Gorbachev Determined to Keep His Party Post : Soviet Union: He deflects fierce conservative criticism with an impassioned plea for Communist unity.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, rallying his supporters after a fierce conservative onslaught on his reform policies, declared Saturday that he intends to remain the leader of the Soviet Communist Party despite calls that he step aside.

Although the posts of state president and party general secretary should be separated in the future, Gorbachev said, he will retain both for the present to deal with the country’s multiple crises and to press ahead with further political and economic reforms.

“I am convinced now that we have to keep the arrangement as it is,” Gorbachev said at the conclusion of a party conference in which his policies came under relentless attack by conservatives. If he gave up his party post, he continued, “confrontations may appear--and elements of such a confrontation were present at this conference.”

Replying to a letter from workers calling on him to step aside as the party’s general secretary and concentrate on the presidency, Gorbachev made clear his determination to fight any conservative attempt to replace him at the party’s congress next week.

Gorbachev had indicated on Wednesday that he could lose his party post at the congress.

Gorbachev on Saturday also committed himself in advance of the congress to hold the party together despite the growing divisions between conservatives and reformers.

In an impassioned appeal for party unity, he urged radical reformers, many of whom are now more determined than ever to break with the Soviet Communist Party, to remain within the party, warning that such a split would imperil the changes they want.

“A split in the party would lead to the biggest polarization of forces in society and weaken the constructive forces in the country,” Gorbachev said. “At this decisive stage of perestroika , it would be a gift to those who want to bury perestroika and defeat it.”

Confident and combative as he answered delegates’ written questions for an hour and a quarter at the end of the conference, Gorbachev was clearly trying to re-establish his authority after a week of some of the harshest public criticism he has undergone.

“This Politburo initiated perestroika ,” he reminded the delegates. “There may have been miscalculations. But some of the speakers here almost reached the point of saying, ‘Stand them up against the wall!’ I must defend us so that we have direct assessments of our work, but so that we do not return to what we all wanted to leave behind.”

But Gorbachev said there would be a major realignment of the party leadership, starting with the Politburo and the policy-making Central Committee.

“I expect a serious renovation of our party’s leadership so that new forces step forward,” he said, adding that the congress will assess the work of each member of the leadership.

The full party congress, which opens next Monday, will focus, first of all, on renewal of the party itself, Gorbachev said, and then on broadening and accelerating the reforms.

“The Communist Party does have a future,” he said. “But this must be a new party that reacts on and perceives everything happening in the country and around the country, a party that can express the vital interests and aspirations of the people, that can generate further ideas for perestroika , that is a consolidating and uniting force.

“It would not fulfill this role if it remained as it has been until recently. There is no third option for the party--either it becomes a consolidating force of the working people or it turns into one of history’s bystanders.”

Gorbachev won important support for continuing to combine the country’s two top jobs when one of his sharpest critics, Ivan K. Polozkov, who had just been elected first secretary of the Russian Communist Party, said Saturday that he would support the president’s position.

Expected to join conservatives such as Politburo member Yegor K. Ligachev in pressing Gorbachev to quit his party post, Polozkov instead told a press conference, “We have to join the two posts of president and general secretary so that (Gorbachev) can be most active and influential in pursuing perestroika .”

“This is a key time, a difficult time for our country,” Polozkov, 55, the party leader in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar and a former Ligachev deputy, continued. “Presidential power has not yet realized its full potential, and the power of the party cannot be dismissed yet.”

Polozkov was at pains to show that he is not the conservative that has been portrayed in the Soviet press--and through his own speeches, many of which have been critical of Gorbachev and perestroika .

“Some people call me a right-wing conservative, some call me a difficult person, some call me unmanageable or insubordinate, some call me unreceptive to innovations,” Polozkov said. “But I am not as terrible as I am portrayed to be.”

He said that he would immediately set to work to show that he is for party consolidation, not new divisions. “We will have to be thoughtful, moderate, democratic and realistic,” he said.

Gorbachev had already won the endorsements of the party leaders of Moscow and Leningrad, two of the country’s powerful political barons, for combining the posts, and Polozkov’s concurrence will make it difficult to mount a serious challenge on this question at the party congress.

Conceding only that he might shift some of his party duties to a deputy, Gorbachev argued that the reform process needs the same individual at the head of the party, which is yielding its monopoly on power, and at the head of the government, which is taking over most of the party’s administrative functions.

This transfer of power has proved to be “a most complicated process,” he said, “and it goes on painfully.”

Vadim A. Medvedev, a Politburo member and the party secretary in charge of ideology, told newsmen at the Russian party conference that, as a result of the sharp criticism and open divisions at the conference, the leadership is intensifying its efforts to ensure that there is no major split in the party at the forthcoming congress.

“We are struggling to avoid a split,” Medvedev said. “I do not rule out that some people will leave. But we must ensure there will be no major split.”

Gorbachev rendered a point-by-point defense of the criticism voiced over the past week as he answered the delegates’ often sharp questions, which ranged across the economy, foreign policy, national security and party politics.

In defending his economic reforms, which will replace central planning and state ownership with market forces and private entrepreneurship, Gorbachev asserted that the only alternative is a divine miracle.

“Who among us is Jesus Christ?” he asked. “Only Jesus managed to feed 20,000 Jews with five loaves of bread. There is no way, other than a miracle, of solving our problem simply.

“We are faced with a difficult question, but we are on the path to fundamental change, and that will bring us along the road to renewing our society.”

Acknowledging popular fears of lower living standards and conservative criticism that the reforms are a retreat from socialism, Gorbachev said that there is no alternative to the government program of establishing a “regulated market economy.”

“Everything else that we have done up to now has failed,” he said. “It is that simple.”