Soviet Union at ‘Danger Point,’ Ligachev Says

The Soviet Union is now facing the gravest dangers, both political and economic, since it began the process of reform five years ago, a senior member of the Communist Party’s ruling Politburo said over the weekend, warning that further policy mistakes could plunge the country into chaos.

Yegor K. Ligachev, widely regarded as the principal conservative within the Soviet leadership because of his staunch support for traditional socialist values, said that the crisis, although still deepening, can be overcome but only with much greater discipline and resolve than the party and the country have shown.

“We have approached a dangerous point, and if we step over, then economic and political chaos may well set in,” Ligachev told The Times in an interview at the party’s Central Committee headquarters. “Understand, we are at the last line, the very last.”

The party’s new platform, which is being debated before adoption at a party congress in July, will “allow us to emerge from the grave state that we are in,” Ligachev said, declaring his support for a program that is decidedly reformist in philosophy and that aims at a sweeping transformation of the Soviet political and economic system.

“I know that Ligachev is presented as a conservative, but I believe that I belong to the realists and that I stick to common sense,” the 69-year-old politician said, acknowledging the controversy that surrounds him and his views. “I say that the transformation (set forth in the party platform) should be implemented consistently, gradually but inexorably.”

But Ligachev warned that the party could split soon over the platform and other questions of fundamental strategy, and he argued that it needs “a thorough cleansing” of its ranks to recover its Marxist-Leninist orientation, re-establish internal discipline and reassert its political authority.

“We cannot watch passively as our party is destroyed,” he said, reiterating a call he made at the last Central Committee meeting for stricter party discipline and the ouster of those who violate it.

Ligachev said that while the current crisis is the result primarily of Stalinism compounded by years of political and economic errors and the party’s loss of moral authority, serious mistakes during the reform efforts have made the country’s problems even worse, particularly through hasty action.

“If we are to be absolutely honest and self-critical, then we must say that in the extremely complex process of perestroika, which touches on all spheres of our life and activities, we have made a lot of mistakes,” he declared during a broad and frank review of the current political situation within the country.

While carefully avoiding direct criticism of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and stressing the Politburo’s unity on basic policies, Ligachev made clear his own view, which is winning acceptance here, that the repeated acceleration and expansion of the reforms in the last three years has undermined their effectiveness and eroded popular support for perestroika.

And, in what many will interpret as a political shot at Gorbachev, who tries to find a middle position between radicals and conservatives on most issues, Ligachev declared firmly: “I am against centrism and centrist positions.

“I have my position, and it coincides with that of the Politburo, the Central Committee and the party platform,” he continued. “Some issues, we have to argue over, but that is a natural process. We treat one another with respect on a personal level, but on principles we argue.”

One issue on which he still appears to be at odds, at least in philosophy if not the letter of the party platform, is private enterprise, including the private ownership of the means of production and the hiring of labor.

Although he can accept such moves in the agricultural sphere, he is strongly opposed in industry.

“For us, this issue was decided in October, 1917,” he said, referring to the Bolshevik Revolution. “This involves hired labor, and it is the capitalist form of acquiring the fruits of someone else’s labor.

“In our society, reintroducing private property in this form would bring a colossal social stratification and intensify social and political tensions,” he said. “We cannot ignore that for decades we built a new type of economy.”

In taking these positions so publicly, Ligachev is clearly positioning himself to remain high in the party leadership, perhaps even bidding for the top party post if Gorbachev steps down in October to concentrate on his duties as executive president.

For Ligachev, the greatest threat to the reforms at present “stems mostly from anti-socialist, separatist forces,” notably the nationalist groups such as that in Lithuania, seeking to secede from the Soviet Union but also from factions within the Communist Party that are breaking away from Marxism-Leninism and opposing the party’s policies.

“Those forces that are attempting to undermine the integrity of our state and to split our party represent the main danger to perestroika ,” Ligachev declared, stressing as he did so the party’s need for a new set of party rules that will allow it to unify its ranks and quickly purge those opposed to its philosophy and program.

Ligachev, who was trained as an aeronautical engineer, helped build the Siberian scientific center of Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk and worked for 18 years as the party leader in Tomsk, a key industrial center, before joining the top party leadership in Moscow in 1983, was openly disdainful of the emerging class of Soviet politicians--”the talkers,” as he calls them.

And he mocked the party’s radicals, his most persistent critics.

“They are pushing for the transformation of the Communist Party to a parliamentary party with various factions and groupings,” he said. “I would not call them radicals but revisionists for this. What they are fighting for is neither new nor radical, for their principles served as the basis for all sorts of bourgeois parties as far back as the 1800s and accomplished little.”

These problems of party organization have become even more critical than actual policies, Ligachev suggested, for policy mistakes have been corrected.

“I am profoundly convinced that we have no other political force except the Communist Party that can bring the country out of the very acute situation it is now in and renovate our socialist society,” he said. “The state of the party determines the situation in society. . . . How can the party enhance its authority and reassert its leadership? Only through deeds, practical accomplishments.”

Reviewing the five-year-old reform program of perestroika, or restructuring, Ligachev said that two mistakes have proved the most costly--one of which he described as a premature transition from a centrally planned, state-owned economy to one based on mixed ownership and market forces and then the withdrawal of party officials from management of the economy.

“We were not prepared sufficiently for economic reform,” Ligachev said. “The core of that, it seems to me, must be a combination of planning and the market. . . . Unfortunately, we started the transition to the market without having any economic regulators, such as the West does.”

The result, he noted, was rapid growth in the money supply as wages increased and Soviet enterprises increased their incomes but without a matching increase in production, particularly of consumer goods, so the gap widened between supply and demand.

The second mistake, also committed in an effort to accelerate the reform process, was to pull party officials out of the government and particularly from the economy before new structures were established to replace the party, he said.

Ethnic violence followed the economic deterioration, Ligachev said, and early resolution of nationalist demands now ranks as a priority with the rapid improvement of the economy.

“This sharp aggravation of ethnic tensions is a phenomenon we have never had before,” he said.

He was firm and uncompromising on the need to end what he described as “an anti-constitutional takeover” by Lithuanian nationalists of the government in the small Baltic republic and their declaration “re-establishing” Lithuanian independence.

Moscow is prepared for a steady escalation of pressure on the Lithuanian leadership, he said, until “common sense prevails.” But he unequivocally ruled out the use of military force to halt the effort to secede.