Gorbachev Ally Wins Party Post Over Hard-Liner

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev secured the election Wednesday of his nominee as the Soviet Communist Party’s deputy general secretary, winning a showdown with the party’s resurgent conservative wing.

Vladimir A. Ivashko, a moderate party leader from the Ukraine, defeated Yegor K. Ligachev, the foremost conservative within the party’s powerful Politburo, for the post as Gorbachev’s deputy, according to the official Soviet news agency Tass.

Ivashko’s election by delegates to the current party congress was an important victory for Gorbachev. It not only gave him a like-minded deputy to manage the party’s affairs on a daily basis, but it should help stem the conservative tide that has seemed to threaten his political and economic reforms.

The contest between Ivashko and Ligachev was, in many respects, the climax to the struggle between those party officials wanting to accelerate and broaden perestroika , as Gorbachev’s reforms are known, and those concerned about the party’s virtual abandonment of many long-held positions.

A vote for Ivashko, 58, was portrayed throughout the debate as a vote for perestroika , a vote for Gorbachev, a vote for faster, more fundamental changes.

Conversely, a vote for Ligachev, 69, was presented as a vote to consolidate the party around its traditional Marxist positions and to reinforce the discipline that has enabled it to lead the country for 73 years.

Details of the election results will be available this morning, editors at Tass said, and the relative balance of forces within the party will become clear only then. A third candidate, Leningrad professor Anatoly Dudyrev, 45, who nominated himself, was also on the ballot but not thought to be a real contender.

In a separate ballot, delegates reelected Boris Pugo as the chairman of the party’s Central Control Commission in charge of discipline, Tass said. Pugo had only nominal opposition.

The contest for deputy general secretary, a new post created as part of a broad reorganization of the party, was fought without compromise. Ligachev declared that he was running as the “Marxist-Leninist” candidate, and Ivashko stressed his unquestioning support of Gorbachev and his reforms.

“I believe there is an overwhelming majority who support the principles of Marxism-Leninism,” Ligachev said, calling for the party to pursue “a union of democratic forces supporting socialism” to press ahead with careful reforms but without losing its orientation.

Radicals rushed to the microphones in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses to protest. If Ligachev won, they warned, tens of thousands of people, probably more, would quit the party. Ligachev, who has sought such a “self-purge” of the party, seemed unperturbed.

Amid this uproar, Gorbachev intervened in the debate to cite obscure Central Committee rules, prepared more than two years ago, that candidates could go onto the ballot only if there were no objections against them. Radicals quickly restated their criticism of Ligachev as objections to his candidacy, and Gorbachev called for a vote on whether Ligachev could be a candidate.

Suddenly, Ligachev was voted off the ballot, 2,293 to 1,916, stunning even radical reformers. Whether Gorbachev had engineered this was unclear, but he and his supporters did not disavow the result.

Ligachev’s supporters, caught by surprise, were not prepared to mount a similar challenge--even if they had the votes.

Again, there were protests, including direct criticism of Gorbachev for the “shabbiness” with which Ligachev, a veteran leader, was being treated.

And then another vote, 2,349 to 1,816, reversed the earlier decision on the grounds that the party congress could overrule the procedures of the Central Committee.

“Americans have a lot of bad jokes about ‘who’s on first?’ ” a Communist Party official said after watching the congress turn into a political and procedural shambles Wednesday afternoon. “But that question is so painfully relevant right now. Up or down, in or out, we have little idea of who is being elected to choose our fate, and that is what reduces even the most cultured among us to ranting and raving.”

In this confusing seesaw, Gorbachev appeared distressed and uncertain about how to proceed. What might have been a clear political victory for his forces was now complicated by procedural errors.

And the strength of his own position clearly rested on his appeal to the delegates for their support rather than on a fully accepted political vision.

The elections came as the 4,700 delegates to the congress, which opened July 2, slowly began to conclude their debates over the party’s new platform, its statutes and other declarations and prepared to elect a new, policy-making Central Committee before closing on Friday.

Gorbachev had told delegates to the congress that the two people at the top of the party hierarchy should hold similar views to ensure the implementation of perestroika, the smooth functioning of the 18-million-member party and the consolidation of the country’s increasingly disparate political forces.

“It is important that these two people be close,” Gorbachev said, making it clear that he wanted Ivashko--and no one else.

Ivashko, who had been the leader of the Ukrainian party, has hewed close to Gorbachev’s reformist line over the past five years, and he has moved rapidly from a local party secretary’s post in Kharkov in 1986 into the top levels of the Soviet political hierarchy under Gorbachev.

“As much as I have before, no matter what my job, I will be working for perestroika, “ Ivashko pledged. “We have to do everything to renew the party and change its priorities. . . . “We have to understand, too, that without us, without the party, nothing will be left of perestroika. “

But Ivashko, quite suddenly, seemed a very flawed candidate rather than a man who could, in the manner of the U.S. vice president, ensure support for the national leadership from a critical region.

Summoned back to Kiev, where the Ukrainian Parliament is in emergency session to debate the republic’s sovereignty and discuss a political strike by coal miners, Ivashko, along with other members of the Ukrainian delegation here, refused to go--and quit his post as president of the Ukraine.

Accused of showing greater loyalty to the Soviet party than to the Ukrainian nation and the government that he headed, Ivashko resigned abruptly on Wednesday, saying that he could not continue in the face of the deputies’ opposition, particularly that of Communist Party members of the Ukrainian parliament.

Even a party spokesman said he was unable to explain, however, why Gorbachev would nominate to the No. 2 party position a politician who had just acknowledged in a formal letter of resignation that he did not have the support of Communist Party members from his own republic.