Conservatives Step Up Attacks on Gorbachev

Conservatives in the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party are stepping up their pressure on President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, attacking perestroika as a setback for socialism, demanding a return to classic Marxist values and questioning his leadership of the party.

Ivan K. Polozkov, the first secretary of the Russian Communist Party, whose members make up about half of the Soviet party, told a meeting of the party leadership last week that perestroika, as Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms are known, had long ago degenerated from an effort to renew socialism into an anti-communist drive.

“Now it is clear for everyone that perestroika designed in 1985 and begun by the party and the people as a renewal of socialism . . . has failed,” Polozkov, a member of the Soviet party’s Politburo, declared in a speech published here on Saturday.

In some of the boldest, and sharpest, criticism of Gorbachev and his policies by conservatives, Polozkov appeared to signal the start of an open onslaught on the president.

Already accused by liberals of reneging on the pledges of perestroika under pressure from the right, Gorbachev must now contend with a fundamental challenge from conservatives both to his reform policies and, judging from Polozkov’s speech, to his leadership of the Communist Party.

Polozkov’s election last June as the first secretary of the Russian Communist Party, defeating Gorbachev’s favored candidate, marked the start of the conservative upsurge that has forced reformers into retreat and thus transformed Soviet politics in the last six months.

“We have to admit,” Polozkov asserted in his speech to the Soviet Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee, “that the party failed to notice the beginning of perestroika’s degeneration and permitted this process to gain in strength.

“The party did not understand that it is losing its historic purpose of protecting, first of all, the interests of the working people.”

The crucial mistake, he contended, was replacing the traditional Marxist approach of class struggle with the concept of “universal human values” put forward by Gorbachev in 1988.

“In opposing common human interests to class interests, in giving priority to global values, we rendered a bad service to the socialist idea,” Polozkov said. “Nobody has ever expressed common human interests better than the working class.”

All of these were basic political errors, he argued, and they allowed anti-communists to gain the political initiative here.

“The party was unprepared for the acute political struggle it faced,” he said. “Our prime task now is to assess the situation, sort everything out and take the measures required to get out of this mess.”

Attacking liberals, both within and outside the party, Polozkov described them as “reactionaries who have taken off the masks of democrats and announced anti-communism as their ideology.”

“They gather under its banners the heirs of the overthrown classes, the nationalists, dealers of the shadow economy--all those who did not or do not like Soviet power,” Polozkov declared.

“International capitalism gladly supports the anti-communist movement. It promotes its expansion by all means possible and helps to make its material base stronger by making various kinds of nice gestures to its leaders.

“And all this is being done under the banner of saving perestroika, protecting it from conservatives and, now, even from the president (Gorbachev) and the newly formed Cabinet.”

Polozkov disparaged the concept of a multi-party political system, although it was endorsed by the Communist Party a year ago in a historic move, and he denounced glasnost , the political openness that has brought unprecedented political freedoms, including a lively, critical press, as benefiting the party’s opponents.

“There can be no talk now about any multi-party system,” he said. “There is the Soviet Communist Party, which defends socialist perestroika, which has been approved and voted for by our people, and there are the leaders of small political groups who have a common political face--anti-communism. These groups are consolidating and uniting for the struggle against the Communist Party and the seizure of power.”

But the country’s news media, he complained, were almost totally in the hands of liberals. “If the monopoly on glasnost belonged before to the Communist Party,” he said, “now it is in the hands of forces that are fighting against the party.”

Polozkov’s speech from the Central Committee meeting Thursday was published only in Sovetskaya Rossiya, the most conservative of the country’s major daily papers. The Communist Party newspaper Pravda on Saturday published only the speeches of Vladimir Ivashko, the party’s deputy general secretary, and Oleg Shenin, a party secretary who oversees organizational questions.

Calling for a purge of radical reformers from the party, Shenin said: “There are many instances when communists and also party organizations do not consider it necessary to abide by the rules of the Communist Party and try, without permission, to modify them according to their own reasoning.”

Although he opened the meeting, Gorbachev oddly did not use the occasion, as has been his practice, to assess the political situation in the country and to rally the party to support his policies. Instead, he allowed Ivashko, Shenin and Alexander S. Dzasokhov, the party secretary for ideology, to speak for the top leadership in a clearly conservative tone. The political statement adopted at the meeting has not been published.

At its meeting, the Central Committee removed one of its members, playwright Alexander Gelman, who already had left the party, and censured Stanislav S. Shatalin, who had been Gorbachev’s economics adviser and was elected on Gorbachev’s nomination. Shatalin, a self-described social democrat and an increasingly vocal critic of Gorbachev and the party, will be investigated by a party committee and probably expelled.

In another development Saturday, a liberal radio station operated by the Russian Federation, the country’s largest republic, said that the Soviet State Committee for Television and Radio had withdrawn key frequencies, effectively reducing its audience, after it had angered Gorbachev with its uncensored reporting.

Radio Rossiya, which reflects the views of the Russian government under the populist Boris N. Yeltsin, said Gorbachev had complained to Leonid Kravchenko, the committee chairman, that its programs were “anti-Soviet,” and Kravchenko had withdrawn its right to broadcast on major frequencies. The move is certain to add to the friction between Gorbachev and Yeltsin.