Officials Blend Democracy, Central Control to Reshape the Party Line : Reform: Provincial delegates had their say, but so did Gorbachev and his advisers. The result is a platform that reflects much--but not all--that the Kremlin wanted.

Under the chandeliers of the Kremlin’s yellow-hued Oval Room, 77 Communists gathered this week to hammer out the party line.

To track the process was to glimpse Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s party in microcosm, navigating somewhere between freewheeling democracy and the top-heavy centralism of the Brezhnevian past. Hundreds of provincial party delegates in Moscow for the Communist Party congress had their say, but so did the Kremlin leadership and its designated brains.

“In one respect, the whole thing has been very democratic,” Andrei Maslennikov, a radical congress delegate from the northern Russian city of Severodvinsk, said when asked how the party’s official point of view was being forged in the Council of Ministers building. “Draft documents were published well in advance in the press, so Communists could discuss them. But what has been done with people’s criticisms and observations is another matter entirely.”

“Many opinions and tendencies were expressed,” Mikhail S. Guberman, director of a Moscow-area cotton mill, said of the workings of the 77-member commission created by the 28th Communist Party Congress to draft its concluding document on economic reform. “We heard many scientists, and we took into account new opinions as we went along.”

In consequence, when Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov goes before the Communist Party congress this week to ask it to approve an official policy for pulling the country out of its economic tailspin, the blueprint he will carry will have gone through at least nine drafts and has been cut from six pages to 2 1/2.

Not everything in the economic reform plan, known as Opus 9, is what Moscow-based, full-time party functionaries originally intended. During an interview in the basement of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, Guberman showed a copy of the latest draft, which referred to the need for a transition to a “market economy,” with the qualifying adjective “regulated” scratched out with a blue pencil.

The Kremlin’s buzzword for months has been “regulated market economy,” a phrase laden with significance since by the use of the word regulated , Ryzhkov and the leadership are trying to reassure the country that their goals are not a betrayal of socialism and that living standards will not suffer.

According to Guberman, the commission finally decided regulated was a weasel word and struck it.

“Either an economy is a market economy or it isn’t,” explained the mill manager with the steel-gray hair. “Many people in our society have a distorted understanding of the workings of the economy, unfortunately.”

However, the weight of what Russians call the apparat , or the party machine, during the closed-door proceedings of Guberman’s commission was undeniable and, according to all visible evidence, decisive.

First, there was the matter of who was named to head the panel--none other than Ryzhkov, who is a member of the party’s Politburo and the promoter of the government’s economic reform plan. That choice made it highly unlikely that the congress would disclaim the Kremlin’s approach.

In other commissions created by the congress to work out and recommend Communist policy in various fields, oversight from the top was equally evident.

“The commission writing the new party statutes was chaired by Gorbachev and (Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoly I.) Lukyanov,” said Maslennikov, a 41-year-old journalist. “Now, what sort of decisions do you think that commission will take--against Gorbachev?”

Members of the commissions were proposed on a territorial basis; for example, the Moscow region’s 126 delegates put Guberman forward as their representative. But then the policy-making Central Committee got into the act by “requesting” that other people be included, delegates said.

For the economics commission, that meant adding Deputy Prime Minister Leonid I. Abalkin, economist Pavel G. Bunich and other personalities of national stature.

The party congress, which opened in the Kremlin on July 2, took off on a conservative tack. The traditionalist majority made itself known early by getting the economic commission’s mandate altered, from plotting the “transition to a regulated market economy” to formulating the “policy of the Soviet Communist Party on the conduct of economic reforms and urgent measures for stabilizing the socioeconomic situation.”

By draft No. 9, the arguments and prestige of Abalkin and his colleagues had evidently routed whatever influence the old-style Marxists might have had on the economics commission, and state-owned enterprises were firmly declared to be “subject to the market.”

The final arbiter of party policy on economics and anything else, however, remains Gorbachev, who was reelected Tuesday as general secretary of the Communist Party.

The Soviet president personally took charge of the commission revising the party’s statutes after his nominee for the post came under a hail of criticism from the floor. In wheeling and dealing behind closed doors, Gorbachev was able to forge a compromise on what the party’s leading institutions will now look like.

The congress, in theory the supreme body of the 18-million-member party, can also be used by the Kremlin leadership as a court of final appeal to get the desired line adopted. When Soviet foreign policy again came under fire from hard-liners Tuesday, Gorbachev made such an appeal, dismissing his critics as “those who don’t understand, who don’t want to listen to arguments.” If they hold official posts, he added, they should quit.

Communists have always been preoccupied with ideology, and the congress argued Tuesday about whether the major document it is to adopt--the “program statement”--should set the party’s official goal as the edification of “humane, democratic socialism.” One delegate objected that there could be no other kind.

To some Communists, such debates seemed arcane and useless at a time when the party is losing members, the economy is flagging and even the Soviet leadership acknowledges the country is in crisis.

“We can take the most radical decisions on paper, but the fate of our party or country does not depend on them,” Maslennikov said.

THE PARTY CONGRESS: DAY EIGHT:

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

GORBACHEV REELECTED: Mikhail S. Gorbachev was reelected as party leader in a one-sided race against Siberian strike leader Teimuraz Avaliani. Gorbachev, who had been assailed by the delegates for eight days, said in his acceptance speech, “I take my election as support for my positions.”

OPPONENT’S VIEWS: Avaliani said strikes are necessary as a last resort when the authorities do nothing to improve workers’ lives. He also advocated a strong army, KGB and police, recommended a gradual rather than an abrupt shift to a market economy and said major businesses should remain under government rather than private ownership.

FOREGONE CONCLUSION: At 7:30 p.m., after the delegates had voted for party leader, congress chairman Stanislav Gurenko suggested that they continue work for another half an hour because the election results would be available by then. The delegates, obviously eager to leave, voted him down. Several delegates then said the situation was absurd, so they took a half an hour break instead and headed for the buffet.

KEY QUOTE: “You can never go back to yesterday by any path, and no dictatorship . . . solves anything.” --Gorbachev, speaking to the delegates before his reelection.