NEWS ANALYSIS : Crucial Week to Test Power of Gorbachev

Once or twice might have been a slip of the tongue, but the leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party was clearly speaking about President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the past tense.

“Gorbachev should have shown greater leadership,” Stanislav Gurenko, the Ukrainian party’s powerful first secretary, was telling reporters after a party meeting in Kiev last week.

Gorbachev, he continued, “should have been more attuned to developments in the country . . . should have foreseen the consequences of his policies . . . should have stayed closer to the feelings of the party members.”

Virtually portraying Gorbachev as yesterday’s man, Gurenko summed up a transition in the Kremlin leadership that many feel may be coming soon--and some feel is overdue--as the Soviet Union’s political system crumbles and its economy disintegrates.

Even Gorbachev acknowledges the country’s peril--and his own. “Our key concern is now the state--it is in jeopardy, and we must save it,” he said last week.

In the coming week, which already is shaping up as one of the most crucial in his six years in power, Gorbachev is expected to try once again to rally his supporters, to reassert his leadership and to recover the momentum for reform.

In rapid order, Gorbachev will attempt to push a program through the country’s legislature to deal with the economic crisis, to get the country’s republics to agree on a new union treaty and to get a vote of confidence from the Communist Party’s Central Committee.

But Gorbachev’s past mastery of Soviet politics will face new challenges. Conservatives in both the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, and in the Central Committee plan not only to question his policies but to demand his resignation if he refuses to bend their way.

Millions of workers are preparing, meanwhile, to join striking coal miners in at least symbolic work stoppages this week to demand higher wages and protest increased prices and new taxes.

Assessing the political situation, a Communist Party commission warned over the weekend that the country is “fraught with the danger of social upheaval.”

Gorbachev, holding to what he believes the middle ground in Soviet politics, hopes that those who favor more radical reform, and thus his sharpest critics in the past year, will come to his defense.

Already, Boris N. Yeltsin, the populist leader of the Russian Federation, the largest Soviet republic, has declared his support of Gorbachev against a conservative putsch, all but forgetting his own “declaration of war” on the Soviet president two months ago.

“The right is preparing disasters for democracy, and when we see that we will act to prevent the right from advancing,” Yeltsin said last week during a visit to France. “In that struggle, we are prepared to cooperate with President Gorbachev.”

Gorbachev, Yeltsin and their supporters, so at odds over the past two years, increasingly speak of a “round-table” approach to the country’s problems or even a coalition government. And a Communist Party commission called over the weekend for a “pooling of forces” with those favoring socialism but perhaps differing in ways to achieve it.

But the broader sentiment is for authoritarian rule, the “iron hand” of Russian history, and even liberals such as Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov and Leningrad Mayor Anatoly Sobchak are advocating firm measures to pull the country back from what virtually everyone now calls “the abyss.”

Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a prominent liberal sociologist and an early supporter of Gorbachev’s reforms, suggested last week that perestroika as “a democratic movement ‘from above’ has exhausted itself” and that the country is now searching for a new strategy.

The most probable course, she said, would combine the original push for democracy with the growing demand for order and become “a bureaucratic approach toward a market economy” with government, party and trade union officials turning their organizations into profit-making enterprises as a strong state maintains order.

Although neither Gorbachev’s fate nor that of perestroika, his reform program, will be decided in a single week, the meetings that begin today could slow or accelerate the political and economic disintegration that everyone, including Gorbachev, sees throughout the country.

The Soviet Union is caught in a triple crisis: Its economy is collapsing faster than the government has been able to reform it, the government and the political system as a whole function with less and less effectiveness, and the Soviet Union as a state is losing its cohesion as some republics try to break away and others flout federal law.

Even foreign policy, which had remained an arena of victory for Gorbachev as domestic defeats mounted, is now joyless. His trip to Japan last week failed to improve relations with Tokyo, let alone bring any promises of much-sought investment. Relations with the United States have grown a bit testy, and other countries are also hedging, asking how long Gorbachev will last and who might follow.

“The proverbial body politic has cancer,” a Gorbachev aide said over the weekend. “. . . It’s truly frightening because, to continue this metaphor, we have no medicine, no antidote, no cure at all.”

Gorbachev, however, will try this week to move on all fronts and, in doing so, reassert his leadership.

“This year is his last chance,” Nursultan Nazarbayev, president of the Soviet Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, said of Gorbachev earlier this month. “If he makes a radical turn, grasps hold of power, starts really to run things and proposes an interesting program acceptable to the people, he could survive. If not, 1991 might be Gorbachev’s last year.”

Although virtually protected from removal as president by the Soviet constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote of the national Parliament, and from easy replacement as the party’s general secretary by similarly strict requirements in party rules, Gorbachev is nonetheless politically vulnerable as the increasing criticism erodes his authority and turns each dispute into an issue threatening his leadership.

And the issue of Gorbachev’s replacement has moved from the unthinkable to the undoable to the difficult to the current “well, maybe” stage. Virtually all Soviet publications are openly discussing the question, “If not Gorbachev, who?”

On Sunday, Soyuz, the leading conservative bloc in the Congress of People’s Deputies, decided to demand an emergency session of the congress to debate the crisis in the country--and discuss Gorbachev’s leadership.

Col. Viktor Alksnis, Soyuz’s co-chairman, said that the bloc would move into “constructive opposition” to the present government. “Personally, I am for Gorbachev’s resignation,” he said, though the group as a whole first wants a full parliamentary debate on the crisis.

In a formal resolution, Soyuz called on Gorbachev to declare a six-month national state of emergency and to use his broad powers to rule by decree to pull the country out of its deepening crisis.

“A meeting of the congress could finally settle the question of the presidency,” Soyuz Chairman Yuri Blokhin said. “I would like (Gorbachev) to introduce a state of emergency himself and finally show that he is a man. But, if he can’t, then perhaps a more resolute person will.”

The fiercest confrontation, however, could come in the meeting of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee on Wednesday and Thursday if conservatives attempt a full-scale challenge.

“Gorbachev will be blamed for a lot of things that have gone wrong, and there will be accusations that he has been too hesitant, too indecisive,” Pyotr Luchinsky, a Central Committee secretary, said on Sunday. “There are districts . . . demanding his resignation, but this is an emotional reaction. The atmosphere is harsher because of the strikes.”

Gorbachev until now has said that the jobs of president and party leader should be divided, but only in the future; only a full party congress could remove him as general secretary, but newspapers speculated last week that he might resign, perhaps accepting chairmanship of the party and nominating an ally to succeed him as general secretary.

“We are the ruling party, and the president is our general secretary,” Anatoly Kornienko, the first secretary of the Communist Party in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, said in a comment reflecting a feeling widespread in party ranks. “But I don’t see why all Communists and all the party’s local organizations should pay for (Gorbachev’s) blunders.”