Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 10, 1990 TAG: 9007100303
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
Delegates to the Communist Party congress also approved plans to chose the party's general secretary, certain to be President Mikhail Gorbachev again, and his deputy by direct election, giving the top leaders greater authority and some protection from removal.
Both decisions were a major political victory for Gorbachev, who had sought these and other changes to make the party structure a vehicle for reform rather than an obstacle to the bolder moves that he envisions for perestroika.
The new Politburo will include, for the first time, the Communist Party leaders from all of the Soviet Union's 15 constituent republics, providing even the smallest with a significant voice in national decision-making, along with the top party officials from Moscow who until now have dominated.
This undoubtedly will shift the majority on the body toward faster and broader reforms, Gorbachev supporters said, and give the Soviet leader the votes he has sometimes lacked in the past five years on key issues.
The battle was not won easily. There had been four hours of tough talking Monday before final compromises had been reached, and Gorbachev was tired, hoarse and even a bit unkempt as he intervened in the afternoon during the delegate debate on proposed changes in the party statutes.
"Let's vote," he told Anatoly I. Lukyanov, a Politburo member and key aide, who was presiding at the time.
The key vote was an overwhelming 3,325 to 839 in favor of including republican party leaders in the new Politburo.
Other votes were closer, however, as Lukyanov steered the compromises through objections from conservatives, who constitute the majority of the congress, and from radical reformers.
Gorbachev's victory came at a congress that has been dominated by hard-line Communists furious at the party's loss of authority. He originally had sought the reorganization in February, at the same Central Committee meeting where he pushed through approval of a multiparty system, but had encountered such resistance that he put in off nearly half a year.
By the time of the vote Monday, Gorbachev already had made key compromises in backroom bargaining. He originally proposed that the party leader be a chairman who headed a "presidium" composed almost exclusively of party leaders from the republics, but he accepted a mix of the old and the new.
In retaining the old names and titles - "Politburo" and "general secretary" - he attempted to satisfy both conservatives worried about the deliberate shift in power out of the center to what Russians call the "periphery" and the traditionalists concerned that public confidence in the party would be further undermined by the very appearance of such changes.
Gorbachev had struggled over five years to develop a consistent majority on the Politburo, which now has 12 full members. Only a series of forced retirements gave him the control that he needed to press ahead with the most immediate reforms.
Under the new party statutes, which must still be ratified as a package, the Politburo would grow to as many as 23 voting members, and the majority would be representatives of outlying republics, ranging from Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the south through Moldavia and the Ukraine to the Baltic republics in the north and out to Central Asia.
The ruling Politburo now is chosen by the party's policy-making Central Committee.
by CNB