NEWS ANALYSIS : For Delegates, the Key Question Is ‘Where Did We Go Wrong?’ : Ideology: Some blame the party’s blunders on reformers, some on the legacy of Stalin. Others call socialism itself an ‘unnatural form of civilization.’

“Where did we go wrong?”

That question has burned throughout the debate at the 28th Soviet Communist Party Congress, searing radicals and conservatives alike as they have sought to apportion blame for their nation’s increasingly desperate decline.

Guilt for the past, far more than hope for the future, has permeated the delegates’ discussions for the past nine days. The hunt for culprits, contemporary and historical, quickly overtook the search for bold new leaders.

Radical reformers suggested that the party put itself on trial and account to the people for its misrule over the past seven decades. Conservatives, in a counterattack, urged that the leadership be purged of those--they meant the radicals--responsible for the errors of perestroika.

Top government and party officials standing on the rostrum of the congress to answer barbed questions from the delegates have looked more like accused war criminals than the men who have brought the country unprecedented liberalization in the past five years.

Even President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has not been spared. The conservative criticism of his policies grew so harsh and merciless that he angrily rejected much of it as “full of malice” and bitterly told the congress Tuesday, “I am alone, and you are thousands.”

In its nearly 73 years of power, the Communist Party has indeed blundered, badly and frequently, as the party’s new platform will acknowledge. Those mistakes must be analyzed carefully if they are not to be repeated by a system that has failed repeatedly to reform itself.

“The crisis in the party has reached an unprecedented level,” Alexei Yemelyanov, a prominent liberal from Moscow State University, said as the congress began, “but the party leadership has yet to recognize it. The party lost the people’s trust long ago because of its errors. Society has not been reformed since the party in power has not yet reformed itself.

“The party oligarchy--its leading structures, its principles, the mechanisms by which it functions--has become the main obstacle to perestroika. This oligarchy sticks to old-style approaches and combats any form of radicalism. . . . The first thing to be done is to apologize to the people for having led the country into such a catastrophe.”

For a country so driven by ideology, to discover where it went wrong is of crucial importance--virtually the key to reversing the nation’s systemic collapse and resolving its problems, as well as a boost in morale at a time when there is a deep crisis of confidence.

On this, delegates to the congress have agreed readily. But they have differed sharply on where and why and how communism failed. They have differed on how to pose the question and where to look for an answer. And they have differed on whether the failures were those of the party, of its leaders or of communism itself.

Does the answer lie deep in history--during the dictatorship of Josef Stalin?

If so, that absolves almost everyone now in the party leadership; only that handful of party members who still insist that Stalin had “merits” might be open to criticism.

But is there not culpability to be found in more recent years--the “era of stagnation” under the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev?

That judgment extends the guilt to virtually everyone now in a leadership position, for all were promoted or came of age politically under Brezhnev; 48% of the almost 4,700 delegates, in fact, are known as “Brezhnev’s children” since they joined the party between 1970 and 1985, the height of the “era of stagnation.”

Or perhaps, as the party’s increasingly vocal conservative wing argues, perestroika itself was a wrong turn, a break from Communist orthodoxy that deepened the country’s problems.

“Has the time not come to sum up perestroika , to assess what it has brought us and where we stand?” one provincial party leader demanded this week. “Do we live better now? Is our economy stronger? Is the political situation more stable? Do our people feel more secure?

“In short, how have we gained from this political and economic structuring? I find it difficult to see the gains and impossible to measure any of them. Are we adding to our mistakes with perestroika? “

Some delegates have gone back further--to V. I. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader who founded the Soviet state, and even to Karl Marx, the father of modern communism.

“Marxism itself is flawed, perhaps fatally so,” Alexander Tsipko, a leading political philosopher, said in an interview, “and if that is true, then how can we expect perfection from socialism?”

Tsipko, deputy director of the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System, was one of the first Communist Party intellectuals to question the foundations of Marxism. Marxism had misunderstood human nature and human motivations, Tsipko argued, and consequently the political and economic systems founded on it are based on “a false blueprint.”

“When ideas about the goals of socialism are wrong, when they contradict the laws of normal civil life, it is pointless to argue about the pace or the methods by which they are achieved,” he said. “When you have an unrealistic goal, it does not matter whether you try to achieve it gradually or through a cavalry charge--the result will be the same.”

This was heresy when Tsipko, then on the staff of the party’s policy-making Central Committee, first raised the question two years ago.

Yuri N. Afanasyev, a historian prominent among radical reformers, had challenged the system with equal bluntness. Writing in the Communist Party newspaper Pravda two years ago, Afanasyev contended that the party had not “built socialism,” as it had long claimed, nor was the Soviet system even “deformed socialism,” as party leaders then argued. What the country had developed, he said, was its own form of totalitarianism.

“We went wrong at the beginning, at the outset,” Tsipko said. “Strictly speaking, socialism is impossible in principle, and in practice it has always existed in totalitarian structures. . . . We need to return from these unnatural forms of civilization, to come back to civilized life.”

Gorbachev himself increasingly reflects this point of view. Although he still describes himself as a Marxist, a man committed to “humane and democratic socialism,” he shows little hesitancy in replacing traditional Marxist views with ideas that have long been political heresy here: a morality based on “universal human values,” a multi-party political system, private property and a market economy.

“The ideology of socialism is not a textbook where everything is compartmentalized by chapters, paragraphs, rules and principles,” Gorbachev told the congress Tuesday.

“It will shape up together with socialism itself as we help develop a well-fed, civilized, spiritually rich, free and happy country, as we come to embrace universal human values again not as something alien from the class point of view but as normal for man.”