Gorbachev Being Pressed for Urgent Meeting on Looming Party Split : Communists: The call by conservatives puts him in an awkward spot. He risks cementing rival factions--or losing control of developments.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is being pressed by conservatives within the Soviet Communist Party to call an urgent meeting of the party’s policy-making Central Committee to discuss the looming split in the party, informed political sources said Thursday.

So far he is resisting the pressure, out of apprehension over the passions that such a debate would arouse, the sources said.

Boris V. Gidaspov, the party first secretary in Leningrad, and other members of the Central Committee from the city, have formally petitioned Gorbachev for the meeting, the sources said. They have won the support of other regional party leaders and of ranking conservatives in the party hierarchy, including senior Politburo member Yegor K. Ligachev, they said.

The petition puts Gorbachev, the party’s general secretary, in a difficult position, according to political observers here. If he agrees to the meeting, the party will probably split immediately and irretrievably into rival factions, they said. But if he refuses, he may lose control of political developments entirely.

Gorbachev has neither agreed nor refused, the sources said, but pressure on him is mounting as conservatives sense an unusual vulnerability on his part.

“The party is going to split--that is regrettable, but it is inevitable,” a conservative political commentator remarked privately Thursday. “This could quickly put Gorbachev in the embarrassing position of being the head of a party that can no longer claim to be the country’s ruling party.

“But he is still president, and he cannot be removed very easily from that position. Politically, he should now try to rise above party politics and all of its squabbling by letting the multi-party system get truly under way. However, to do that, he needs to accelerate the scaling down of his own party and the establishment of competing parties.”

The complexity of these developments reflects the intense political maneuvering under way in advance of the pivotal Communist Party congress in July, in anticipation of the adoption of radical economic reforms before then and the rapid reshaping of the country’s power structure.

“All is motion, everything is in contention,” a liberal member of the party Central Committee said Thursday. “The fate of a great nation, a superpower of the 20th Century, is in the balance. . . .

“And so, suddenly, everything counts, not a centimeter will be ceded by anyone without struggle, parallel moves are under way at every level of society and, somehow, every development is linked. Politics now have an intensity that burns day and night.”

The current focus of interest is the push by conservatives, defeated so often in the past three or four years, to reclaim the leadership of the Communist Party and oust their radical rivals.

The conservatives are now promoting a quick, sharp campaign, which is beginning in Byelorussia, the Ukraine and other outlying areas, to oust party members promoting radical political and economic reforms that break with socialism, and advocate mainly a parliamentary role for the party.

The campaign--no one here dares call it a purge--began this week with an open letter to all party members from the Central Committee declaring that political discipline must be re-established inside the party and that those who had gone beyond the party’s positions must either recant or leave.

Although they have long cherished the Communist Party’s status as a ruling party and viewed party unity as a primary political virtue, the party’s conservatives have come to favor a smaller, more disciplined Communist Party that they believe will emerge from this “cleansing” process committed to the traditional Communist values that they uphold.

They expect that the proposed Central Committee meeting would be a showdown between the party’s different wings and consequently would hasten this process.

Conservatives would also like to elect the delegates to the forthcoming party congress and then to shape the new party program and rules without competition from radical reformers, according to political insiders here.

Gidaspov, an increasingly important figure on the national political scene, contended in his petition that the open letter to party members this week did not go far enough, even though many liberals fear the campaign will become a purge against them.

In Gidaspov’s view, the party must define its position on key issues clearly and quickly so that there will be a firm basis on which to act against the radicals in the “delineation of positions.”

Gidaspov, who has been Leningrad’s party leader for less than a year, is fighting to retain his position against an expected challenge later this month by an alliance of party liberals and radical reformers under Anatoly A. Sobchak, a law faculty dean, who has risen to considerable prominence as a member of the Supreme Soviet.

With a firm declaration of party principles and goals and a strong launching of the anti-radical campaign, Gidaspov believes he can contain the challenge of the insurgents, although they scored impressive victories in the recent elections in Leningrad.

With that, Gidaspov will be able to hold to a centrist position himself, according to Soviet political observers; without it, he might well decide to align himself firmly with the conservatives and assure himself of their support.

He already is a principal patron of the new Russian Communist Party, which will hold its initial conference in Leningrad next week and whose formation, undoubtedly on a conservative platform, runs counter to Gorbachev’s intention to maintain the integrity of the Communist Party as a countrywide organization.

“If Gorbachev does not help Gidaspov, if he pushes him away and Gidaspov loses the post of first secretary, he will lose Gidaspov to the conservatives forever,” one Soviet political analyst commented, “and that could prove to be a significant loss in terms of holding the party together.”

The coordinating committee of the Democratic Platform, the principal target of the Central Committee’s open letter, appealed Thursday to other Communists and the Soviet people to assist in “preventing the persecution of dissenters in the Soviet Communist Party.” The appeal demands a referendum of all Communists on key aspects of the party’s development as well as national strategy.