Gorbachev Urges World to Help Save Perestroika

Warning the world that it has a stake in ensuring the success of his stalled reform drive, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Wednesday made a virtual appeal for foreign financial aid for perestroika, cautioning that its collapse could lead to the restoration of Kremlin tyranny.

One week away from a key high-level Communist Party meeting at which rebellious hard-liners are expected to censure and perhaps try to oust him, Gorbachev made an eloquent plea for backing at home and abroad, and referred favorably to Soviet progressives for the first time in weeks.

“The centrist policy line for which I stand is geared to a sense of responsibility and a new innovative approach,” he told Japan’s Parliament. “There is a possibility of a civil showdown if this policy line is abandoned and if it fails to rally democratic supporters.

“If we fail to halt the disintegration of the state--the economy, legality, the interrelations among (Soviet) republics--and if we let the new social processes get out of hand, the country may be thrown into chaos from which a dictatorship will emerge,” Gorbachev warned in his first major speech to a foreign audience in six months.

Gorbachev, increasingly depicted by radical foes as an opponent of genuine change, stressed two themes in the 45-minute address: Any current backtracking in Soviet economic and political reforms is intended to safeguard what has been achieved, not to obliterate it; and the West has objective reasons for helping him remain in power.

“Everything we do now is necessary precisely in order to keep perestroika on course and, at the same time, to create prerequisites for the even more resolute progress of reform,” Gorbachev, 60, said from the Parliament rostrum.

Members of Gorbachev’s entourage have openly said his four-day trip to Japan--the first by a Soviet head of state--is intended to open the floodgates of Japanese trade and investment to replenish the moribund Soviet economy. In a barely veiled appeal for financial aid from his hosts and leaders of the other industrial democracies, Gorbachev said it is in their own interest to see his policies succeed.

“The development of a new, peaceful world order will largely depend on the outcome of perestroika, “ he told the 764-seat bicameral Parliament. “We are counting on support for our efforts, particularly now as we go through this critical stage of transition.”

He noted later that “rich countries that help less prosperous ones are helping themselves.”

In separate talks with Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu, Gorbachev hammered home the same point, hinting that his ouster or the triumph of Marxist-Leninist die-hards in the Soviet Union would trigger a resumption of international tensions and the arms race.

“The world should be interested in the success of perestroika, “ Gorbachev reportedly said. “In the case of perestroika’s defeat, the cost will be much higher.”

At a luncheon with 2,500 representatives of Japanese business groups, Gorbachev asked them to invest in all branches of his country’s economy, proposed a joint development bank and listed investment opportunities. They include projects in natural gas, condensed gas and crude oil on the Far East island of Sakhalin, which he said would require an investment of $2.5 billion to $3 billion but would be repaid in five to six years.

However, many of the business leaders were unmoved. They cited Japan’s 45-year-old territorial dispute with Moscow, which has blocked full normalization of relations and is the most contentious issue of the Gorbachev-Kaifu talks.

“Our countries have to resolve their political problems, and your country must lay the groundwork for the transition to an orderly market economy,” Gaishi Hiraiwa, chairman of Japan’s powerful Federation of Economic Organizations, the Keidanren, said at the luncheon. “Long-term investment will require economic and political stability.”

Six years ago, on April 23, 1985, the Communist Party Central Committee decreed the new party line-- perestroika, or restructuring--that became the catchall term for the economic and social transformations sought by Gorbachev.

Since then, key reformers have fallen by the wayside as conservative forces, including the KGB, military brass and regional party barons, have gone on the attack. High-profile progressives--like Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the former foreign minister, and erstwhile Politburo member Alexander N. Yakovlev--now hold no government or party office.

Gorbachev reassured the Japanese lawmakers that the “changes which have occurred are irreversible.” But to safeguard the reform program, he said political consensus was indispensable.

The Central Committee, which elected Gorbachev as general secretary in March, 1985, is scheduled to convene April 24 in Moscow with some party officials no longer bothering to camouflage their lack of respect for Gorbachev.

Led by hard-liner Boris Gidaspov, the Leningrad party machine, the Soviet Union’s largest party organization after Moscow, has demanded that the Central Committee “review” Gorbachev’s six-year tenure as general secretary.

For Gorbachev’s partisans, historical precedent gives reason for concern. Alarmed at the “hare-brained” policies of Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, ruling Politburo members convened the Central Committee in 1964 and rammed through a vote relieving Khrushchev of his duties. Virtually overnight, he became a non-person.

The party rules were amended last year so that the larger party Congress, and not the Central Committee, now elects the general secretary. But the Central Committee could convoke an emergency Congress to resolve the leadership question.

On Wednesday, the head of the state-run Soviet broadcasting company, a professed Gorbachev ally, forecast a stormy meeting, with Gorbachev’s job performance one of the most central issues.

“I don’t think everything will go smoothly,” Leonid P. Kravchenko, a member of Gorbachev’s entourage in Tokyo, told reporters.

Along with the top party job, Gorbachev holds the No. 1 post in the Soviet government, a presidency that he tailor-made for himself and that in theory has broad powers. But as events have recently shown, Gorbachev must also rely on the party and loyalist organizations such as the KGB and Soviet military to govern.