Gorbachev’s New Credo Watered Down : Soviet Union: Conservatives seize opportunity to rework Communist Party’s draft platform. But it remains a reformist document.

Communist Party conservatives have won their battle to put traditionalist jargon back into their party’s draft platform--including a pledge to pursue the path blazed by V.I. Lenin and Karl Marx--but the document’s guiding light is still President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reformist thought and goals.

The lengthy text of the proposed platform--supposed to be the collective credo of all 15 million Soviet Communists and their battle plan for economic, social and political action--was printed Thursday morning in Pravda, the party’s flagship daily newspaper. Last month, the policy-making Central Committee had given initial approval to a sensational draft submitted by Gorbachev, the party’s general secretary, which committed Soviet Communists for the first time to working toward the establishment of a free-market economy and pluralist democracy.

However, the version printed by Pravda has been somewhat reworked by a party committee and has a decidely more conservative bent than Gorbachev’s document. At a time of seething divisions within the party--which former Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze has said is actually several parties in one and will ultimately break up--most changes appear to be largely cosmetic and intended to appease disgruntled traditionalists.

For example, under the new draft the party pledges to “develop” the “humanist principles of the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin,” the founding fathers of the philosophy and practice of Marxism-Leninism that Gorbachev says Communists must largely renounce.

Gorbachev’s references to a “multi-party system” have been stricken, but since the Communist Party has renounced its constitutional monopoly on power, that is the political environment it will be forced to live in anyway.

But just as in Gorbachev’s document, the draft printed in Pravda condemns the totalitarian practices that besmirch so much of the Soviet party’s past and outlines its role as “the party of economic, political and spiritual freedom.”

One potentially controversial change is a new declaration of unbending support for a unitary federal state, the keystone of which is supposed to be the Aug. 20 signing of a new Union Treaty. Gorbachev, in contrast, talked of a “multinational statehood.”

A paragraph also was deleted from the Soviet leader’s text that committed Communists elected to office to serving their voters before they serve the party. That change, plus the unequivocal backing for a unitary state, may convince many that the party is unable to serve the interests of the increasingly rebellious Soviet republics and that Communists care more about their party than democracy.

But no matter what the party’s most important philosophical document will finally say, it will no longer become the touchstone of Soviet political life, as it was in the pre-Gorbachev years. The party is now hemorrhaging members--at least 5 million have quit in recent years--and its problems have never been so apparent.

Hard-line leader Ivan K. Polozkov resigned this week as Russian party leader, and Russia’s vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, created his own pro-democracy “party within the party” and was booted from the Communist ranks.

The revised text printed in Pravda is being submitted to Communists nationwide for discussion. This fall, it will be voted on at a national party congress that could see the breakup of the party into rightist, leftist and centrist factions and the relinquishing by Gorbachev of his general secretary post.

Viktor K. Grebenshikov, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this report.