in social behavior and psychology. . . . This regime is the toughest when the old system is fast falling apart and the traditions of democracy are still weak.”

A further argument is advanced by members of the Congress of People’s Deputies and the Supreme Soviet, the country’s standing legislature, who see not the diminution of their authority through a strong presidency but the implementation of laws they pass.

“There is an acute lack of executive power at the moment, and it will become even more acute when the party organs are driven out of the state structures,” said Sergei B. Stankevich, a political scientist and member of the Congress of People’s Deputies. “The problem is that the adopted laws are hanging in the air and not being put into practice.

“This is a dangerous situation that undermines the authority of the law and discredits the legislative bodies. We cannot invent anything aside from the executive control exercised by a president. A presidential system is ideal in that it provides for the effective implementation of laws.”

The change has brought warnings, however, that it could facilitate a return to dictatorship. Boris N. Yeltsin, the radical populist, accused Gorbachev last week of becoming power-hungry and intolerant of criticism. The powers of Parliament must be strengthened to match those of the president to ensure a system of checks and balances, Yeltsin said.

Gorbachev will use his new powers, his supporters assert, to implement reforms that have been blocked by the conservative bureaucracy, that have been stalled by legislative debate or have simply succumbed to inertia.

In the future, he will be able to act before problems--such as the territorial conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan--grow into full-scale crises; to fire obstructive government officials, such as those suspected of withholding consumer goods to sabotage economic reforms; to suspend regional and local administrations in areas where reforms like the leasing of farmland are blocked, and to rule by decree if necessary.

This will be the “strong hand” that many political figures, liberals and conservatives alike, believe is needed to pull the Soviet Union through its difficult transition from a failing, largely totalitarian system into one based on growing political pluralism and economic competition.

And with this, the Soviet Union will finally begin to emerge from its prolonged crisis, advocates of the executive presidency contend.