Soviet Party’s Top Leaders Criticize Radical Reformers : Communists: An ‘open letter’ insists on greater political discipline. It calls for expulsion of those forming factions.

The Soviet Communist Party’s top leadership sharply criticized radical reformers within the party Tuesday, accusing them of dividing it into factions and undermining its authority, and it called for their ouster in what some of them fear could become a purge of liberals.

The principal target of the attack is the six-month-old Democratic Platform, which groups many of the party’s most original and radical thinkers and which was campaigning from within for the party’s transformation, but the far right could also be included in the likely dismissals of dissenters.

In an “open letter” to the country’s 18.8 million Communist Party members, the leadership called for the expulsion of those who are “working toward a split and creating organizationally formed factions within the party, who reject the Soviet people’s socialist choice, who by their views and conduct have actually placed themselves outside the party.”

Read at the outset of the evening news on Soviet television Tuesday and published in the central Soviet newspapers today, the letter undoubtedly heralds a period of intense political struggle before a pivotal party congress planned for early July.

The declared goal is to purify the party’s ranks and to insist on greater political discipline from its members.

“It is important that the delegates to the congress are convinced Communists,” the letter said, reflecting the fears of top leaders that the party could split at the congress itself.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, addressing delegates to the Communist Youth League’s congress here, sought to assure the country that this is not the start of a purge in the old Stalinist sense, for the campaign would be carried on through review of individual cases.

Gorbachev argued that perestroika, or restructuring, as his program of political, economic and social reforms is known, has become virtually a revolution. Thus, he contended, the country needs a much stronger party, all of whose members would be committed to its goals.

But Vyacheslav Shostokovsky, rector of the Moscow Higher Party School and a leader of the Democratic Platform, said the campaign would be shaped almost entirely by local and regional party officials, most of whom are still conservatives, and that for this reason he feared that it would become a purge of liberals.

“This unties the hands of party functionaries on the spot to get rid of those members who, through their ideas and the support they consequently win, have become the most powerful critics of the party,” Shostokovsky said in an interview Tuesday.

Acknowledging that he is among those likely to be forced to choose between his political principles and continued party membership, Shostokovsky predicted that many of those forced out would seek to form their own left-of-center party.

The Democratic Platform had already recruited about 60,000 supporters in 162 branches in 102 Soviet cities, according to its organizers, who were predicting last week that their expulsion, when it came, would bring it even greater backing from within and outside the party.

Drafted by the party’s ruling Politburo, endorsed by members of the Central Committee and reviewed by regional first secretaries, the letter represents a considerable political victory for Yegor K. Ligachev, the senior Politburo member who supports traditional beliefs within the party’s top ranks.

Ligachev had spoken out forcefully during last month’s Central Committee meeting for such a “cleansing” and “demarcation” to restore party discipline and revive its past strength.

The letter, as published, is said to be more conciliatory on some points than the first draft. While many conservatives within the leadership applauded the original letter, a number of local party leaders argued forcefully for clear limits on who would be asked to leave, according to informed political sources, and the final letter was said to be rewritten to make it softer.

Describing the Democratic Platform and other radicals, the letter said, “Under the banner of perestroika, some party members unleashed a struggle within the party with pseudo-radical positions,” and that the Democratic Platform specifically “lacks answers on the principal questions our society is concerned about.”

The party leadership objects most strongly to the Democratic Platform’s attempts to organize a small party within the larger party’s ranks and to efforts to make it a federal party in which each of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics would have an independent Communist Party.

Such moves, the letter said, would quickly weaken the party and ultimately bring its breakup.

The Democratic Platform, organized initially in Moscow last October and as a national group since January, has been campaigning for the transformation of the Communist Party into one based on parliamentary politics--and one that would have a liberal philosophy close to that of Europe’s Social Democrats.