Kremlin Still on Road to Reform, Official Says : Soviet Union: The Communist Party’s chief of ideology claims tough measures were needed to stabilize the country and preserve <i> perestroika</i> .

The recent tough measures that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s critics see as the abandonment of perestroika and an accelerating shift to the right are intended, in fact, to protect past reforms and lay the basis for new ones, a senior member of the Soviet leadership asserted over the weekend.

Alexander Dzasokhov, the Communist Party’s secretary for ideology, acknowledged that “stabilization” is a priority now as the country’s political and economic crisis deepens, but he argued that the Soviet Union is too far down the road toward democracy to be pulled back to totalitarian socialism--even if that were Gorbachev’s intention.

Speaking of recent steps, including the deployment of troops to maintain law and order in Soviet cities and the withdrawal of large-denomination bank notes, Dzasokhov contended that each was necessary in order to retain control of the reform process and ensure it does not run ahead of the country’s ability to cope with change.

“These are not aimed at suppressing democracy, but promoting it,” Dzasokhov, who is also a member of the party’s Politburo, said in an interview with The Times at party headquarters. “Moreover, we are not reviewing or rethinking a single one of our fundamental reforms--except to broaden it.”

Most of the measures, he continued, were taken in response to rising popular concern about the country’s multiple crises and the problems, such as growing inflation, increased crime and the huge black market, that stem from them.

“In recent weeks, there have been attempts to present the political process as a shift to the right,” Dzasokhov said, “but this accusation is neither precise nor accurate. . . . The president, the parliament and the ruling party are following the same political course toward perestroika, democratization and economic change, to radical changes throughout society.”

Yet, the Soviet leadership undeniably is under pressure from conservatives within the party, at all levels of the government and, perhaps most of all, from the armed forces, and it appears to be trapped between the political imperatives of responding to forces on the right that threaten it and its reforms and not wanting to appear a hostage to those forces.

“The situation has become such that we must take steps to defend perestroika and democratization from some very elemental forces, from attempts to exploit the freedom of democracy for political ambitions,” Dzasokhov said. “This forces us, in response to popular demand, to take measures to stabilize the political, economic and social situation.

“In American history, the U.S. government took force majeure measures many times to preserve the republic, to deal with social unrest, to pull the country out of economic depressions and even to resolve political conflicts. . . . This is the responsibility of governments.”

The country, as a whole, is caught up in a massive political struggle over its future, and Dzasokhov contended that “destructive forces,” both among radicals and conservatives, were doing considerable harm as they contended for power.

“We are not using the old methods in this struggle, we are using new ones,” Dzasokhov said, dismissing charges from radicals that the government was increasingly turning, notably in the three Baltic republics, to military power to enforce its point of view. “If we were using the old methods, then everything would have been resolved months ago.

“Instead, and despite the criticism we get from the other side, we are showing tolerance, we are for dialogue and we are for calm discussion.”

Dzasokhov said that people, in arguing about how far the Soviet Union had to go to establish a modern democracy and mixed economy, should also recognize how far it had come under Gorbachev.

“We have moved so far from the monopoly of power, from the monopoly of one party, from the unitary nature of our state,” he said, “ . . . that there is no way to reverse the process, let alone bring it back to where we started nearly six years ago. We can only go forward, developing the conditions we need to build humane socialism.”

The Soviet leadership is seeking support for what it regards as its centrist position, but Dzasokhov said that this is proving difficult because of the massive swings in the country’s political mood over the past year.

“If you asked me to distribute political opinion by sector--the left, the right, the center--frankly I couldn’t do it,” he said. “Everything is shifting. There are very few clear standpoints, and none seems permanent.”