New Politburo Drops Kremlin’s Key Ministers

The Soviet Communist Party, withdrawing further from direct, day-to-day management of the nation and its economy, elected a new Politburo on Saturday that excludes, for the first time, the head of the country’s government as well as its key ministers.

The move, which is likely to prove one of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s most important reforms, will end, symbolically and practically, the party’s determined use of the state to enhance its own power as well as to implement its policies.

Those excluded from the new Politburo included Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov and Anatoly I. Lukyanov, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature. The ministers of foreign affairs, defense and economic planning, who had been members, were also dropped, as was the chairman of the State Security Committee, the KGB.

“This serves to emphasize that the party is breaking completely with the past practice when it was totally incorporated into the command-and-administer system and was at the top of the bureaucracy,” Ivan T. Frolov, the editor of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda, said after the elections by the party’s new policy-making Central Committee.

“Now, the party will be competing with other social and political forces and seeking to establish its predominance mostly through an ideological and political struggle,” he added.

Instead of the party’s most powerful figures, the new 24-member Politburo includes, for the first time, all the Communist Party leaders from the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics in an effort to bind their parties closer to the center by giving them a voice in Moscow’s decision-making.

In addition to Gorbachev and Vladimir A. Ivashko, his deputy as the party’s general secretary, the Politburo also includes--on Gorbachev’s nomination--the party officials in charge of international relations, ideology, agricultural and industrial policies and Frolov, as the editor of the party newspaper.

Galina V. Semyonova, the editor of the magazine Peasant Woman, became the first woman elected to full membership in the party’s ruling body. She was named to take charge of the “feminist movement,” a party spokesman said. “You see, she’s a woman, and that’s the way it is.” The old Politburo had a woman as a party secretary, and a woman served as an alternate, non-voting member in the 1950s.

The Politburo’s political balance is “firmly center-left,” another party official commented. While Ivashko, Moscow party leader Yuri A. Prokofiev, and agriculture chief Yegor S. Stroyev are regarded as moderate reformers, others such as Frolov and Alexander S. Dzasokhov, the new ideology secretary, are seen as well to the left.

Assessing the appointments, the official Soviet news agency Tass commented: “This is the first time that no one from the Soviet government or the Soviet Parliament’s (executive) presidium joined the Politburo. This reflects the Communist Party’s course of separating the party from state authority.”

During the Communist Party’s 73 years in power, the state had become one of the primary motors in its “construction of socialism.” Although Karl Marx had theorized that the state would “wither away” under socialism, the party turned it into a major instrument in implementing its policies, and in less than a decade the state was effectively subordinated to the party apparatus.

The party’s new, 412-member policy-making Central Committee, which itself was elected only Friday at the end of a lengthy party congress, also elected 11 party secretaries, most of whom will be full-time headquarters officials.

In addition, five “members of the Secretariat,” including a farmer, a factory hand, a weaver and two local party officials, were appointed to the Politburo to ensure that authentic grass-roots voices are heard in the top leadership.

The old Politburo had 12 full members and seven non-voting, alternate members, all but one Moscow-based officials, and there were 13 Central Committee secretaries.

Gorbachev and Ivashko, the former party leader in the Ukraine, are the only old Politburo members to retain their posts in the new body.

Most of the previous Politburo members, in fact, remain in the Council of Ministers, the Presidential Council or other governmental bodies. Among them are Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, economic planning chief Yuri D. Maslyukov, KGB chairman Vladimir A. Kryuchkov and Alexander N. Yakovlev and Yevgeny M. Primakov--two of Gorbachev’s closest political advisers.

But other prominent members of the old Politburo, most notably the conservative standard-bearer Yegor K. Ligachev and ideologist Vadim A. Medvedev, were simply forced into retirement by the increasingly rough-and-tumble politics here.

Editor Frolov said these changes had been hotly debated by the new Central Committee, which met late into the night Friday and then resumed its deliberations Saturday morning in the Kremlin for several more hours before reaching an agreement.

“The plain fact is that we have never done it this way, and the change is real, far-reaching and quite profound,” Frolov said. “Many members of the Central Committee wanted to know why Ryzhkov, for example, was not included, or Lukyanov. Why these other people, some of whom are not well known?

“The debate also continues quite sharply in the party about power, political power, and how it should be won, how it should be used and how it should be retained. That is a debate about what kind of party we are, what kind of society we want. . . .

“Not all like our decision, which was made some time ago, for the party to stick to politics and end the command-and-administer system through which we tried to run the whole country from top down, that is from the Politburo.”

The move, although part of the broad democratic reforms undertaken by Gorbachev, will paradoxically strengthen his position by restricting the new Politburo to party matters and transferring many of its previous functions to his Presidential Council, which has emerged as the country’s top policy-making body.

Gorbachev, moreover, no longer is responsible to a committee of his party peers--people who had proposed his appointment, whose views must be heeded and who could, perhaps, force him out.

The new Politburo, filled with so many representatives of such disparate interests, meeting only once a month and depending on a core leadership of officials loyal to Gorbachev for much of its direction, appears unlikely to curb Gorbachev or to hold him to account.