Soviet Union The First Hurrah

By JAMES O. JACKSON

As Ronald Reagan and other recent Western visitors to Moscow have noticed, Mikhail Gorbachev has achieved something that only three years ago would have seemed impossible. He has made the Soviet Union appear almost normal, a place with problems and foibles much like any other nation, a country that has ethnic protests, rock concerts, train wrecks, church services, strikes, scandals and beauty contests, not to mention pizza, pollution, late-night television talk shows and a First Lady. After the congenial Reagan-Gorbachev summit, the country paused for the millennium celebrations of the Russian Orthodox Church. Unthinkable under the old order.

Now Gorbachev is giving the Soviet Union yet another new taste: a political convention. Next week's 19th All-Union Communist Party Conference is developing into something almost Western in tone: a genuine political meeting, complete with delegate fights, a sense of spontaneity and a platform ringing with promises of free speech and untapped telephones.

More than 5,000 members will participate in the June 28 gathering, the first irregular party conference since 1941. Many of the sessions will be broadcast live on television, and newspapers will reprint texts of speeches and delegate interviews. A press center is being established to provide Soviet and foreign journalists with daily briefings, access to high-level party officials, and meetings with key Gorbachev advisers.

The event has aroused genuine political passion among ordinary Soviets, for many a first in their lifetime. Soviet journalists have turned into political reporters, and ordinary citizens are joining with zest in the preparations for the conference. Every day the newspapers are filled with stories of rigged delegate elections and commentaries on the pros and cons of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). In a round-table debate last week sponsored by the Novosti press agency, two delegates fiercely disputed whether a guarantee of "freedom of demonstrations" should be approved at the conference. "Look what happens in the West!" one shouted. Exclaimed the other: "But it is necessary for democratization!" Not since the early 1920s had Soviet Communists disagreed so publicly on so contentious an issue. There was even talk of a party for non-Communists who support perestroika, to be called the Union of Fighters for Perestroika. Vladimir Kluyev, party secretary for Moscow's Lenin District, was asked if such a party might be formed. "A dialogue is going on," he replied. "New proposals are coming in and we are discussing them all together."

Like many of Gorbachev's ideas, the notion of convening a special conference is traceable to the founder of Russian Communism, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In the early days of Soviet power, such extraordinary sessions, held between regular quinquennial party congresses, were convened to deal with emergencies, major and minor. The practice fell into disuse under Joseph Stalin's dictatorship, although it was Stalin who called the last one, in 1941, to rally the party and the country against the German invasion. Gorbachev has revived the practice in hopes that it will give impetus to his reforms and provide him with a protective mandate for his program.

Gorbachev has already made startling progress by putting most of the country's industry on a self-financing system and encouraging private initiative in cooperative and individual enterprises. But the reform process has run up against bureaucratic resistance and opposition from traditional Communists, who see the profit motive as sinful backsliding into the evils of capitalism. A firm endorsement by the party conference will help break the bureaucratic backlog as well as reassure those who take their Marxism-Leninism too seriously.

During the four days of meetings in the Kremlin's steel-and-glass Palace of Congresses, delegates are to debate the future of Gorbachev's policies and, hence, perhaps of the General Secretary himself. The widespread expectation is that the conference will be far livelier than the set-piece meetings typical of East bloc politics. That prediction is buttressed by the presence among the delegations of fiery and independent-minded public figures. These include Boris Yeltsin, whom Gorbachev ousted late last year as Moscow party leader, apparently for being a bit too outspoken in favor of perestroika. Yeltsin was nevertheless elected a delegate from a remote district on the Finnish border.

Soviet intellectuals are hoping for short, sharp debate at the conference rather than an interminable series of droning speeches. They anticipate secret ballots of uncertain outcome, not the usual unanimous show of party cards. Many delegates are convinced that the conference will decide not only the future of perestroika but also the very course of world Communism. "If conservative forces manage to cut short our revolutionary perestroika and throw us backward, it would mean the moral death and destruction of our party, the party of Lenin," wrote Playwright Alexander Gelman, a Gorbachev supporter. If the conference fails, Gelman warned, "society would be led down the ((democratic)) path not by our party but by some other political force, which would emerge from the people in the whirlwind of crisis."

Gelman's strong words reflect Gorbachev's own analysis of what the General Secretary has called a pre-crisis situation that must be resolved by conference support for his policies. He has spoken repeatedly of a vaguely defined but supposedly powerful "opposition," of "antagonists" determined to "put a brake on perestroika." Addressing Soviet media officials last month, he warned, "Our antagonists are making their own plans and calculations" in the choice of delegates to the conference. "Our position is that ardent supporters of perestroika, active Communists, should be chosen as delegates . . . There must be no more quotas, as was the case in the past, specifying how many factory workers and farmers and how many women are to be chosen."

With all the talk of opposition, a relatively new word in Soviet politics, the conference is seen as a heavyweight contest: Reformer Gorbachev in one corner, bureaucratic conservatism in the other. "It is a game of perceptions," says a Western diplomat in Moscow. "If afterward the perception is that the conservatives have scored some points, it will be a setback for Gorbachev. If the perception is that perestroika is irreversible, a lot of fence sitters will join Gorbachev's bandwagon."

The analyst's choice of language reflects the degree to which Gorbachev has adapted Western-style political techniques to Soviet politics and how he has applied them to the organization of the conference. Perhaps surprisingly for a man who was born in the closed society of Stalin and rose to prominence in the closed-minded society of Leonid Brezhnev, Gorbachev knows about the straw man, the trial balloon and the bandwagon effect, and has used them in a subtle and effective campaign to make sure that he can win next week's game of perceptions.

His straw men are the "oppositionists" he so often criticizes. Whether they actually exist or are merely the creations of a canny political illusionist, they are effective in winning him support. They inspire perestroika's enthusiasts to greater effort and at the same time put pressure on nervous provincial leaders who want to avoid falling into the dread category of opposition.

Gorbachev floated a variety of trial balloons before the conference, such as the notion that party officials should be limited to two five-year terms in office. At his first mention of that idea last year, he was careful not to include the powerful Central Committee or Politburo in the suggestion. But the & concept caught on and is now part of the reform proposals to be aired at the meeting. Gorbachev himself, as well as all Central Committee and Politburo members, would presumably be subject to the two-term limit, though there is a controversial loophole: officeholders may win a third term if they receive three-fourths of the vote in the party committee concerned, a relatively easy task in a country with a tradition of 99.9% majorities in one-candidate elections.

The bandwagon Gorbachev tows to the conference is crowded. Part of his political success lies in the fact that he has made room for nearly everybody, from the redoubtable dissident Andrei Sakharov to Russian Orthodox priests to downtrodden workingwomen. Perhaps the only major category of citizenry not invited aboard consists of habitual tipplers, who have been driven to moonshine, cologne cocktails and sullen anger over Gorbachev's anti-alcoholism campaign.

Even the suspicious West will be an interested spectator as the conference debates a set of ten "theses" that were approved last month by the Central Committee. On the basis of the debate, the conference will pass a series of resolutions, probably five in all, dealing with such issues as legal reform, nationalities and a general political resolution. They will then become official party policy. The theses include a manifesto of freedoms that suggests a cross between the U.S. Bill of Rights and the "Socialism with a human face" of Czechoslovakia's Alexander Dubcek, which was crushed by Soviet tanks in 1968. The state, according to the document, should provide "material and juridical conditions for the exercise of constitutional freedoms (freedom of speech, the press, conscience, assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations, etc.). And firmer guarantees of personal rights, such as the inviolability of the person and the home, and privacy of correspondence and telephone conversations." Encouraging as such language may be, most of those rights are already enshrined in the Soviet constitution. By mentioning them in the theses, the party is admitting that the freedoms have not been protected in the past and probably not in the present.

Yet the theses, as well as the advance buildup for the conference, seem to demonstrate a willingness to open up a byzantine political system. One of the most unusual aspects of the party-conference preparations -- a credit to both glasnost and Gorbachev's adroitness -- is that Soviet citizens have been able to read about delegate fights in the press. Pravda told of a meeting at an 8,000-seat soccer stadium in the west Siberian city of Omsk at which enraged rank-and-file members harangued party bosses because a final delegate list did not include those who had received the most votes in the secret ballot. "Party leaders who came to the meeting . . . went through some unpleasant moments," Pravda reported. In another case, the weekly magazine Ogonyok delighted its readers with a scathing satire on the back-room politics surrounding the selection of the archconservative Anatoli Ivanov, editor of the youth journal Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard). Seasoned Communist politicians have found themselves forced to campaign for delegate seats, most for the first time in their careers. "It was exhausting," said Vladimir Kluyev, who won a place on the delegation from Moscow's Lenin District. "A difficult process."

Notwithstanding his reformist image, Gorbachev in the end may find he prefers the Kluyevs of conventional party practice over more fiery pro- perestroika candidates. At a meeting attended by Gorbachev to choose Moscow's delegation two weeks ago, Ivanov was confirmed as a delegate despite the Ogonyok attack, while the passionate playwright Gelman was not. There and elsewhere Gorbachev has shown a well-tuned instinct for the safe middle ground. When he dumped Yeltsin, the pro-perestroika Moscow party boss, from the Politburo earlier this year, Gorbachev was protecting one flank. When he later chastised Yegor Ligachev, a Politburo member regarded as the country's leading conservative, Gorbachev was guarding the other flank. "Left-wing phrasemaking is the wrong medicine," Gorbachev said during the meeting to select Moscow's conference delegation. But in the same speech he blamed "inertia and old-style methods of management through command and pressure" for failures in the economy. In other words, the fault lay with both sides, and he was a clear-eyed St. George prepared to slay the dragons of right and left. Asked Gorbachev: "What should we do in the face of this situation? Above all, we should not panic and should not quiver and tremble. In this cause, comrades, too much emotion is what we do not need."

Gorbachev may have had in mind the volatile situation in the southern republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, which may represent a serious threat to his policies and his position. More than 35 people have been killed in four months of demonstrations and occasional violence over the status of Nagorno- Karabakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. Last week the issue took a surprising turn, when the Armenian supreme soviet, or parliament, voted in favor of annexing Nagorno-Karabakh, contradicting the position taken in March by Moscow party leaders. The vote also put the Armenian leaders in conflict with their counterparts in Azerbaijan, who had decided earlier in the week not to relinquish control of Nagorno-Karabakh. It was the first time in Soviet history that one of the 15 constituent republics had so directly opposed either Moscow leadership or a sister republic. That issue and other disruptive nationality problems will be discussed at length at the party conference. One possible compromise solution would be to give Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous status, making it independent of both Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Although the turmoil is neither anti-Soviet nor anti-Communist, it could threaten Gorbachev's position if it remains unresolved. "What is happening around Nagorno-Karabakh is a blow to perestroika, possibly the most serious blow in recent times," warned the youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. "This is a challenge to the ideals of glasnost, a chance for conservatives to strengthen their point of view."

Troublesome as they may be, the Armenian protests -- and Moscow's restraint in dealing with them -- are part of what makes the Soviet Union look less formidable these days. A truly evil empire would have put down the protests with tanks, troops and mass arrests. Shared problems build trust.

So do shared tastes, good and bad. Thus when staid comrades bent to the lighthearted task of choosing 16-year-old Maria Kalinina in a bathing suit as Miss Moscow last week, the world could afford to relax a little. It will relax still more if next week's party conference keeps its promise of liberalizing Soviet society -- even if delegates do not snake-dance down the aisles in funny hats amid balloons and confetti, as their American counterparts will be doing later this summer in Atlanta and New Orleans.

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DESCRIPTION: Changes in Soviet policy advocated by Mikhail Gorbachev.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Moscow