Soviets’ Official Labor Union to Dissolve : Reform: Gorbachev calls for ‘strong, independent’ organizations.

The Soviet Union’s labor union organization, which for 70 years maintained the Communist Party’s grip on the proletariat, voted Wednesday to dissolve itself, acknowledging that it was badly out of touch with the country’s workers and unable to cope with the current economic crisis.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, speaking to what became the last congress of the Soviet Central Council of Trade Unions, called for the development of “strong, independent” unions in the place of those now being rejected by workers as little more than agents of the party and government.

But Gorbachev warned the new, worker-organized unions, which are rapidly emerging across the country and testing their strength with strike after strike, not to push the government too hard as it undertakes its economic reforms.

“If you try to bring us to our knees, nothing will come of it,” Gorbachev said, urging the new unions to act “constructively and responsibly” during the transition to a market economy.

In the Ukrainian mining center of Donetsk, coal miners already are organizing the country’s first industry-wide independent union and threatening to repeat last year’s crippling strike. The miners want economic autonomy for their enterprises and higher prices for coal.

Gorbachev sounded unusually defensive as he once again sought to justify the economic reforms and the hardships they will bring.

The development of a market economy is the “logical evolution” for the Soviet Union despite its more than 70 years of socialism, he said, and must be pursued despite the difficulties.

“This will be the greatest test, but we should pass it,” he declared, according to a report of his speech by the official Soviet news agency Tass.

Gorbachev said that unless decisive headway is made toward establishing a market economy and reversing the present crisis, the political situation might deteriorate so badly that “a return to a system of ‘strong-hand government’ could not be ruled out,” according to Tass.

Emergency measures are already being prepared to stabilize supplies and prices during the initial steps toward development of a market economy, he said, describing the reform program as “a last-ditch stand.”

The Soviet president, who is also the Communist Party’s general secretary, reacted strongly to criticism, apparently from conservative union leaders at the congress, that he has turned against socialism, Tass reported.

“I am against the barracks-style socialism, against socialism under which a man is suppressed by a totalitarian state,” Gorbachev said. “Socialism is justice, equality and freedom. . . . It is a society of democratic institutions and mechanisms that preserve and maintain law and order. But we are still far from this.”

In a further attempt to reassert its authority over the Soviet Union’s increasingly rebellious republics, the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, voted Wednesday to give its laws precedence over those of lower levels of government in the hope of avoiding constitutional showdowns.

The lawmakers also gave Gorbachev, who already has sweeping powers, the right to fire directors of many enterprises and organizations if they fail to obey directives from the central government.