Soviet Union It's Lonely Up

By JOHN KOHAN MOSCOW

The first sign of trouble came barely five minutes after Mikhail Gorbachev opened the 28th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party last week. A delegate from the far eastern region of Magadan proposed an unprecedented resolution, calling for nothing less than the resignation of the entire Central Committee and its ruling Politburo. The daring delegate also wanted the party leadership to tell the 4,657 delegates why so little had been accomplished since the last party Congress, in February 1986, which had launched Gorbachev's ambitious -- and increasingly beleaguered -- program of perestroika to transform the Soviet Union.

Presiding alone amid dozens of empty chairs on the two-tier tribunal, Gorbachev managed to sidestep that first frontal attack. But there was plenty more Politburo bashing to come in the opening week of the ten-day conclave. Progressives and conservatives argued bitterly over who was responsible for the party's fading power. Nine members of the twelve-member council were forced to give accounts of themselves, and the assembly was not about to let them get away with long-winded, cliche-laden speeches. Where past Kremlin meetings greeted boiler-plate presentations with perfunctory outbursts of applause, this one constantly interrupted party ideologist Vadim Medvedev's lackluster presentation with insolent rhythmic clapping. When chief economist Leonid Abalkin warned delegates that the socialist idea had begun to lose its popular appeal and the only way to save it was to switch to a market economy, he was greeted with derision. The warmest ovation was saved for conservative hero Yegor Ligachev, who fired up the audience with an attack on "thoughtless radicalism."

Few events on the calendar of perestroika had been invested with so much importance as the 28th Congress. It was supposed to mark the long-awaited - turning point, when reformers would finally seize control of party power from entrenched bureaucrats and release the brakes on radical change. Gorbachev would quit straddling the widening gap between the party's fractious wings and align himself once and for all with democratic liberals. There was also speculation that he might step down as General Secretary and devote full attention to his new presidential office, sealing the shift of power away from the party to the state.

None of that happened. Instead, it appeared that Gorbachev would continue to preside over the party -- but one shifting to the right under his feet. A dramatic split, with the progressives breaking away to found an opposition party of their own, seemed to have been postponed, although not ruled out altogether.

The party's rightward slide was signaled three weeks ago when Russian Communists chose Ivan Polozkov, the hard-line party boss of the southern Krasnodar region, as their standard bearer. The right-wing political coup appeared to have caught Russian party reformers by surprise. They had clearly underestimated the depth of resentment in local party organizations with everything from political change in Eastern Europe to schemes for converting military assembly lines to the production of consumer goods.

At the Congress last week, the sniping from the right swelled with renewed vigor. Delegate after delegate -- provincial-party leaders, factory managers, defense-industry workers and collective-farm chairmen -- rose to lash out at the rapid decline of party prestige and influence. Anatoli Porutchikov, a state-farm director from central Russia, sneered at party leftists. "Each peasant feeds 17 of those who walk around with slogans and blame the party for everything," he said. Country folk were smart enough to recognize "wolves in sheep's clothing." In one especially sharp attack, Major General Ivan Mikulin assailed the leadership for abandoning its hold on Eastern Europe, an increasingly volatile issue among military leaders and party hard-liners.

If Gorbachev was stung by the venom from the right, he gave no sign. He told the delegates that it was "simply nonsense" to pin all the blame for the country's economic and social woes on perestroika and ignore the "extremely grim legacy" inherited from the past. Explained Gorbachev: "We are in a transitional period, in which the dismantling of the old system -- and still less the building of the new one -- has not been completed." If perestroika did not succeed in reviving the economy within two years, he said, the leadership would quit "of its own accord." He urged the delegates not to be deceived by those who justified their conservative stance "under the pretext of promoting the people's interests, the purity of ideological principles." The greatest danger to perestroika, Gorbachev warned, was a split among "democratic forces."

For all its rhetoric, the rebellious right wing seemed unwilling to challenge Gorbachev for the General Secretary's post. Many disgruntled delegates ended their denunciations of the party leadership with ringing endorsements of Gorbachev himself. Nonetheless, the conservatives seemed determined to chip away at radical planks in the party program. They overrode Gorbachev's choice for chairman of the commission on agricultural policy and named Ligachev instead. Hard-liner Polozkov took charge of the commission on "party renewal." When it became clear that the anti-Kremlin mood would keep Gorbachev ally Georgi Razumovsky from heading the all-important group drafting new party rules, Gorbachev had to assume the job himself. The feisty assembly even voted to drop the words "transition to a market economy" from a commission title in favor of the vaguer "policies for implementing economic reform."

Politicking behind the scenes, Gorbachev appeared to have won sufficient pledges to remain the party's General Secretary. But he may find himself isolated within a new, more conservative leadership elected at the Congress. The two most prominent Politburo liberals dropped hints last week that they wanted out. Alexander Yakovlev, viewed by many as the intellectual architect of reform, told the assembly that "this will be the last Congress for me." Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze noted that "a Minister need not be a member of the Politburo." Both seem more interested in devoting their energies to Gorbachev's Presidential Council, which has eclipsed the once dominant Politburo in importance. Younger voices in support of Gorbachev's brand of reform might yet be heard, but they seem to have been intimidated by the pressure tactics of the conservative claque.

A coalition of 200 leftist delegates from radical reformist groups like the Democratic Platform, Marxist Platform and Young Communists, all of which remain in the party, sought to forge a Democratic Unity bloc. But their effort to challenge conservatives from within seemed doomed to failure. In the four months since the Communist Party renounced its monopoly on power, many leading radicals such as historian Yuri Afanasyev and worker activist Nikolai Travkin have simply quit the party. A further wave of defections is bound to follow if the rightists carry the day at the Congress. If the losses seriously erode the party's left wing, the monolithic organization is less likely than ever to split in two.

The would-be reformers may find even less to unite them once they are out of the party fold. A sign held above a crowd of 3,000 gathered for an anti- Communist rally outside Gorky Park last week aptly expressed the problem blocking the creation of a serious opposition movement: DEMOCRATS, UNITE! YOU CAN ARGUE THINGS OUT LATER. Even if all the political splinter groups could patch up their differences, they must still do battle with an entrenched party that is not about to yield the privileges acquired over seven decades, whether it be possession of prime real estate across the country, control of the mass media or power over an extensive network of party organizations stretching through every Soviet institution. The growing movement to depoliticize the security forces by eliminating the party cells inside the army, the police and the KGB, for example, has met fierce resistance from top generals and officers, who insist that the structures are essential to national stability.

One Central Committee member who leftists have been hoping might come to their rescue did not even bother to attend all the early days of debate at the Congress. Boris Yeltsin preferred to preside over the Russian Republic's supreme soviet. Amid growing calls for a Gorbachev-Yeltsin center-left coalition to save perestroika, the ex-Politburo member has refused to say just what he will do if the party rushes rightward. Yeltsin could choose an option that Gorbachev has so far rejected: withdraw from the political fray to become a nonpartisan supporter of reform.

When Yeltsin finally did appear at the Palace of Congresses, he put on display the fervid public indignation that has made him the black sheep of the party. He warned traditionalists that the price of their intransigence would be nationalization of party property -- and worse. "An effort might be made," said Yeltsin, "to prosecute party leaders at every level for the damage they personally have inflicted on the party and the people." The heavily conservative delegates gave him only a smattering of applause.

If Gorbachev hopes to keep his reforms -- and his political fortunes -- on track, he might yet have to cut his ties with the party and shift his power base to the presidency. So much has transpired in the Soviet Union in the four years since the last Congress that the debate today is no longer about the direction of party policy but about the very future of the party.

But for many Soviets, the slugfest in the Congress seems irritatingly irrelevant at a time when store shelves are empty and the nation's coal miners have given notice that they intend to stage a political strike this week. For them, reform has not come fast enough, and they only want more. As Politburo liberal Yakovlev told the assembly, the changes in Soviet society were already "irreversible" and would proceed "with the party or without it." The question that Gorbachev has to decide is whether he dares risk his political future to stay behind "with the party."

With reporting by Paul Hofheinz/Moscow