Gorbachev Foils Ouster Bid, Gets Yeltsin Backing

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Wednesday defeated an attempt by his hard-line critics to oust him as leader of the Soviet Communist Party, and he accused them of wanting to return the country to a dictatorship.

In an equally important victory, Gorbachev won the support of his radical rival, Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, on a program to stabilize the Soviet Union’s crisis-ridden economy and on the formulation of a new Union Treaty as the basis for holding the country together.

Together, the two triumphs should restore some of Gorbachev’s diminished political and moral authority. The Soviet leader, speaking at the meeting of the party’s policy-making Central Committee, pledged to pursue with renewed vigor the political and economic reforms that he began six years ago.

In a fighting speech as the meeting opened, Gorbachev lashed out at his conservative critics who in recent months have aggressively sought his replacement, first as party leader and then as president. They were trying to reverse the reforms of the past six years, Gorbachev said, and split the party in order to regain power for themselves.

Warning of nationwide instability, violence and then a dictatorship if he and other Soviet leaders yield to these demands for their resignation, Gorbachev swung the majority of the 410-member Central Committee behind him even before the debate got under way Wednesday afternoon.

“Let’s soberly imagine what would happen if these demands are fulfilled: The destruction of the lawful state structure would inevitably create an explosive power vacuum,” Gorbachev said, according to a text of his speech from the official Soviet news agency Tass.

“And no matter who was to come out on top, in place of democratic institutions would come arbitrary rule--to put it simply, a very real dictatorship, not the imaginary one that some people see in the current constitutional regime.”

When hard-liners later tried to put the question of Gorbachev’s continued leadership of the party on the meeting’s agenda, the proposal was rejected overwhelmingly with a show of hands, according to party officials who were present at the closed-door session.

“The drama was in Gorbachev’s mastery of the situation,” one Central Committee member commented. “He was strong on the issues, of course, but he was unbeatable as a tactician. . . . He was wounded, badly wounded, going into this plenum, but he will undoubtedly come out stronger just for this victory.”

What the conservatives sought was a formal accounting by Gorbachev of his leadership of the embattled party. That would have opened the way for a torrent of criticism, long evident in party ranks around the country, and for a move to force Gorbachev to step down as the party’s general secretary.

“Already, not just in words but in deeds, attempts are being made to push the country off the path of reform or to throw it into another ultrarevolutionary adventure, threatening to destroy our state or return it to the past, to a slightly dressed-up totalitarian regime,” Gorbachev said.

“I have in mind the plans of the extremists of the left and the right. Both of these lines are fatal. Pseudo-democrats are demanding the trial of the Communist Party and its prohibition, while some party activists are looking for enemies and traitors in the party leadership.”

And he defended his continued leadership of the party despite his heavy duties as president. “I do not hold the chair of the party leader out of some personal motive,” Gorbachev said. “The issue is not me. Combining the two posts is vitally necessary for whoever finds himself in this chair.”

Gorbachev, despite his victory, did come in for sharp criticism from regional party leaders in the first speeches, according to other unofficial accounts of the meeting. Although further attacks are likely as the meeting continues today, the conservatives are not expected to mount a new challenge at this session of the Central Committee.

“They are beaten, but I can’t say that we’ve fully won,” a Gorbachev supporter on the Central Committee commented Wednesday evening.

Gorbachev’s position had been immeasurably strengthened by the agreement, announced on the front page of the party newspaper Pravda, among the leaders of nine of the country’s 15 constituent republics on an economic stabilization program and on the basic principles for the new Union Treaty.

The leadership agreement--with Yeltsin’s signature on it--effectively countered the conservatives’ charges of weakness, indecisiveness and drift, and it laid the foundation for a centrist coalition of forces.

Gorbachev hailed the signing of a joint statement with the nine Soviet republics as “the start of a turning point” for the nation, and he said it reflected a fundamental shift in the political balance toward the formation of a centrist majority.

Yeltsin’s willingness to support the government’s economic stabilization program just days after denouncing it was one indication of the gravity of the political crisis.

Although Gorbachev made important concessions to win the agreement, he apparently broke the long political stalemate over the Union Treaty as well as obtaining support for the government’s new economic stabilization program.

The six republics that did not take part in the agreement were the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as well as Armenia and Georgia in the southern Soviet Union and Moldova on the border with Romania.