Next Step : With Glasnost Comes Identity Crisis in Soviet Communist Party : A national congress will grapple with changes in the nation’s guiding political force. The outcome could determine the country’s future.

The Communist Party, which has governed the Soviet Union since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, remains on paper the country’s ruling party. Its leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, is the country’s president. Its members form the majority of the national Parliament. Only one minister in the central government is not a party member.

True, the Communists lost power to new nationalist movements during elections this spring in the Baltic republics, and the governing councils of the country’s two largest cities, Moscow and Leningrad, are now in the hands of dissident Communists and non-party members with programs of radical reform.

But no one doubts that the decisions that the party will make at its 28th national congress starting next Monday will shape the future of the Soviet Union and that political initiative in the country still lies largely with the party leadership.

“The weight of the party is still great and undeniable, and that is why it is worth fighting over where it stands and what it does,” Vyacheslav N. Shostakovsky, rector of the Moscow Higher Party School and the chairman of Democratic Platform, said as he argued for the group’s participation in the congress.

“The party still holds power--sometimes unjustly, sometimes passively, sometimes malevolently, sometimes negligently . . . . With that power comes the potential to change Soviet society, to transform the economy, to reform the political system, to do so many things that need to be done.”

Yet, this is not the power that the Communist Party once wielded--and it is nowhere near “the party of militant revolutionaries” that it had proclaimed itself.

Its membership, now just over 18 million, is declining with three to four times more people quitting than joining the party in most areas of the country. Soon, fewer than one in 10 workers will be party members, according to recent projections; a decade ago, the party’s goal was one in five.

The party’s popular prestige has dropped to the point where far more people trust the Russian Orthodox Church; 47.9% of those surveyed in May by the Center for the Study of Public Opinion expressed “full trust” in the church compared to 29.5% for the party. And 26% said they had no trust at all in the party, even though it had governed the country for three generations.

In fact, party members themselves are so divided over perestroika, the reform program launched five years ago by Gorbachev, that the same institution that used to boast of its political discipline and “monolithic Leninism” appears likely to split after the congress.

Radical reformers belonging to the Democratic Platform have already warned that they plan to break away if their reforms are not adopted, and some conservatives believe that they, too, should leave in order to uphold traditional Marxist-Leninist values.

Such a split, although it would be the first since the time of V. I. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, would diminish the party’s ranks only slightly; more members are leaving through apathy or because membership is no longer required for their jobs than would quit over ideology.

Nor is there an early prospect of the party’s being replaced by a rival, as happened in many East European countries. For more than 70 years, the Communist Party has been the only political organization allowed in the Soviet Union, and there simply are no real challengers except nationalist movements in the smaller republics.

A more serious danger might arise in the future, some Soviet analysts have speculated, if the party lost all authority and the country drifted into anarchy, an old Russian preoccupation.

“The priests turn heretics--that is the great fear in any religion,” Shostakovsky remarked in an interview. “When we political ‘theologians’ reverse our positions and say, ‘This, not that, must be done, and this is forbidden but that is good,’ doubt is introduced, the faith is weakened and orthodoxy is greatly diminished.”

This soul-searching is largely the result of the country’s multiple crises and the freedom that glasnost, or the new political openness here, has given people to think about solutions. But it has left even the party’s leaders disoriented.

Asked to define the Communist ideal, one of the party’s chief ideologists, Alexander S. Kapto, said this month that, “stripped of dogmatism, (it) incorporates all the fundamental humanitarian ideas evolved in the course of history and reflects the fundamental human aspiration to happiness and a better future.”

Kapto might have been preaching at a nondenominational church service. He made no mention of the classless society of the future, nor of class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, public ownership of the means of production or the other ideological pillars around which the Soviet Union was built.

“The moment has come for the total de-ideologization, de-Communization of the country, and it is already happening in practical terms,” Alexander Tsipko, a leading political philosopher, said in an interview. “When Mikhail Gorbachev speaks, and when he talks sense, it has no relationship to Marxism-Leninism. . . .

“But where does that leave the party? It leaves it as an organization whose cause, whose raison d’etre, no longer seems relevant or even valid.”

The largest factor, however, in what is now a full-scale crisis of confidence is the great uncertainty over the party’s day-to-day role.

The organization that, up to two years ago, ran everything--the whole Soviet government from top to bottom, the world’s second largest economy, the armed forces and nuclear arsenal of a superpower, the daily lives of more than 285 million people--has been deliberately cut back, its authority reduced and its officials told to stick to political work.

There are two sides to this question, one of the most important in the Soviet Union, and the issue is far from resolved.

Most managers were quick to praise the initial decision to pull the party out of its day-to-day role, for this gave them new freedom to operate their factories and run their offices without interference from an ubiquitous and meddling party committee, often made up largely of professional party workers.

Many later found, however, that the party professionals had the necessary connections to obtain supplies, the authority to hire new workers and ways to get bank loans or foreign currency allocations that they lacked. The party’s decision to give up its monopoly on power and step back from daily operations had, in fact, left a vacuum at every level of the economy.

“Nobody is willing to sign anything, to make a decision, to do anything,” the frustrated manager of a Moscow construction company, a cooperative enterprise, said, complaining about what it now takes to get a building permit. “Those who are willing, it eventually turns out, either lack the authority or the money or materials to follow through.”

This phenomenon affects health care, schooling, cultural activities, the news media and even neighborhood youth groups. Where there had been party committees, each interpreting the decrees of the Kremlin in its local conditions, government officials or private citizens are starting to take charge, but without the connections or the experience and with uncertain tenure.

The result, say conservatives, has been chaos--the near collapse of the economic system, political paralysis at virtually all levels, social discontent on a growing and dangerous scale.

“We are going through an extremely dangerous period now,” Yegor K. Ligachev, the foremost conservative in the party leadership, told a farmers’ conference here this month. “Our party and our state are facing a great threat, and our Soviet federation is being torn to pieces. If we continue to make one concession after another, we may lose everything.”

Although Ligachev disagrees with many of Gorbachev’s reforms, believing that they were not well thought out and have been poorly executed, he is most concerned about the decline of the party, its internal confusion and loss of authority.

“The nation is now like a giant, all of whose tendons have been cut and who can’t raise his arms or his legs or even raise his head,” Anatoly S. Salutsky, a conservative political commentator, observed at the start of a Russian Communist Party conference here last week. “In our organism, those tendons were the party. The party linked all the distant parts to the center, it executed the decisions that were made, it ensured a functioning of the economy.. . . Now, nothing works.”

Even Gorbachev’s supporters are critical. “We have destroyed the mechanism of managing our economy, and we have not set up a new one,” Yuri A. Prokofiev, the first secretary of the Moscow party organization, the country’s largest, said at the conference, tartly summing up one result of the changing party role.

Another regional party leader, voicing a common criticism of the reforms, said, “We are like the boy who sees an old clock, one that is not keeping time very well, and who then takes it apart. What we have now are a handful of springs and wheels and screws and no idea of how to put them together again.”

This self-doubt is sapping the party’s strength even further, Gorbachev acknowledged last week, and the shape of the party, as much as its policies, must be the focus of the congress. “People are inquiring with anxiety--what is happening with the party, where is it going, what will it look like?” he said.

But Gorbachev, in a preview of the congress, declared his intention to proceed with the restructuring of the party, not the return to the old Leninist system of a ruling party that took charge of everything in the name of the country’s workers and peasants.

“We have achieved what the most progressive people of our country have for decades been striving for,” he asserted, reaffirming the changes of the past year. “The party has decided not to assume the functions of the state any longer. The division of power is now actual fact. Elections have become truly free. We are actually on the threshold of true political pluralism. The notion of ‘social democracy’ is no longer a mere propaganda phrase.”

The new party platform and party rules, Gorbachev said, would bring further changes, both in the party’s relations with society and in its internal structures. “The Communist Party will be turned from an administrative body imposing its will on society into a political organization that will uphold its right to political leadership in free competition with other socio-political forces,” he added.

That would mean renouncing the nomenklatura system, a key instrument of political control, that reserves jobs for party members and through which the party leadership appoints officials at lower levels. Party officials would in the future be elected on the basis of competitive nominations and secret ballots. And party members would be allowed to express dissenting views and challenge the leadership.

Resolution of the country’s problems depends on first reorienting the party, said Veniamin A. Yarin, a steelworker with a wide populist following who now sits on the Presidential Council.

“The party must determine its role in society,” Yarin said in an interview. “Either it continues to be a tool for those who want to pressure society, or its leadership must be assumed by men who will turn the party to human needs. That is what always has been lacking in the party--attention to human needs.”

Prokofiev, the Moscow party leader, made a similar point. “The future of the party is broad, sweeping democracy,” he told newsmen. “That is the only way to attract the popular masses.”

On the State of The Party:

BORIS N. YELTSIN, 59

President of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic

“The party apparatus is extremely bureaucratic. People hold onto their seats with such tenacity, you can’t get rid of them unless you catapult them together with the seats out of the picture altogether.”

“There must be no monopoly of power. Down with the Communists!”

ALEXANDER N. YAKOVLEV, 66

Soviet Communist Party Politburo member

“For there to be a multi-party system, there must be other parties. We in the Communist Party don’t see any reason to establish an opposition to ourselves, but as a result of the democratic process other parties will emerge and will compete for seats in parliament. I hope we will be ready.”

YEGOR K. LIGACHEV, 69

Soviet Communist Party Politburo member

“We are going through an extremely dangerous period now. Our party and our state are facing a great threat, and our Soviet federation is being torn to pieces. If we continue to make one concession after another, we may lose everything.”

YURI A. PROKOFIEV, 51

Soviet Communist Party first secretary in Moscow:

“The party is a unique mechanism of state government. It is now, only now, evolving into a political organization, but a lot of comrades don’t understand and want to return to the old command-administrative system.”

MIKHAIL S. GORBACHEV, 59

President and Soviet Communist Party general secretary:

“People are inquiring with anxiety -- what is happening with the party, where is it going, what will it look like?”

“The Communist Party will be turned from an administrative body, imposing its will on society, into a political organization that will uphold its right to political leadership in free competition with other socio-political forces.”