TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/88/88capsov.3

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                                                          July 11, 1988

SOVIET UNION

More Than Talk


Gorbachev's gabfest becomes an electrifying gripe session--and
then some


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 Poltiburo 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. Earthly 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 Pandor'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 Poltiburo 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 victory behind him
but still has many more battles to face.

--By William R. Doerner.  Reported by Ann Blackman and John
Kohan/Moscow


--------------------------------------------------------- IN
MOSCOW'S PALACE OF CONGRESSES, NEARLY 5,000 DELEGATES gathered
to hear more than 70 speeches, including three by Mikhail
Gorbachev. Excerpts from his keynote address:

"I would like to dwell particularly on the political freedoms
that enable a person to express his opinion on any matter.
Comrades, what we are talking about is a new role of public
opinion in the country. And there is no need to fear the novel,
unconventional character of some opinions, there is no need to
overreact and lapse into extremes at every turn of the debates."

"For much too long, uniformity, monotonous conformity and
mediocrity were made out to be the hallmarks of progress. We
still lack the custom to engage in debate,...to practice free
competition."

"Apart from undeniable gains, there still are daily cares
largely preventing women from enjoying their rights fully."

"The Soviet people want a clear perspective...full-blooded and
unconditional democracy. Glasnost in all things, big and
small. Respect for hard work, and talk, and faithful service for
the cause and the good of society. We need no social utopias."


--------------------------------------------------------- Making
of the President

Among the more striking ideas set forth by Mikhail Gorbachev
last week was one for a radical restructuring of the Soviet
government. As envisioned by the General Secretary, the present
system would be supplanted by bodies and offices somewhat more
Western in style.

THE OLD SYSTEM...

President of the Presidium

Nominally head of state, the President presides over the
Supreme Soviet and performs largely ceremonial duties.

WOULD BE REPLACED BY...

President of the Supreme Soviet

This U.S.-style executive would conduct foreign and defense
policy and be elected by secret ballot of the new Congress.

THE OLD SYSTEM...

Presidium of the Supreme Soviet

Its 39 members oversee ministries and issue laws, but like the
President, the Presidium is answerable to the party.

WOULD BE REPLACED BY...

Presidium of the Supreme Soviet

Its 17 Vice Presidents would assist the President and oversee
the work of committees of the new Supreme Soviet.

THE OLD SYSTEM...

Supreme Soviet

Technically the highest organ of state authority, this
1,500-member legislature is actually just a rubber stamp for the
Presidium's decisions.

WOULD BE REPLACED BY...

Supreme Soviet

A smaller, two-chamber parliament with real legislative duties,
it would sit year-round to decide specific matters and be
answerable to the new Congress.

Congress of the People's Deputies

A 2,250-member forum, it would meet annually to decide major
policy issues and elect the President and the Supreme Soviet.

THE OLD SYSTEM...

Local Soviets

These councils supervise departments in their areas but are
bound by local party directives.

WOULD BE REPLACED BY...

Local Soviets

The councils, which would have enhanced authority to manage
economic enterprises in their area, would be presided over by
the party's regional secretaries.