Soviets Plan Military Purge : Party Agrees to Dissolve Central Committee : Coup aftermath: New defense chief says he’ll replace 80% of leaders with ‘younger, more loyal’ officers. Gorbachev’s personal military adviser commits suicide.

The breathtaking pace of change in the Soviet Union continued unabated Sunday as the defense minister announced plans for an 80% shake-up of the military leadership, and the Communist Party hierarchy, just as discredited by the right-wing coup, agreed to abolish its nucleus, the Central Committee.

Appearing on evening TV news, Col. Gen. Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov said his Defense Ministry--one of the hotbeds of support for last week’s abortive bid to overthrow President Mikhail S. Gorbachev--will soon be rocked by large-scale personnel changes to rid it of generals and other officers who aided or sympathized with the coup plotters.

“The team will be renewed by 80%,” said Shaposhnikov, the former commander of the air force. He took over the job once held by Marshal Dmitri T. Yazov, fired by Gorbachev for his part in the rightists’ plot. “The people should be younger, more loyal and incapable of anti-constitutional acts.”

On Moscow Radio, Shaposhnikov assured his fellow citizens--who have seen Soviet soldiers deployed in the past 2 1/2 years to lethally repress dissent in Moscow and in the republics of Lithuania and Georgia--that “as long as I am defense minister, our country’s armed forces will never in any circumstances be used against the people.”

Gorbachev accused the Communist Party hierarchy of participating in the coup or doing nothing to foil it, and on Saturday resigned as party general secretary while ordering Communist cells shut down in state organizations and party property confiscated. The Secretariat one day later hotly denied involvement of party leaders in the “criminal plans” but admitted they had failed to wage an “organized struggle against the putschists.”

“The members of the Central Committee (the party’s policy-making body) should evidently make a difficult decision, but the only one possible in present circumstances--to dissolve the Central Committee,” the Secretariat said.

That conclusion, which Gorbachev had demanded, would effectively doom the Communist Party’s ability to function, as it has for almost three-quarters of a century, as a parallel bureaucracy for government at all levels and the true center of economic and political decision-making in the country. The Secretariat said the country’s top Communists should be convened to decide the “further destiny” of the party.

In other developments:

* Gorbachev’s personal military adviser, Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, committed suicide, reportedly by shooting himself in his office. There was conflicting evidence, but according to a KGB general, Akhromeyev--a ramrod-straight, affable career soldier who made no secret of his conservative views--was present when Yazov and other high-ranking officers planned military support operations for the coup d’etat.

* Byelorussia declared its independence, becoming the eighth Soviet republic to move toward sovereignty. The Parliament of the Ukraine adopted an independence declaration Saturday but will ask voters to approve the move in a referendum in December. Byelorussia’s conservative president, Nikolai Dementei, resigned under fire from radical deputies, who said he had failed to oppose the coup.

* Monuments to Soviet founder V. I. Lenin were destroyed or dismantled in Riga, Latvia, and in the southern Chechen-Ingush region, where crowds of thousands of people hailing the coup’s collapse also seized government headquarters and the broadcast center. In Moscow, statues of Mikhail Kalinin, the first president of the Soviet Union, and oldtime Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov were demolished.

* Raisa Gorbachev, said by her husband to have suffered a debilitating “spell” during the three days they were confined in the Crimea by the hard-line junta, was reported by the Soviet president’s chief spokesman to be resting at the Gorbachevs’ country residence outside Moscow and feeling better. Some reports said she had a stroke, but the spokesman, Vitaly N. Ignatenko, said she is suffering only from “serious fatigue.”

* Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites--one representative of the city government said they numbered more than 1 million--came Sunday to the spot where three defenders of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government were slain by Soviet soldiers during the putsch. They covered the bloodstains on the pavement with heaps of flowers.

* Lawmakers converged on Moscow for today’s emergency session of the Supreme Soviet legislature, which is to hear a report from Gorbachev on the coup that will likely determine what future role he plays in Soviet politics. Supreme Soviet Speaker Anatoly I. Lukyanov, accused by the Russian Federation leadership of having served as “chief ideologist” of the coup, has tendered his resignation, Gorbachev’s spokesman said.

* Panicky Muscovites again began erecting barricades outside the Russian government building--the “White House”--when word spread Sunday afternoon that, once again, Soviet armored units were streaming into Moscow. The news turned out to be a false alarm.

Tempo of Change

The sweeping changes in the Soviet political landscape over the past week now threaten to create a “power vacuum,” Igor Malashenko, a spokesman for Gorbachev’s office, said in an interview on American television, and the new defense minister and Communist Party leadership were trying hard to take into account the new realities.

To salvage the Soviet military’s honor, Shaposhnikov vowed a full investigation of its involvement in the coup but also defended the 4-million-strong armed forces as “virtually totally innocent” in the matter. He pleaded with the citizenry not to indiscriminately persecute soldiers in the belief that everyone in uniform had been a plotter.

The party Secretariat, for its part, endorsed the adherence of rank-and-file Communists to a new party program, proposed by Gorbachev, that would make Lenin’s progeny into something virtually indistinguishable from the once-scorned “bourgeois” Socialist parties of Western Europe.

Gorbachev’s decrees hamstringing the party’s activities at the workplace and stripping it of its vast property holdings, as well as his now decidedly dependent position on Yeltsin, were seized on over the weekend by the Russian Federation leadership, which issued a series of rapid-fire decrees that effectively make the Russian White House, and not Gorbachev’s Kremlin or the Central Committee on Moscow’s Old Square, the dominant institution in the elaboration and enactment of Soviet domestic policy.

Russian Prime Minister Ivan S. Silayev, accusing the Soviet Cabinet of Ministers of “active participation” with the coup, ordered that until the ministers are replaced by Gorbachev, the Russian Federation government will take charge of all Soviet ministries, government offices and state-run industries on Russian soil.

Their personnel, Silayev said, must now obey Russian law alone. Gorbachev on Saturday named Silayev to head a new administration running the Soviet economy, additional proof of the growing symbiosis between the Russian and central governments.

In that vein, one clause of Silayev’s decree further blurs the distinctions by proclaiming that, if the outlying republics agree, Russia is ready to provide services once assured by the Soviet government.

In a separate decree, Yeltsin ordered that all government communications in Moscow and the whole of Russian territory--including telephones and scramblers for secret documents--are to be put in the hands of the Russian KGB, to bar their use in any further attempts to overthrow the government.

The Russian president also named 14 prefects--his “representatives”--to oversee the execution of the Russian government’s will in the far-flung provinces of the Russian Federation, where elected governments are often dominated by career Communists.

There were isolated protests at the rapid accumulation of power in Yeltsin’s hands, a leitmotif that no doubt will be echoed by conservatives in the Soviet legislature. In one blast of criticism, Amangetldy Tuleev, head of the regional government in Kemerovo, denounced as “a violation of human rights” Yeltsin’s earlier order banning activity by the Communist Party in Russia.

The Suicide

In a laconic dispatch, Tass, the official Soviet news agency, cited a Defense Ministry spokesman as saying that “Marshal of the Soviet Union Sergei Akhromeyev on Saturday committed suicide.” Gorbachev’s spokesman Malashenko said later that Akhromeyev had shot himself in his office.

Opinions varied about Akhromeyev’s ties to the plotters. However, KGB Maj. Gen. Viktor Karpukhin told the Rossiya newspaper that Akhromeyev, 68, attended a closed-door meeting on Aug. 19, the first day of the attempt to oust Gorbachev, at the Defense Ministry along with Yazov, army Gen. Mikhail A. Moiseyev and other members of the military elite.

One of the eight members of last week’s short-lived State Emergency Committee, Interior Minister Boris K. Pugo, also committed suicide, reportedly to avoid being arrested. All other members of the committee that grabbed power for three days have been taken into custody.