Communists Bow to Yeltsin on Party Cell Decree : Soviet Union: Given six months to comply, they agree to abandon offices and factories.

Handing Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin another victory in his battle of wills with the Communist Party, a Politburo member announced Saturday that his comrades will obey Yeltsin’s order to liquidate party cells in Russia’s offices and factories effective today.

Yeltsin’s decree, issued two weeks ago, strikes at the heart of the Communist Party’s privileged place in Soviet society, because until recently it was able to exploit its network of committees in every plant, mine and office to ensure its role as ruler of the Soviet Union.

Eradicating that web would be a painful, perhaps fateful blow for the party, which is reeling from membership losses in the millions and is now on the political defensive in most Soviet republics.

“Our attitude to the decree is known: We don’t think that it is democratic,” Yuri A. Prokofiev, the Moscow party chief and a member of the ruling Politburo, said Saturday. “But since the Constitutional (Compliance) Committee hasn’t taken it under consideration, we cannot violate the law.”

Prokofiev, a moderate in a party increasingly dominated by hard-liners nostalgic for the pre- perestroika days, said he had spoken to Yeltsin on Friday about how the decree is going to be implemented and indicated that party organizations in Russia will be granted six months and even more to comply, minimizing chances of an immediate confrontation between party and government.

Meanwhile, Yeltsin’s vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, was fighting the power of the party hierarchy from within. Meeting with 800 other delegates in Moscow, Rutskoi announced the creation of a “party within the party”--the Democratic Party of Communists of Russia, a reformist counterweight to the reactionary Russian Communist Party led by Ivan K. Polozkov.

“We want to cast aside the potentially criminal elements of the party and eject from its leading positions the obtuse, dull-witted, malicious and cynical, for whom power is an instrument for humiliating others and promoting personal gain,” Rutskoi told the meeting in a virtual declaration of war against the Communist leadership. He predicted the new party will sign up about 5 million members--about a third of the membership of the Soviet Communist Party.

Even organizers, though, had trouble explaining the bizarre status and role of the new “party within the party,” and the Soviet Communist Party hierarchy was quick to denounce the whole exercise as meaningless and a violation of the party’s own rules.

“When the task of preserving unity has been brought to the fore, the attempt at creating a new party is objectively intended to cause a schism of the ranks of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union),” the party secretariat said in a statement.

The reformist faction of Russian Communists vowed to support Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev as long as he holds fast to his present pro-market and pro-democracy course, and Rutskoi said that it would vote to sever all ties with the Communist Party and became totally independent if supreme party institutions do not recognize it.

The secretariat’s verdict apparently makes such a rupture in party ranks--an event that would mean the existence of two competing Communist parties in Russia--all but inevitable.

Prokofiev agreed: “Those who join the Democratic Party of Communists of Russia will have to make a choice--either the CPSU or the Democratic Party of Communists of Russia.”

It was impossible to tell from Prokofiev’s remarks whether mainline Communists intend to obey Yeltsin’s decree only temporarily, awaiting a finding by the Constitutional Compliance Committee that Yeltsin has exceeded his powers.

Significantly, the government committee created to exercise constitutional oversight--a body chaired by a Gorbachev crony--has so far ducked the issue of whether Yeltsin can issue such an order, and Yeltsin last week claimed that his “departization” decree helped save Gorbachev’s political skin by sowing panic among right-wingers at a key meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee last month.

The July 20 decree from Yeltsin, who quit the Communist Party last year after serving in various posts, including the Moscow job now held by Prokofiev, prohibits parties and political movements from having organizational structures at workplaces in Russia, the country’s largest republic.

Although it is couched in general terms, it targets the Communist Party, whose structures are intertwined at every level with economic, social and political institutions.

“As for us, we are ready for it,” Prokofiev said of Yeltsin’s order. “We have the experience of creating territorially based party organizations in education and health services.”