Official Says Gorbachev’s Party Foes Are Growing : Communism: Wide spectrum now supports his ouster as general secretary, Ukrainian leader asserts.

Calls are mounting within the Soviet Communist Party for the replacement of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as its leader, with conservatives and centrists now joining radicals in urging the election of another party chief, the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party said here Monday.

Stanislav I. Gurenko said that Gorbachev’s leadership is now certain to be an issue at the meeting of the Soviet Communist Party’s Central Committee next week, and he indicated that Gorbachev’s support, once broad enough to withstand any challenge, has weakened significantly.

“Orthodox Communists are greatly offended by the neglect that the president shows the party,” Gurenko said in some of the sharpest anti-Gorbachev criticism yet from a regional party leader. “Party members increasingly feel that they cannot accept the blame for the mistaken decisions made by the president in which the party had no voice.”

Gorbachev would remain president of the Soviet Union if he gave up or lost his post as the party’s general secretary. He has already concentrated virtually all powers in the presidency.

Yet a serious move to unseat Gorbachev as the party leader--even if unsuccessful--would diminish his political stature at a time when he is struggling to hold the Soviet Union together and to pull it out of its economic crisis.

Gurenko, emerging from a daylong meeting of the Ukrainian Party Central Committee, said that speakers had repeatedly questioned Gorbachev’s leadership and some had called for his replacement as general secretary.

The Ukrainian committee discussed a call for a general strike to protest recent price increases for food and consumer goods. The body’s strike committee has called for a day of protests today, and even the official trade unions, affiliates of the Communist Party, have scheduled a meeting to denounce the increases.

While the leadership of the Ukrainian party would continue to support Gorbachev, Gurenko signaled an important shift by calling for a full debate at the Central Committee plenum on April 24 and 25 on whether Gorbachev should still hold the party post as well as the national presidency.

“The plenum must try and work out a position--either continuing to combine the two posts or separating them,” Gurenko said. “We must make a decision on this.”

As a leading centrist within the party hierarchy, Gurenko said that others are troubled by the question of whether “the Communist Party, which personifies guilt for all our country’s troubles in the eyes of our opponents, can now bear the responsibility for the mistakes of the president, although the party has virtually been removed from state affairs by him.

“If this is not resolved,” Gurenko continued, “the party will face even greater problems in maintaining its unity.”

While radicals in the past have pressured Gorbachev to step down as general secretary to ensure a separation between the state and party, the push is now coming from conservatives and centrists such as himself, Gurenko said.

In Central Committee meetings over the year since Gorbachev was reelected general secretary, “there were bright, radical speeches but no exhaustive, in-depth analysis that would persuade people to change things,” Gurenko said. “We want to look at this again.”

Gurenko accused Gorbachev of sanctioning what he described as a new campaign by a number of the president’s liberal advisers, past and present, to discredit the party’s centrists and conservatives.

“Any criticism of Gorbachev is interpreted today as a revanchist attempt by Stalinists and by those supporting (political) stagnation,” he said. “This is a horrible attempt to paralyze all dissent within the party.”