Will Continue <i> Perestroik</i> a Fight, Gorbachev Declares

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said in an interview today that he will fight for his perestroika reform program as long as he remains in power.

“To me personally perestroika is my choice, it is my life, my destiny, my predicament as a person and as a politician,” Gorbachev said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. in Moscow. “I am not going to deviate from this road, whatever pressure is put on me.”

Gorbachev indicated that he is coming under strong pressure to change his policy.

Speaking to the BBC after a meeting with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Moscow, Gorbachev said Soviet society is “sick” and needs radical reform.

Although enjoying unparalleled popularity abroad, Gorbachev has come under mounting criticism at home, including the method by which he was elected to the new presidential office--by legislative vote rather than by nationwide ballot. The next elections are scheduled in about five years.

Gorbachev said his remaining in office can only be decided democratically.

“Whether I am at the helm or whether I am not going to be at the helm, this should be decided in a democratic way on the basis of the existing constitutional process,” he said. “This is the issue that is linked to life itself.”

Gorbachev is trying to induce the Supreme Soviet to pass a plan for a transition to a market economy as a way of rejuvenating the entire country.

He insisted that a revolutionary perestroika is the sole method to heal Soviet society.

“I am optimistic because we have made our choice in such a direction,” he said. “Evolutionary processes are prevailing all over this world.”

The Soviet president discounted what he painted as expressions of doom by critics that his restructuring program of perestroika, glasnost (openness) and democratization had spawned a breakdown of order.

“The process of disintegration, of which many people speak so much . . . I think that this is a superfluous point of view,” he said. “There is no process of deterioration. This is the process of renovation, of transition to a new quality, which we are going to do.”