Party Congress Harshly Attacks Gorbachev’s Reforms

The Communist Party of the Russian republic, known as the bulwark of Marxist orthodoxy in a country moving further and further from its tenets, proceeded at a stormy congress this week toward a head-on clash with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev over his revisionist reforms.

Delegates to the three-day congress applauded fiercely when one speaker declared that Gorbachev’s perestroika program of reforms was “not a revolution but a counterrevolution,” and they acclaimed Siberian worker Ivan Vtorushin’s suggestion that the country would be better off if it went back to the way things were in 1985, before Gorbachev came to power.

The congress provided a setting for the harshest criticism yet of Gorbachev’s plans to initiate radical economic reforms expected to bring the mass selloff of state property, free-market prices and widespread private ownership in a clear abandonment of traditional Communist principles.

Several delegates went so far as to issue a printed statement denouncing the plan as “anti-Communist” and warning that it would plunge the country into chaos. A commentary by Tass, the state-run news agency, called the 2,585 delegates an “audience inflamed by anti-market passions.”

Yuri Kazarin, party affairs observer for the newspaper Evening Moscow, predicted Friday that, “if the current mood of the party continues, it will be in the opposition” when Gorbachev presents the economic plan to the national Legislature next week.

“That would clearly go against the interests of the country,” Kazarin said.

The 10-million-member Russian party came into being this June as the Communist organ of the Soviet Union’s largest republic--previously, Russian republic Communists were simply members of the national party--and it immediately gained a reputation as a haven for hard-liners.

That image was shored up when the June congress elected as its president Ivan K. Polozkov, a party apparatchik renowned for his opposition to private property.

But the open political battles at this week’s congress showed also that there is a strong reformist faction, led by Moscow party chief Yuri A. Prokofiev, that wants to dump Polozkov and bring the Russian party in line with the national party’s more liberal leanings.

The Russian party makes up 60% of the national party and could theoretically shift the balance in the Supreme Soviet, the national Legislature. Its congress, however, turned out to be so divided that concerted action in parliament appeared unlikely.

The congress did not manage to pass a party program or set of rules, and “many Communists aren’t even sure about how to join the party,” Gennady Sklyar, a delegate from central Russia, complained.

Judging by Gorbachev’s somewhat offhand treatment of the congress, he was not overly concerned about the delegates’ ability to block his reforms. He attended many of its proceedings, but he made no public speeches; he met only briefly with leading members. One delegate who attended the meeting described the Soviet president as “laconic”--a rare description for a man whose speeches routinely run an hour or more.

Still, Kazarin said that the Russian Communist Party’s influence in the national and Russian parliaments could prove dangerous in that its conservative members could slow down the passage of the economic reform program, which backers hope to ram through in time to begin implementing it on Oct. 1, the start of the Soviet fiscal year.

“They can’t put forth a productive program, they can only brake things,” Kazarin said.

Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov, an economist and outspoken advocate of reform, called Friday for the Soviet prime minister, Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, and his government to resign in response to popular anger over its ineffective economic program.

A similar call came last week from Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, and Popov said the radical opposition in Parliament would raise the demand at the session that convenes Monday.

Popov, Yeltsin and a number of other prominent Communist reformers quit the party this summer, and tens of thousands more have been turning in their membership cards over recent weeks.