Gorbachev Bars Confiscations of Communist Property : Soviet Union: Decree seeks to protect the party’s vast holdings from new, popularly elected governments.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, moving to protect the vast holdings of the Soviet Communist Party from seizure by new, popularly elected governments, issued a decree Friday that makes such confiscations illegal.

The decree, published by the official news agency Tass, came just days after a city council in the Ukraine voted to take over all Communist Party property in its territory.

In Moscow and Leningrad, and in the Baltic republics and elsewhere, party property, which is valued at nearly $8 billion, is under siege by new local governments. The local authorities look on the party’s offices, hotels, printing plants, medical clinics and schools as the property of the people.

Friday’s presidential decree, along with defending party holdings, also helps prepare the ground for coming economic reforms that are expected to bring a massive selloff of state property to private buyers.

The decree attempts to allay potential investors’ fears that they might put their money into a home or business or plot of land only to lose it to expropriation. Soviet leaders have repeatedly turned to expropriation as a way of ensuring state ownership of virtually all property.

Gorbachev, courting Western partners whose technology and expertise are needed to help the reforms succeed, specified that the property of foreigners, too, must not be confiscated.

“The inviolability of ownership rights is an indispensable condition of the current economic policy,” the decree said.

Gorbachev, unable as yet to work out a unified economic plan, has begun introducing reform piecemeal by taking advantage of his new powers to issue decrees. He is scheduled to have a full-fledged reform program ready for presentation Monday.

Although Friday’s decree mandates respect for all kinds of property, it appears to reflect Gorbachev’s fears that the Soviet Communist Party, with its popularity already plummeting, may end up like many of its Eastern European counterparts--stripped of influence and relegated to opposition status.

Communist Party Secretary Yuri Manayenkov told reporters last week that of the party’s nearly $8 billion in property, about $3 billion is in buildings, $2.5 billion in publishing and hundreds of millions in medical facilities and schools.

As local governments have tried to find legal grounds to take over party buildings and plants, often arguing that they were partially paid for by the state and therefore belong to the people, Communist officials have scurried to establish their claims.

“We have the appropriate papers covering all this property and showing it has been acquired from our members’ fees and from our publishing earnings,” Manayenkov said.

In the Ukrainian city of Ternopol, which acquired an anti-Communist reputation this summer by becoming the first Soviet city to dismantle its statue of Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin, the city council decided Tuesday to take over all Communist property.

The council ordered a complete inventory of party holdings by Dec. 1 and authorized the city attorney to prosecute anyone who gets in the way.

Gorbachev’s decree threatens to create a major conflict in the town of 189,000 by nullifying such local decisions and requiring the police to guard all property that appears to be under threat of illegal confiscation.