Individual Voices Expected to Be Heard From Soviet Party’s New Ruling Body : Politburo: Gorbachev intends for the membership to make party--not state--policy.

From a long-winded philosopher to the editor of Peasant Woman magazine, a defiant trade union leader and an independence-minded Estonian, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev will see a row of fresh and very disparate faces when he looks around the table at the first meeting of his new Politburo.

The 24 members of the Soviet Communist Party’s ruling body, elected Saturday by the party’s Central Committee, reflect Gorbachev’s attempts to turn the Politburo from a de facto Cabinet into a party policy-making body that stays out of running the country’s business.

They also herald the arrival of a new generation at the pinnacle of party power.

Of seven members proposed by Gorbachev himself, almost all are in their early 50s--younger than the 59-year-old leader but still members of the reform-minded generation that came of age in the era of change under Nikita S. Khrushchev in the 1950s.

Only Gorbachev and his deputy, Vladimir A. Ivashko, are carry-overs from the outgoing Politburo.

The seven handpicked members will share the long oak table in the Kremlin, where the Politburo traditionally meets, with the party chiefs of the 15 Soviet republics, who automatically received membership under new party rules. The rules were aimed at appeasing nationalists along what Russians call the “periphery.”

The republics’ chiefs are almost all new to their posts. Most were elected in recent months as the party’s upheaval brought a wave of defeats for incumbents, some of them long serving but others elected in the first years of perestroika , Gorbachev’s reform program.

They run a wide gamut, from Ivan K. Polozkov, the conservative Russian party chief with a reputation for quashing private businesses, to Enn-Arno Sillari, head of the Estonian party branch that is seeking total independence for itself and the tiny Baltic republic.

If anything unites them, it is their push for more rights from the central government and the party; Communists in virtually every republic wrote claims to greater sovereignty into their party lines.

Gorbachev’s chosen seven, too, can be expected to clamor for their own interests.

“They’re like-minded, but at the same time each has his own views,” Ivan T. Frolov, editor of the Communist Party daily Pravda, said Saturday of the new party leadership. “Through experience, I’ve learned that these are people who can openly express their views and stand up for them.”

Gennady I. Yanayev, head of the national Council of Trade Unions, spoke out from the Red Square tribune at the traditional May 1 workers’ parade against the unemployment and poverty that he said the government’s planned market-oriented reforms would cause.

“He is not a shaky man,” Vladimir Tulinov, the deputy head of the semi-governmental Novosti Press Agency, said of Yanayev.

Galina V. Semyonova, the only woman on the new Politburo, can be expected to push for improvements in the lot of Soviet women--and judging by how her election was announced Saturday, she has a long battle ahead.

Party spokesman Alexander A. Lebedev described Semyonova, a philosopher and editor of the popular magazine Krestyanka, or Peasant Woman, as “a very charming woman.” And when asked at a news conference what Semyonova’s role would be, answered simply, “She’s a woman.”

But her election to both the Politburo and the Secretariat, which handles the party’s day-to-day affairs, indicated she will play a large role in decision-making.

Frolov said the five members of the Politburo who are party secretaries will make up the inner core of the party leadership. The Politburo will meet once a month; the Secretariat, every week.

Among the members of that inner core, which includes union leader Yanayev, champions of Gorbachev’s reforms predominate.

Yegor S. Stroyev, assigned the unenviable job of handling Soviet agriculture, made his name in the Orel region of Russia with successful experiments in leasing out land, and he remains a vocal advocate of moving from collective farming to more private forms.

Alexander S. Dzasokhov, head of the international affairs committee of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, has publicly defended the Gorbachev administration’s foreign policy, which has been under attack recently.

Dzasokhov, an Ossetian from the Caucasus in the southern Soviet Union and former ambassador to Syria, will be in charge of ideology, replacing the unpopular Vadim A. Medvedev. The fifth member of the inner Politburo, Oleg S. Shenin, will handle organizational affairs. Tulinov called him “a pure party worker.”

Among other reform champions in the new Politburo, Yuri A. Prokofiev, Moscow’s frank and pudgy-cheeked party chief, has become a model practitioner of Gorbachev’s policy of tolerant “dialogue” with rival political groups.

Prokofiev warned before March city elections that if Communists did not learn the art of democratic politics better they would go down to defeat. When his predictions came true and the Moscow City Council fell to the radical opposition, he took a conciliatory tone.

Frolov, Pravda’s editor since last year and a philosopher, is more than a defender of perestroika . He sees himself as one in the key group that drafted the reform program soon after Gorbachev came to power. Frolov also took partial credit Saturday for the party’s less dogmatic new doctrine, known as “humane, democratic socialism.”

He is also renowned for his lengthy, rambling lectures to the press. In the best glasnost (openness) tradition, he has called regular news conferences at Pravda’s headquarters to take questions from all comers, but then shown a tendency to go on for 20 minutes or more on one question, often entering deep into realms of abstraction.