Communists Squabble, Assail Leadership : Soviet Union: The Gorbachev regime is accused of betraying its East European comrades. Purges are demanded.

Soviet Communists accused President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Kremlin of betraying their East European comrades and demanded mass purges at the top as the party, riven by quarrels on its beliefs and leaders, agreed Thursday to consider whether it needs a new name to regain the people’s trust.

With his accomplishments as Soviet president and party general secretary under ferocious attack from delegates to a nationwide party congress, Gorbachev moved to re-cement his ties with provincial and city party officials, the source of much of the criticism. But one participant in the resulting meeting said Gorbachev’s campaign for restructuring, or perestroika, came under assault there too.

The nearly 4,700 congress delegates met in closed-door workshop sessions to prepare for Friday’s general debate on changes that Gorbachev and his allies want to make in the party, which is losing public influence and members by the tens of thousands precisely at a time when it is being forced to compete with other parties for votes.

Communists are more split than at any time since the days of V. I. Lenin, but Gorbachev continued to campaign for unity, telling participants in the workshop on farming problems “not to yield to appeals by left-wing adventurists (or) by those who want the past to return,” according to the official news agency Tass.

However, delegates assembled in the seven separate discussion groups continued to maul the accomplishments of Gorbachev and the team with which he has surrounded himself, according to accounts in official Soviet media and from party spokesman Alexander Lebedev.

Lebedev told a news conference that one Soviet admiral complained that as a result of five years of Gorbachev’s “new way of thinking” in foreign policy, the country had squandered every geopolitical gain it had made since before World War II, when it was encircled by capitalist powers.

Other Communists made clear their desire to see heads at the Kremlin roll but apparently did not mention Gorbachev specifically.

“Many delegates suggested the top leadership of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) be replaced,” Lebedev said. One Muscovite said that 90% of the current leaders should be thrown out by the congress.

Mirroring the party’s crisis in self-confidence, Col. Gen. Dmitri A. Volkogonov, a spellbinding orator and author of a glasnost- era expose of Stalin’s crimes, called for a new name for the party, reminding delegates that the current label was coined by the Stalin dictatorship.

The notion of communism is a “beautiful Utopia” no longer current, the three-star general was quoted by Lebedev as saying. “The renaming is not a goal in itself, but it is needed to restore the people’s trust.”

Volkogonov said he favors something like “the Party of Democratic Socialism,” adding that a new name is inevitable.

Though several sister parties in Eastern Europe shed their Communist label in the past year and a small radical faction at the congress wants the Soviet party to do the same, the notion that the party once led by Lenin might even debate the issue seems almost incredible.

But the workshop discussing steps needed for “party renewal” decided to put Volkogonov’s proposal to the entire congress today, and it also wants debate on whether the Leninist notion of “democratic centralism”--in practice the Moscow leadership’s power to dictate to every party cell in the nation--has not “exhausted itself.”

During the first three days of the 28th party congress, it was Gorbachev’s domestic program and the crisis in the shortage-ridden economy that came under blistering attack, but delegates Thursday zeroed in on what has made Gorbachev such a folk hero in the West--his acts in the realm of foreign policy. Some seemed to accuse him of selling out the national interest.

“Where do you see improvement in the international situation?” Gen. Ivan I. Mikulin, chief of the political department of the Southern Army Group, was quoted as saying at the workshop on foreign policy. “Is it in our loss of allies in Europe?

“The Soviet Union is losing its status as a world power while the United States is getting stronger,” the general said. He even accused some members of the party of seeking to “destroy a significant part of the country’s defense potential.”

Mikulin rejected the Gorbachevian notion of a “common European home” that would supersede the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact as “a fiction.” He said that if the home exists, the Soviet Union has been pushed into the back yard. The Vienna talks on conventional arms reductions, he charged, will lead to unilateral disarmament by the Soviet Union.

A writer from the Crimea, Oleg Kirillov, continued the pillorying of Gorbachev’s achievements in foreign affairs, saying recent Soviet successes were largely due to the Kremlin’s weak-kneed “ability to give in.”

Evoking the downfall of Communist regimes in what was once called the Soviet Bloc, an event that has clearly made some party officials here worry about their own futures, Kirillov said “we left our friends in East Europe to their fate, while America helped thousands to leave Vietnam.”

The bleakest assessment of the Soviet place in the world seemed to be given by Adm. Gennady A. Khvatov, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, who, according to Tass said: “We have no allies in the West. We have no allies in the East. As a result, we have returned to the 1939 situation.”

Gorbachev’s ally, Yevgeny M. Primakov, an expert on international affairs, came to the Soviet leader’s defense by saying that Gorbachev’s foreign policy has been “truly triumphant.”

Elsewhere, a candy-factory worker named Ivanova said people are worse off today than before perestroika . And in the discussion on the country’s inter-ethnic relations, Tass said many delegates laid “direct blame” on the Gorbachev leadership for the dizzying number of ethnic clashes in which hundreds of Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks and members of other Soviet minority groups have been killed since 1988.

Much of the hostile criticism directed at Gorbachev has come from local party leaders, whose powers and careers are menaced by his vision of a party removed from running the country’s day-to-day affairs, but who can be targets of grass-roots resentment for unpopular policies imposed by Moscow.

On Wednesday night, Gorbachev moved to mend fences with party potentates from the provinces by meeting with more than 300 city and regional officials. Filip F. Strogonov, a party secretary in the Latvian city of Ludza, said that regional leaders have been pressing for such an encounter for more than two years, and that Gorbachev acknowledged it was a mistake on his part to have put it off for so long.

Strogonov, speaking at a news conference, said the meeting changed him into a Gorbachev supporter: “Yesterday I saw his character,” he said. But according to an account of the session given by state-run Soviet television, criticism of Gorbachev was also aired.

A party official from the Ukrainian mining city of Donetsk identified only as Sapunov told the TV news program “Vremya” that at the meeting, “there was an attack on the general secretary with the aim of changing the political course of the party.” He did not elaborate.

However, Sapunov said Communists still need to keep Gorbachev at the head of the party, “and if we don’t do this, we’ll be driven back.”

THE PARTY CONGRESS: DAY FOUR

Highlights of Thursday’s session of the 28th Communist Party Congress:

Name change: Their internal divisions ever more apparent, the delegates decided to discuss changing the name of their party to make a clean break with the horrors committed in communism’s name. And some delegates continued to lambaste the foreign and domestic record of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Only woman: Alexandra P. Biryukova, the only woman in the ruling Politburo, told the economic section she is retiring because she has been in the party leadership for 20 years and she feels that leaders should only be allowed two five-year terms.

Low tide: Marshal Nikolai V. Ogarkov, former Soviet chief of staff, complained that “the party’s authority and power has never been lower” and blamed the media for many of the party’s image problems.

Ethnic conflicts: The section on ethnic relations called the party’s work in its field “unsatisfactory” and especially criticized the leadership for not stemming Baltic secessionism in time. One delegate dubbed liberal Politburo member Alexander N. Yakovlev “the godfather of Baltic separatism.”

Key quote: “Where do you see improvement in the international situation? Is it in our loss of allies in Europe?”--Gen. Ivan I. Mikulin, chief of the political department of the Southern Army Group, at a foreign policy workshop.

28th COMMUNIST PARTY CONGRESS

There are 4,683 delegates elected from among 80,000 candidates nationwide; an additional 350 worker and farmer representatives were invited to participate as were first and second secretaries of the Communist Youth League. OF THOSE ELECTED: Peasants: 5.4% Military and KGB officers: 6% Workers: 11.6% Managers: 17% Office holders and others: 17% Party officials: 43% AS COMPARED TO 27th CONGRESS IN 1986: Peasants: 9% Office holders and others: 49% Workers: 42% Source: Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee