Disloyalty in High Places Boldly Stalks Gorbachev : Soviets: Two deputy-minister generals sign an ‘open letter’ full of nationalism, threats and venom--and keep their posts.

It was no small feat for Mikhail Gorbachev to persuade the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party last week to accept a program closer to socialism of a West European social democratic type than to communism in the normal sense. The great majority of those who voted for it did so largely in order to fight another day. They have been promised the opportunity for further work on the program--that is, a chance to water it down--and a party congress by the end of the year. Only the party congress can adopt a fundamentally new program and, if it so desires, elect a new general secretary.

There are, perhaps, just two ways in which Gorbachev could lead the party into the congress and earn the respect of the more serious political figures in the democratic movement. One would be to step aside as general secretary and put all his weight behind a genuinely reformist alternative candidate. Whether he could succeed in this is doubtful. Much would depend on the way delegates are chosen. If the local party bosses have as much control over the selection process as they had last time, such an attempt would probably fail. Gorbachev could then capture broad public support only by breaking away, with as many rank and file members as possible, from a Communist Party that refused to be reconstructed.

A second option, which would be less acceptable to many democrats but which might still commend itself to Gorbachev, would be to fight to retain the leadership but only on his terms: by forcing the party to accept once and for all that it is not part of the power structure, and by refusing to go along with any dilution of the essentially social democratic program that he has endorsed. The ideal for Gorbachev would be to put the conservatives in a position where they had to break with the party. A possibly renamed party, shorn of its conservatives and reactionaries, could then more plausibly become part of a coalition with the newer democratic forces and parties.

Probably the worst possible outcome--one that could be nothing more than a short-term tactical victory--would be for Gorbachev to make enough compromises with the conservatives to paper over the cracks once again and keep together an organization whose unity is extremely tenuous and highly artificial in the conditions of developing political pluralism.

It is still not easy for Gorbachev to contemplate giving up his party institutional base unless he can be confident that he has a good chance of establishing an alternative political base. Hence the importance of his relations with the leaders of the Soviet Union’s republics and with opinion leaders in Russia over the next few months. Gorbachev’s fear must be that his place as party leader might be taken by someone who would make an alliance with those who hate the pluralizing and liberalizing changes of the past six years and regard him as a traitor, both to the country and to communism.

Such people are to be found in high places. It is quite extraordinary that two deputy ministers, Gen. Boris Gromov and Gen. Valentin Varennikov, should still be holding government office of any kind after putting their names to the open letter to their countrymen that was published in Sovetsakaya Rossiya last week. Full of cloying nationalism, hatred of liberals and democrats and fear of the future, the document left no reader in any doubt that its prime target was Gorbachev.

Hypocritically declaring their opposition to a “fratricidal war,” the signatories of the letter virtually called upon the army to revolt against the presidents and elected assemblies of the Soviet Union and the Russian republic. Without naming names, they attacked those who had renounced the power of the Communist Party and handed it over to “frivolous and clumsy parliamentarians.” And they expressed their conviction that the army will step forth “as the bulwark of all the healthy forces in society.”

The document bearing the generals’ names (among others) asked “how it happened that we . . . allowed into power those who do not love this country, who fawn on foreign patrons, and who seek advice and blessings across the seas.” It went on to note that “among the Russians there are statesmen who are prepared to lead the country to a dignified and sovereign future.”

In most political systems, whether authoritarian or democratic, after such a public display of disloyalty to the national leader and contempt for the political institutions to which they are formally accountable, Gromov and Varennikov would not have remained in government service another 24 hours. That they are still there suggests that Gorbachev is very wary of the army’s loyalty.

Combatting the threat from these quarters is one of the problems Gorbachev has to weigh as he ponders his next move. Consolidating his relations with Boris Yeltsin and building bridges to the potentially large democratic organizations now emerging surely offer the best hope of doing so. Splitting the party carries risks, but remaining in the same party as Gromov and his friends has a greater disadvantage. It prevents Gorbachev from forming a new coalition government that could command popular support. Such support might not rule out unconstitutional action by those who have expressed their contempt for democratic institutions, but it would put a formidable spoke in the wheel of their backward-looking designs.