Reform Crucial, Gorbachev Says : Perestroika: President’s policies are attacked at party conference. Radical change must be accelerated, he says.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, replying to mounting criticism that his reforms are worsening the Soviet Union’s political, economic and ethnic problems, on Tuesday defended perestroika as achieving more in five years than past Communist Party leaders had in previous decades.

Gorbachev, fighting to recover perestroika ‘s lost momentum, acknowledged that the country is in an acute crisis, but he argued that the only way out is to accelerate the changes, particularly the establishment of a market economy.

The Soviet leader nevertheless came under attack immediately at a party conference from conservatives who blamed him for the party’s loss of power and prestige, who opposed the transition to a market economy as a “surrender to capitalism” and who criticized his foreign policy as based on concessions to enemies and rivals.

In a debate on the future of communism in the Soviet Union and thus the future of the nation, Gorbachev sought to respond to the growing criticism on the right in terms that would blunt its thrust but, at the same time, rally the country to support his reforms once again.

“Views are already being voiced that perestroika is to blame for everything,” Gorbachev said, opening a conference of Communist Party members from Russia. “We have lived through five years of perestroika. Historically, this is a very brief period. But a most profound change has been accomplished in a huge country during some 1,500 days that is comparable to the largest and most radical events in the world’s history.”

The conference was called to formally re-establish a Communist Party for Russia, the largest of the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics, reversing its absorption into the national party in 1925. After originally opposing a separate Russian party as weakening the Soviet party as a whole, Gorbachev and others reversed them selves when conservatives in Leningrad moved to establish a party that they would control.

The Soviet president endorsed the separate party Tuesday, calling it “necessary.” But the main focus of Tuesday’s debate was on his policies.

Rarely has Gorbachev been forced into such a spirited defense of his program of political, economic and social reforms, but rarely has he met with such forceful criticism of his policies and achievements in a party forum.

“Many Communists are convinced that the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party should be held guilty because the party has been put in the position of trying to catch up and consequently always losing the initiative and unable to influence the development of events properly,” Ivan Osadchi, a member of the conference’s organizing committee, said to the loud applause of the delegates.

“Instead of strengthening all the links of the party, determining its strategy and tactics, the leadership has reduced it to crouching unarmed in the trenches under massive shelling by anti-socialist forces, which have rapidly mobilized. There are those who want to end the matter with suicide. . . . We are for a Communist Party on a Leninist basis.”

Perestroika had given the people nothing in the past five years, Viktor Tiulkin, a party official representing a group of conservative Communists from Leningrad, told the conference. In abandoning the party’s old Marxist principles, the leadership is fostering widespread social injustice and alienating the workers, he said.

“Is perestroika oriented toward the interests of the majority of the common people or the interests of a narrow group of people who know how to make money?” Tiulkin asked. “We favor the unity of Marxists, not those who pervert Marxism.”

Col. Gen. Albert Makashov, a regional military commander, warned that Gorbachev’s foreign and defense policies have left the country open to attack and declared that the armed forces would never accept “ideological surrender.”

“Germany is reuniting and will probably become a member of NATO, Japan is becoming a decisive force in the Far East,” Makashov said, criticizing the “new political thinking” that is the basis of Gorbachev’s foreign policy. “Only our learned peacocks are crowing that no one is going to attack us. Comrades, the army and navy will be needed yet by the (Soviet) Union!”

And Alexander G. Melnikov, the first secretary of Siberia’s Kemerovo regional party committee and a frequent critic of Gorbachev, contended that the Soviet leader is “sliding toward the cult of personality” by taking over so much decision-making himself.

This rough political debate highlighted the crucial period through which the Soviet Union is passing as fundamental decisions are being made on the nation’s future--not only at this week’s conference but at a congress of the full Soviet party that opens July 2.

“The debate is hot, and opinions differ quite sharply,” Yuri A. Manayenkov, a secretary of the party’s policy-making Central Committee, told a news conference at the party gathering. “This is a major event, an extraordinary event, and it is extremely important for the destiny of Russia and the country as a whole.”

The conference offers a preliminary test of strength among conservatives, radical reformers to the left and Gorbachev’s supporters in the center before the party congress in two weeks. Gorbachev outlined further changes for discussion at the conference, the party platform will be debated this week and leaders of the Russian party will be elected. The 2,750 delegates to the Russian conference will constitute nearly 60% of the delegates at the congress.

“We will see who is who and where they stand,” a Central Committee official said. “Nothing is settled, everything is flux, little can be predicted, except struggle--sharp, acute and fundamental struggle.”

Gorbachev warned both the conservatives and the radicals that they could break up their Communist Party with their infighting.

But the initial focus of Gorbachev’s speech, broadcast live from the Kremlin, was his strongest defense yet of perestroika in the face of what he acknowledged as setbacks.

“The question is frequently asked, even now, ‘What has perestroika yielded?’ ” he said. “The assessments are paradoxically contradictory. Some regard what has happened as the greatest revolutionary event, opening up broad prospects for making our society more humane. Others regard these changes as the downfall, the disintegration, the collapse of everything--as a real apocalypse.

“Some favor perestroika, others damn it. But this is not all. There is a desire recently to go from talk to action. Attempts are being made to muster dissatisfaction caused by current difficulties and to exploit the acuteness of the situation as a battering ram against perestroika and its true advocates, against those who are really concerned about the country’s destiny.

“These actions by those who claim to be ‘spokesmen for the people’ are by no means in the interest of the cause, and it is now a well-known, tried and tested, populist tactic by which some people make political capital. No matter from what positions such attacks are launched, their true purpose is destructive.”

Ticking off the gains of perestroika, Gorbachev contended that economic reforms debated for more than 30 years without result are now being put into effect, that the same is true in terms of political reform and that in foreign relations Soviet policy has enhanced world peace as well as the country’s own security.

“What whole generations were striving for and could not be achieved has now been achieved in the ideological and political sphere within five years,” Gorbachev asserted. “Thus, despite all the drawbacks, the extremes, the negative phenomena and the losses, including those of an ideological and moral nature, the way has been cleared for the spiritual rebirth of man and society.”

He was equally sharp in his defense of economic reforms, rebutting criticism from Yegor K. Ligachev, the party’s ranking conservative, who earlier this week had rejected the transition to a market economy.

“It is only through the market,” Gorbachev argued, “that society’s requirements will really be revealed and the development of the sectors of production and services will be oriented in the right way, that is to the creation of what people really need and in the amount they need it. . . . There is no other choice.”

He rejected with ridicule Ligachev’s contention that this would bring a return to capitalism.

“One could not have invented anything more absurd,” he said, not mentioning Ligachev by name but virtually quoting him. “The market appeared at the dawn of civilization--it is not an invention of capitalism. . . .