Party Apparatchiks Rise in Defense of Their Privileged Turf : Soviet Union: Communist functionaries are often called parisitic. But they will get their say this week.

They can be found--usually sleek, well-fed men--in offices the length and breadth of this country. They sit at imposing desks with portraits of Lenin behind them and with three or four telephones, badges of rank and clout, in easy reach.

They mix Marxism and the take-charge style of a Chamber of Commerce executive or a Soviet version of Dale Carnegie. To hear them tell it, they and their forerunners are the ones who have done the job of building socialism, industrialized the Soviet land, won World War II and put a Russian in space first.

“Today it’s fashionable to blame everything on us, the apparatchiks, “ said Ivan P. Khudyakov, chief of a local Communist Party machine in this city 120 miles south of Moscow, whose spacious office and four telephones immediately show visitors how important he is. “But no society can function without an administrative machine, or without the people to run it.”

This week the Soviet apparatchiks will get their say. Full-time Communist Party and government functionaries are by far the largest contingent among the nearly 4,700 delegates to the national party congress, and they want an accounting of what’s become of their country, party and personal standing during the often tumultuous rule of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

“We should receive answers to the questions: What has happened to the party; why has it found itself lagging behind events; how can it overcome the crisis?” V. Chikin, party secretary at the Minsk Clock Factory, wrote in the daily newspaper Pravda.

Some barely conceal their desire to oust Gorbachev from the post of party general secretary that he has held since March, 1985, and which he is increasingly subordinating to the office of the Soviet president.

Career Communists like Khudyakov, also the top elected official in his Tula neighborhood of 100,000 people, are denounced by a growing chorus of their countrymen as unproductive bureaucrats and parasites. In the new, freely elected parliaments of the Soviet Union, the men chauffeured in black Volga sedans to their dachas are excoriated as foes of democracy and the gray eminences of the party’s continuing dominance of society.

A stormy June meeting of Russian Communists, widely regarded as a dress rehearsal for the 28th Party Congress, showed how aghast apparatchiks have become at Gorbachev’s “regulated market” reforms, political changes that now allow forces from Social Democrats to anarchists to vie overtly for leadership of society, and internal party reforms that, in cities like Tula, could cut the number of full-time party functionaries in half.

“Many Soviet people have lost faith in the party’s capacity to take the country out of its grave condition,” Ivan K. Polozkov, the newly elected leader of the party in the Russian Federation and a salaried party executive for 28 years, said recently. “In this, I do not see a crisis of the Soviet Communist Party, but rather a crisis of its leaders.”

Such critical language from the stocky conservative from south Russia gives voice to the widespread frustration in the apparat over what the “Moscow comrades,” especially Gorbachev, have wrought.

Some say the Kremlin leader’s perestroika and glasnost programs and their fallout--ethnic violence, joblessness, sensational revelations about past Soviet crimes and misdeeds--have left Communists bewildered and unsure what to believe.

“Some forget that in order for there to be perestroika, there had to be (Josef) Stalin and (Leonid I.) Brezhnev first,” said Vyacheslav S. Vencherov, second secretary of the Tula city party committee, whose headquarters are in an elegant rococo building that was once a home for Russian orphans of noble birth.

“Primary party organizations want and need a clear formulation of what our ideology now is,” said Mikhail G. Rotin, an intense 30-year-old elected to the congress by the 1,300 Communists at Tula’s Kosogorsky Metallurgical Factory. “We must know what the country’s problems are and where the party stands.”

Rotin, though manifestly on the party’s right, appears worried most of all by the inability of leaders at all levels of the Soviet system to put meat or sugar regularly on the table for the average citizen.

It is not ideological deviationism or the party’s renunciation of its monopoly on political power that appears to upset him and many of his comrades most, but the drop in the Gorbachev-led party’s visible capacity to govern well and the resulting decline in its authority.

“People today see only one result of the transition to a market economy: higher prices,” Rotin said during an interview in the rent-free office the Kosogorsky metal works puts at the party’s disposal. “People see empty shelves and think either that the reforms are wrong, or that they are not changing life in the right direction.”

Yegor K. Ligachev, who for five years was the top Communist Party official in charge of promoting and assigning cadres, recently gave voice to the prevalent apparat view that might be summed up thus: After five years of chaotic reformist and “democratic” chaos, why not return to old-fashioned Communist competence?

“People are tired of talking, of useless discussions, of disorder,” the Politboro’s leading exponent of orthodox Marxism said. “People want concrete deeds and a better life for today and tomorrow. Democracy and order should go together.”

In big cities like Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, reformers this year beat the apparatus, riding resentment over party perks and dominance of society into elected office. But Tula, an ancient Russian city of 600,000 where Peter the Great founded the first czarist weapons factory, shows how strong a grip on power a provincial party machine can have.

Democratic Platform, a radical opposition inside the Soviet Communist Party, only has 20 avowed adherents in a city with 57,000 party members. It failed to elect a single delegate here to the Moscow congress. Its members say the local newspaper, The Communard, refused even to invite them to a round table on the party’s future.

Among Tula’s 14 representatives to the Moscow congress, functionaries from party and government, including Khudyakov and Rotin, as well as economic managers, dominate. In pre-congress elections largely run by the apparatus, not a single worker was chosen to represent one of the oldest industrial cities in Russia at what, after all, is supposed to be the highest forum of a self-professed “workers and peasants” party.

Tula, long famous for its manufacture of both samovars and firearms, is hardly exceptional. According to the Democratic Platform, although party secretaries and other functionaries are only 3% of party membership, they make up half the delegates to the congress. Another 20% are factory managers, government ministers and other state bureaucrats.

Not all apparatchiks are enemies of Gorbachev’s reforms, but even progressives say the party must decisively prove that it knows how to achieve its goals and show citizens their lives will be better as a result, or risk becoming expendable in the budding Soviet multi-party system.

Anatoly P. Pukhov, general director of a Tula metal works that turns out 2 million tons of cast iron a year, is the kind of manager Gorbachev is counting on to make his reforms a success, both in the economy and the party.

“Our society unfortunately is used to centralization, and I don’t see any other organization in society like our party, no one else with the organization and the experience we have,” the congress delegate said recently.

Pukhov wants party bureaucrats to leave him and his managers alone in running the Tulachermet plant, and to allow elected officials a free hand in supervising the country’s day-to-day affairs. In what seems to symbolize the 50-year-old metallurgist’s flexibility in searching for a brand of communism that works, his office contains a South Korean-made personal computer as well as a bound edition of the collected works of V. I. Lenin.

“The overwhelming majority of workers still believe the Communist Party has a chance to reform itself,” Pukhov said. But to do that, the apparatus must be altered, and in the final analysis vanquished--”the party which yesterday was an absolute supporter of the command-administrative system is called on today to uproot it,” he said.