Ligachev Says Gorbachev’s Policies Threaten Nation

Yegor K. Ligachev, the Politburo’s conservative standard-bearer, directly attacked President Mikhail S. Gorbachev this week for making “concession after concession” and said his policies threaten to break up the Soviet Union.

Ligachev’s remarks, reported in the newspaper Izvestia on Thursday, are the first response from conservatives to the Soviet president’s calm acceptance of the Russian republic’s declaration of sovereignty. The declaration asserts the supremacy of Russian laws over those of the Soviet Union.

Rather than condemning the declaration, Gorbachev proposed a new formula for the future Soviet Union as a decentralized “union of sovereign states” in which the Kremlin would wield only the limited powers delegated to it by the 15 republics.

According to Izvestia, Ligachev turned down a nomination to become chairman of the new Peasant’s Union of the Soviet Union, which held its founding congress in Moscow this week.

He told the congress he wanted to “carry to the end his political battle at this dangerous moment, in his words, for the party and the state,” Izvestia said. “He considers that the current line of the leadership of the country is leading to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

“Concession after concession is being granted, and if compromises are made endlessly, everything could be lost,” he was reported to have said.

Izvestia did not say which policies Ligachev was objecting to, but undoubtedly his immediate target was Gorbachev’s mild reaction to the Russian republic’s sovereignty declaration.

By permitting the republics to place their laws above the union’s, Gorbachev is encouraging a radical decentralization of power in the long super-centralized Soviet empire. In the words of Komsomolskaya Pravda this week, he is accepting the position of “president without territory.”

That would be enough to scandalize the traditional Ligachev, 69. The fact that the sovereignty declaration was proposed by President Boris N. Yeltsin, Ligachev’s old nemesis, undoubtedly compounded the offense.

Ligachev has sharply criticized two other major Gorbachev policies in recent weeks, though not quite so directly. Some Soviet watchers believe he is campaigning for a leading post in the Russian Communist Party, to be founded next week. Conservatives seeking a new power base have targeted that organization.