Leaders of Soviet Party Say Split Is Inevitable : Communists: Two or more branches are foreseen after a congress in July. Gorbachev’s critics say he is weakening ideological foundations.

Leaders of the Soviet Communist Party, themselves deeply divided over fundamental principles as well as the course of the nation’s political and economic reforms, say that a split in the party that has ruled the country for more than 70 years is now inevitable, the party newspaper Pravda reported Tuesday.

In an angry debate over the party’s strategic goals and basic policies, members of the policy-making Central Committee predicted with little qualification that the Communist Party will break into two, or perhaps more, parties following its congress in July.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev came under harsh attack at the same time for his advocacy of “democratic humane socialism” and “common human values,” rather than “class struggle” and “dictatorship of the proletariat,” as the ideological basis for his reforms, according to accounts of the speeches at last week’s Central Committee meeting.

This had been “a clear concession to those who want not to revise but liquidate outright--to liquidate outright--the ideological foundation of our party,” Gorbachev was told by one regional party leader.

He was accused of allowing the destruction of the party’s ideological foundation, if not participating in it himself, and turning the party away from communism even as a distant and perhaps rhetorical goal. Another participant charged Gorbachev with abetting an effort “to destroy the party from within” by weakening its ideological rigor and searching for expedient solutions.

Such great differences have developed among the party’s 18.8 million members that the long-cherished principle of party unity, which has helped to keep the Communists in power here, is all but dead, speaker after speaker contended at the meeting.

“As soon as there is a party platform and rules, a split is inevitable,” Yuri A. Prokofiev, the Moscow party first secretary, told the Central Committee, according to Pravda. “And by now it is clear that the Communist Party can no longer be considered the party of the entire people because, were it so, it would have to express the interests of those who no longer subscribe to socialism but are still among us.”

The party is already breaking into factions, Prokofiev asserted, and remains nominally united only because it has yet to adopt a program declaring its goals and plans to achieve them. That move, due at the congress, is certain to split the party from top to bottom.

“Let us be honest--the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has ceased to be a party of those who think alike,” V. V. Chikin, the party secretary at a watch factory in Minsk, declared. “In its ranks are people with positions that are diametrically opposed.”

The party has become paralyzed, Chikin said, by a deep ideological divide between radicals, such as the populist Boris N. Yeltsin, and conservatives adhering to traditional socialist values and party discipline.

“Both I and my political opponents try to know the position of the center and where it is leading us in order to know whether we can travel the same route,” Chikin said, echoing a common complaint among participants in the meeting. “Meanwhile, both right- and left-wingers can only guess over many of the maneuvers undertaken by the party leadership and try to crack the crossword puzzles that we now have as party documents.”

The most immediate threat to the party’s unity, several speakers at the meeting said, is the Democratic Platform, a group of liberal-to-radical Communists whose alternative program would take the party even further from classic Marxism toward social democracy, the moderate wing of the working class movement in Europe.

Yuri N. Shogin, the party first secretary in Zhukovsky, a town outside Moscow, said that the program was widely discussed in his area and at least 30% of the people already support it in preference to the party’s proposed platform, which itself is highly reformist and therefore controversial.