Soviet Union More Than Talk

By William R. Doerner

The words were inflammatory, but the audience took them in stride. Referring to the discredited era of Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982, Vladimir I. Melnikov, an obscure official from the Russian republic, declared from the podium at the 19th All-Union Communist Party Conference, "People who in previous times actively conducted the policy of stagnation cannot now be on, or work in, central party or Soviet organs in the period of restructuring."

To most people in the auditorium, Melnikov's meaning was clear. But Mikhail Gorbachev wanted him to be even more explicit. Breaking into the speech, Gorbachev asked, "Maybe you have some concrete suggestions?" Then, explaining to other delegates, Gorbachev added with a smile, "We're sitting here and don't know: Is he talking about me or somebody else?" Melnikov proceeded to do what would have been unthinkable even a few months ago, naming names -- and prominent ones at that, including Andrei Gromyko, the country's 78-year-old President. The smile faded from Gorbachev's face, but when the highlights of the session were played on Soviet television later in the evening, that remarkable exchange was not deleted.

So it went last week at the first, extraordinary party gathering since 1941, an event that proved extraordinary in every sense of the word. Day after sweltering day in an early summer heat wave, nearly 5,000 delegates met in the Kremlin's vast Palace of Congresses to debate their country's political future, and specifically the fate of Gorbachev's three-year-old program of perestroika (restructuring). A combination political convention, town meeting, classroom lecture and gripe session, the gathering turned into an astonishing exercise in Gorbachev's second-favorite buzz word, glasnost (openness). More than 70 delegates spoke their minds by week's end, and many others wanted to do so. But Gorbachev finally cut short discussion to hold a series of votes on political reforms. He got pretty much everything he asked for, including a new presidential system of government in which he could be not only party chief but also the Soviet Union's head of state.

Whether or not the conference succeeded in making Gorbachev's modernization plans "irreversible" -- his stated goal -- there was little doubt that he dominated the event. The Soviet leader delivered three addresses, including a 3 1/2-hr. keynote speech and an impassioned follow-up talk starkly warning that socialism "will die unless we reform the political system." He also delivered the meeting's closing address, declaring that the conference had opened the way to "a democratic image of socialism."

As if that were not enough, Gorbachev repeatedly interrupted other delegates as they spoke, usually to endorse their pro-reform assertions. The General Secretary even provided some moments of comic relief. After Politburo Member Alexander Yakovlev read a note asking delegates to refrain from delivering self-serving accounts of local party activities, Gorbachev leaned back in his chair and deadpanned, "That has the support of the conference, right?"

The meeting's most arresting move was a decision, at Gorbachev's urging, to reorganize the Soviet Union's governing institutions in ways that could, depending on how the changes operate in practice, relax the party's iron grip on day-to-day economic and political decision making. As startling as that idea might sound, however, Gorbachev stressed that he was speaking about only some forms of operational authority, not a transfer of ultimate power out of the hands of the party -- a point he took pains to clarify in his second, largely extemporaneous speech. "We do not abandon the role of the ruling party in the country," he said. "On the contrary, we want to reaffirm it."

One of his ideas reaches all the way back to the country's revolutionary origins. During the chaotic days that followed the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and the Bolshevik Party used local councils of workers and soldiers, known as soviets, as their springboard to power. Lenin's famous call for "all power to the soviets" was abandoned, however, almost as soon as its author had managed to establish a one-party state. Gorbachev proposed refurbishing the soviets, now largely impotent councils that do little more than endorse party directives, and making them serve as basic units of local government. Said Gorbachev: "We should assert the full and independent authority of the soviets in managing the development of the areas they run."

On the national level, the conference approved the creation of a new supreme organ, a 2,250-member Congress of People's Deputies. It would meet annually to select a smaller full-time legislature, the Supreme Soviet, and also a President, who would serve as the country's chief executive. Gorbachev did not say whether that job should be filled by the current leader of the Communist Party, namely himself. But he did specify that local party leaders should get the top jobs in the soviets, raising the possibility that he favored a parallel arrangement on the national level.

One of the key questions left unanswered was whether this system would satisfy Gorbachev's insistence on lines of "strict demarcation" between party and government functions. Noting that the proposal called for automatic election of party leaders as heads of the soviets, Leonid Abalkin, director of the Academy of Science's economics institute, pointed out that this was actually a step away from Gorbachev's previous calls for multi-candidate votes. The plan, he said, amounted to a "vote of confidence rather than a vote with many variants." But Gorbachev insisted that the system's provision for secret balloting would offer a genuine choice. If a party candidate were turned down for office in a soviet, he said, then the local party committee would be forced "to draw the necessary conclusions" -- presumably, that the person was not fit for the party office either.

Addressing the principal issues that have arisen in his term of office, Gorbachev candidly admitted that "we could have accomplished far more than we have in these three years in the main perestroika areas." To resolve the chronic difficulty of food shortages, which he termed "the most painful and the most acute problem in the life of our society," Gorbachev called for the introduction of land-leasing agreements that would make agricultural workers feel that they are "true masters on the farm." The Soviet leader stepped up his attacks on the country's economic bureaucracy; he blames its obsession with sheer output for sabotaging his reform program's emphasis on efficiency and product quality. "We do not need millions of tons of steel, millions of $ tons of cement, millions of tons of coal as such," he said. "What we need are tangible end results."

Gorbachev also discussed what is likely to become one of his most difficult problems in the near future: the necessity of raising prices on many consumer products, including meat and bread, which currently soak up wasteful state subsidies. Until these artificially inexpensive goods are subjected to what he delicately called "pricing reform," said Gorbachev, "we shall not be able to create normal relations in the economy and secure a properly grounded assessment of the costs and results of production." The Soviet leader, however, was well aware that announcements of sudden and severe price hikes have proved explosive elsewhere in the East bloc, notably in Poland. Adjustments in the Soviet cost of living, he promised, will be made only after a "thorough nationwide discussion."

Gorbachev demonstrated less patience with the problem of nationalist unrest, which has broken out with violent repercussions in the southern republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. While praising the "growth of ethnic self- awareness," the General Secretary cautioned that "any obsession with national isolation can only lead to economic and cultural impoverishment." Nationalist "collisions," he said, must be settled "within the existing state structure of our union," a reference to the roiling secessionist movement in the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, an area that is geographically part of Azerbaijan but ethnically 75% Armenian.

The Soviet leader invited delegates to use the conference for a freewheeling exercise in "criticism and self-criticism." He did not have to ask twice. As speaker after speaker assumed the podium for an allotted 15 minutes of temporary fame, the strictures and inhibitions of decades of Soviet political life seemed to slip away, at least for the moment. Not that candor has been entirely absent from previous party gatherings, perhaps most memorably when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalinism at the 20th Party Congress in 1956. What made last week's display of political emotion so remarkable is that much of it was shared, via nightly television summaries, with the nation and the world. Many Soviets found the experience difficult to believe. Said one Muscovite, an artist in her 40s: "I am hearing things on television that weeks ago I would never have whispered over the telephone."

Complaints ranged from the mundane to the exotic. One crowd pleaser was Vladimir Kabaidze, 64, general director of a machine-tool plant in the city of Ivanovo. Earthy and outspoken, Kabaidze took pleasure in skewering the ministerial bureaucracy that oversees Soviet industrial enterprises. Kabaidze offered some feline advice: "If a minister can catch mice, feed him. If he can't, don't bother." He also denounced the bloated cadre of "scientific workers" who are designated to carry out state-supported research-and- development projects but actually perform little productive labor. "I recently heard a horrible statistic," he told the conference. "There are supposed to be 900,000 scientific workers in Moscow. What is this supposed to be, a gathering place for wunderkinder?" Baiting bureaucrats is hardly a high-risk enterprise in the Gorbachev era, of course, but Kabaidze's gibes drew appreciative chuckles and applause, even from some of their targets in the audience.

Among ordinary workers, who according to official statistics constituted one-third of the delegates, the most frequent gripe was that perestroika so far has provided few benefits in day-to-day life. Said Veniamin Yarin, a metalworker in the west Siberian city of Nizhni Tagil: "The workers say, 'Where is perestroika when the supply of goods in shops is as poor as ever, sugar is bought with ration cards and there is no meat?' "

Yarin also called for an end to the Soviet tradition of cloaking the individual responsibilities of ruling Politburo members in secrecy. "We don't know the specific matters each Politburo member is personally responsible for," he declared. In fact, last week's conference produced one important new disclosure along those very lines. At a press conference, Byelorussian Party Chief Yefrem Sokolov confirmed earlier rumors that Politburo Member Yakovlev, a strong Gorbachev supporter, has become chief overseer of party ideology, replacing Yegor K. Ligachev, who is thought to be the Soviet leader's major rival.

Another frequently voiced concern was the environment. Rafik Nishanov, the Uzbekistan party chief, complained bitterly about a disastrous drop in the water level of the inland Aral Sea, which has been depleted over the years by efforts to irrigate the arid republics of Central Asia. The chief of a new environmental protection committee, Fyodor Morgun, blamed the "ill-considered drive to build gigantic plants" for a Pandora's box of ecological problems, including air and water pollution.

+ By and large, delegates refrained from discussing Soviet foreign policy. The exception was the eight-year war in Afghanistan, which was criticized as a misguided Brezhnev-era adventure by two speakers, Editor Grigori Baklanov and Economist Yevgeni Primakov. But Gorbachev was applauded when he defended the performance of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The commander of the Soviet forces there, Lieut. General Boris Gromov, told the conference that "we have performed our duty with honor."

A leading Soviet actor, Mikhail Ulyanov (who often plays his eponym, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin), cited a now famous letter, printed earlier this year in the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya, from a Leningrad schoolteacher that criticized glasnost. Ulyanov warned that all too many intellectuals "snapped to attention and waited for the next orders" as a result of its publication, convinced that the period of openness was about to end. Others, unhappy with glasnost, criticized the Soviet press for carrying the campaign too far with its newfound appetite for muckraking. Calling those who produce such fare "princes of extremism," conservative Novelist Yuri Bondarev declared, "Not all newspaper and magazine editors have realized that the immorality of the press cannot teach morality."

At one point the proceedings were interrupted by a spicy dispute involving the weekly magazine Ogonyok, which has emerged as one of the staunchest supporters of glasnost -- and one of the most daring probers of its limits. Shortly before the conference convened, the newspaper had alleged that several unnamed delegates from the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan were guilty of accepting bribes. When the conference's credentials chairman said it would take time to subject the charges to official investigation, there were shouts for Ogonyok Editor Vitali Korotich to substantiate them himself. Korotich gamely came to the podium and explained that he could not name the alleged culprits because their party membership protected them from public prosecution. Then, with a flourish, he turned and handed Gorbachev what he said was his evidence.

Perhaps the best-known political casualty of the Gorbachev era, former Moscow Party Boss Boris Yeltsin, issued a typically brash plea for political rehabilitation. Fired last November for his attacks on fellow Politburo members who showed a lack of enthusiasm for Gorbachev's reforms, Yeltsin portrayed himself as the victim of circumstance. "I believe that my only + mistake was that I chose the wrong time, ((just)) before the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Revolution," said Yeltsin, now a high-ranking construction minister. "I took very much to heart what happened." Showing that he is as combative as ever, Yeltsin tore into the party's Central Committee for publishing the text of its agenda too close to the opening of the 19th All-Union Conference to allow for significant debate.

Yeltsin's tirade did not go unanswered for long. In what amounted to a public airing of a long-simmering Kremlin feud, Ligachev urged the conference to deny Yeltsin rehabilitation because he had failed to renounce his "doubtful and uncomradely methods." Gorbachev sought to put the matter to rest, saying everyone involved in the Yeltsin affair had "learned a lesson."

In his closing address, Gorbachev pronounced the four-day meeting a success and hailed glasnost as "one of the heroes of our conference." He also promised to "bring about a qualitatively new condition in our society and give a human face to socialism" -- the exact phrase used 20 years ago by Czechoslovak Reformer Alexander Dubcek. As Gorbachev joined the delegates in singing verses of the Internationale, he took off his glasses. A pensive, almost weary expression crept across his face, the look of a man who has put one more victory behind him but still has many more battles to face.

With reporting by Ann Blackman and John Kohan/Moscow