Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 3, 1990 TAG: 9007030174
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Long
Addressing a hall packed with party bureaucrats and senior military officers, Gorbachev acknowledged that the crisis confronting the world's second superpower had deepened during his five years in power. But, while conceding that "mistakes" had been committed by the present leadership, he put most of the blame on "the extremely grim legacy that we inherited."
"This will be a time for blunt speaking," said the Soviet leader, setting the tone for the 10-day congress that could lead to the breakup of the party that has held a virtual monopoly of political power here for 72 years.
"The issue today is this: Either Soviet society will go forward along the path of the profound changes that have been begun, ensuring a worthy future for our great multinational state, or else forces opposed to perestroika [restructuring] will gain the upper hand. In that case - let us face the facts squarely - dismal times would be in store for the country and the people," the 59-year-old president said.
The leadership has been bracing for bitter criticism at the congress, the supreme organ of the 20 million-member party, which is to elect a new ruling Politburo and policy-making Central Committee and to adopt a new program. The congress will be an important test of Gorbachev's grip on the party following unprecedented criticism of his policies by hard-liners at last month's conference of the Russian republic's party.
A taste of what is in store for Gorbachev and his colleagues came at the start of Monday's session when a deputy from the far eastern town of Magadan demanded that none of the outgoing leaders be allowed to sit on the party's Presidium. The proposal was rejected, but the hall did assure its right to examine the individual performance of each Politburo member.
In scenes that would have been unthinkable at the last party congress in 1986, deputies jeered Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov and ideologist Vadim Medvedev as they gave 20-minute reports of their stewardship. Gorbachev's closest ally on the Politburo, Alexander Yakovlev, fared somewhat better with an impassioned defense of glasnost, or openness, and perestroika that won him the respect of the hall.
Declaring that perestroika was taking place "50 years too late," Yakovlev described himself as a "happy man" because he had been able to take part in "a great renovation of a great country and its historic entry into the world of freedom." Yakovlev's reputation as the most liberal member of the leadership has made him a frequent target of conservative anger.
Gorbachev called for "more resolute measures" to dismantle the discredited system of central planning and replace it with a market-oriented economy. But he also distanced himself from the government's latest economic reform package, which unleashed a storm of protest from left and right after it was unveiled last month.
"The logic, tactics, priorities, and sequence of steps toward a market have not been thought out well enough," Gorbachev declared, describing the emphasis placed on a series of early price increases as "absurd." A wave of panic buying hit the Soviet Union last month when the proposed higher prices were announced, forcing the legislature to postpone debate on the issue until the fall.
The Soviet leader's comments suggested that Ryzhkov is being set up to take the blame for collapse of the government's second economic reform program in six months. The measures were debated in the Presidential Council, and it was widely assumed that they had Gorbachev's support.
Ryzhkov, who has served as prime minister for five years, sat grim-faced on the podium while Gorbachev accused the government of not doing enough to force industry to abandon the old-style economic methods. He later complained that the government's measures had not received support "either from the center or at the local level" and had been subjected to severe press criticism.
Although Gorbachev lashed out at critics on both left and right, he seemed to lay special emphasis on his opponents within the Communist Party's vast bureaucracy. He said that some unnamed "leading cadres" preferred to govern by "old methods" and had refused to accept the need for reform "either politically or psychologically."
Gorbachev said the Stalinist policy of central planning had devastated the Soviet economy - resulting in a series of man-made disasters culminating in the 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine. He also blamed his predecessors for the "militarization of the economy, which swallowed colossal material and intellectual resources," and the "irreparable human losses due to the war in Afghanistan."
Rejecting criticism that the Kremlin had "lost Eastern Europe," the president said that his "new thinking" in foreign policy had won the Soviet Union respect around the world. He described the former Communist regimes of Eastern Europe as "a variety of the Stalinist authoritarian and bureaucratic system which we ourselves have abandoned."
"We are being accused of leaving without giving battle. It appears that what this means is that we are being advised to resort to the methods we used in the past," Gorbachev said, referring to the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
At the Russian party conference last week, a senior general, Albert Makashov, derided the "so-called victories of our diplomacy" that led to the Soviet army being driven out of countries that it had liberated from fascism.
Gorbachev and his allies appear to have concluded that they must now respond in forceful terms to the criticism of the hard-liners. But they are holding back from taking the next step of forming an alliance with radicals demanding the transformation of the Communist Party into a Western-style democratic party.
While insisting that Communists have a right to express minority viewpoints, Gorbachev called for preservation of the principle of "democratic centralism," which excludes the formation of organized factions in the party. Supporters of Democratic Platform, who claim up to 40 percent of the Communists in the country but have less than 2 percent of the delegates in the hall, say they will leave the party unless their proposals are accepted.
Gorbachev rejected calls by the Democratic Platform for the network of party cells in the armed forces and factories to be disbanded, saying this would violate the right of Soviet citizens to "freedom of assembly." He added, however, that other parties should also have the right to recruit members in government institutions now that the Communist Party has officially given up its constitutional "leading role" in society.
After Gorbachev's two-hour speech, Democratic Platform supporters said that the Soviet leader appeared to have taken some steps in their direction, but not enough to satisfy them.
"Gorbachev said some things clearer than he has before. He said our problems all flow from the Stalinist model of the economy . . . My opinion is that the trouble goes back to 1848 when Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto," said eye surgeon Svyataslav Fyodorov, a leading progressive.
The Russian Communist Party, which elected a hard-line leader last month, holds 60 percent of the seats at the present congress.
by CNB