<i> Perestroika</i> Near Collapse, Russians Told

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reform program is “on the brink of collapse,” a leader of the Communist Party’s traditionalist wing told 2,500 delegates at a Russian party congress in the Kremlin today.

Ivan K. Polozkov, first secretary of the Communist Party in the Russian Republic, drew vigorous applause from the delegates, a group that includes many generals and career party officials who are believed to harbor reservations about Gorbachev’s policies.

Gorbachev sat on the podium at the front of the hall, remaining virtually silent through a day of speeches that often contained scathing criticism of his leadership, though without mentioning him by name.

Some of the day’s strongest applause went to Ivan Vtorushin, a worker from the Siberian city of Tyumen who called for “returning the nation to 1985,” the year in which Gorbachev assumed power.

“No matter what slogans are used, a policy resulting in falling living standards and bloodshed is against popular interests,” Vtorushin said, referring to the Soviet Union’s accelerating economic problems and ethnic strife.

The delegates are meeting this week to complete the process of creating a separate Russian branch of the Communist Party.

In his hourlong keynote address, Polozkov urged delegates to counter the “deliberate discrediting of the Communist Party and the socialist choice as a whole.”

He said the country’s economic crisis, caused by the Soviet people’s psychological unpreparedness for a market-based system, “is, in the final analysis, putting perestroika on the brink of collapse.”