Soviet Union Cleaning Up the Confetti

By William R. Doerner

Like the host of any successful bash that at times came close to getting out of hand, the Soviet Union spent last week dealing with the confetti -- literal and symbolic -- generated by its just ended 19th All-Union Communist Party Conference. Moscow street workers pulled down the festive red bunting and banners that had decorated the Soviet capital during the conference's four days of extraordinarily open debates and disputes. More substantively, General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev convened the 13 voting members of the ruling Politburo, who in turn scheduled a plenum of the 307-member policymaking Central Committee for later this month. Its purpose, declared the Politburo, would be "to discuss questions concerning the practical realizations of measures noted in the conference documents."

One sign of the intense popular interest in the conference came with the publication of its six final resolutions in Pravda, which caused a run on copies of the party daily in Moscow. The resolutions contained virtually all the political reforms Gorbachev had sought, including the creation of a stronger President (probably himself), a limit of two consecutive five-year terms for party and state officials, an invigorated system of soviets (local councils) as the basic units of local government, and a greater separation of party and state. Somewhat confusingly, the resolutions call for local party first secretaries to be nominated as chairmen of the soviets in most cases, a much debated provision that Gorbachev backed.

The cautiously favorable reaction to the conference in the West tended to view the General Secretary as the event's big winner. "Gorbachev has proved to be an outstanding political tactician," said Eberhard Schulz, a specialist on Soviet affairs at West Germany's Foreign Policy Research Institute. "When it became evident in January 1987 that the Central Committee would not accept some of his changes, he stepped back and organized a party conference to get them through." Even so, most analysts warned that Gorbachev's success in winning institutional reform only underscored the largely unmet challenges of economic perestroika (restructuring). The conference featured several speeches by delegates complaining about the inadequacy of food supplies and the poor quality of housing under the present system.

The resolution dealing with ethnic rivalries turned out to be one of the conference's more vaguely worded statements. It called for both "greater independence" for regions and republics and for a strengthening of "our multinational state." That clearly did not go far enough to satisfy nationalists in Armenia, who have been agitating for months for the annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian enclave in the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan. The conference had hardly ended when activists in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, resumed demonstrations that have occurred sporadically since last February. Last week a crowd of nearly 2,000 massed at the city's airport, paralyzing the facility and causing the cancellation of 60 flights. In clashes with police, 36 of the protesters were injured.

The Central Committee meeting later this month may set a formal schedule for putting into effect the conference reforms. Gorbachev has suggested that voters will choose a new 2,250-member Congress of People's Deputies as early as next April. Elections for local and regional legislatures will probably be held in late 1989. But Gorbachev clearly will not sit idle in the interim. Last week a U.S. State Department official suggested that a grand gesture may be forthcoming from Moscow in the near future: the unilateral withdrawal of the 65,000 Soviet troops stationed in Hungary.

With reporting by John Kohan/Moscow