Hurt feelings of that sort could help to determine whether President Gorbachev will survive next week as leader of the Soviet Communist Party. More than anything else, the party faithful blame Gorbachev for curbing their power to run the country. Now some see a chance to get rid of him at a Party Congress opening next Monday. The 4,000 delegates will elect the party leader for the next five years. Many conservatives want a new leader to take charge, revitalize the party and whittle Gorbachev’s presidential powers down to ceremonial handshakes. They may never get a better chance; for hard-liners, the congress could be a last hurrah.
Gorbachev is likely to run again and win; if he fails, the last hurrah could be his. He has broken the party’s monopoly on power at the national level, but the transition to a strong presidency is far from complete. The party is still a formidable force. The Army and the KGB secret police, for example, remain instruments of the party, not the president. The 16-member presidential council still lacks staff to make sure its decisions get implemented across the country. And on local and regional levels, the party continues to run everything from factories to trade unions to newspapers. Until Gorbachev changes all that, he cannot give up the party leadership without endangering his reforms. In electing a leader, says Nikolai Shishlin, a party spokesman, “this congress will decide the future of perestroika. "
Gorbachev hopes to put the fix in early. He is expected to meet this Saturday with some 400 senior delegates, who are supposed to tell the others how to vote the usual Soviet way of doing business. But now, thanks to Gorbachev’s democratic reforms, delegates tend to ignore instructions. That happened in May, when parliamentary deputies defied Gorbachev and elected his radical rival, Boris Yeltsin, as president of the Russian Federation, the largest Soviet republic. “We had a 3-to-1 majority against Yeltsin, but it collapsed in two days,” a Gorbachev aide recalls. “That makes the congress unpredictable.”
Damage control: Another complication is the possibility of a walkout by progressives, conservatives or both. “A split in the party is inevitable,” Georgi Shakhnazarov, a personal adviser to Gorbachev, told NEWSWEEK. The most important thing is to keep it limited.” Gorbachev’s damage control will probably work. Although the radical reform wing, Democratic Platform, threatens to split offend form a social democratic party, its walkout won’t take more than 100 delegates. On the stronger conservative side, the Marxist Platform wants a return to traditional party values but makes no threat to leave. There are real incentives to stay in the party, including jobs, cars, housing and other perks.
With 19 million members, the party remains the dominant political force in the country, even though it now loses 250,000 members a year because of sagging prestige. Gorbachev’s game plan at the congress is to retain the party leadership, impose a more progressive Central Committee, and use it to push his reforms. He may have to face one or more rivals in the election for general secretary, and his winning margin could be embarrassingly small. But he remains the favorite, because as of last week there were no other declared contenders. Even if a rival emerges–such as Yeltsin or Ivan Polozkov, the conservative leader of the new Russian Communist Party–only Gorbachev is likely to get enough votes from both the reform and orthodox factions to win. “He is still the most popular leader,” says Shakhnazarov. “Our polls show he has 60 percent support.”
In what is still a one-party state, that’s not a strong showing. Last week Gorbachev came under fire at a congress of the Russian Communist Party, a dress rehearsal that will provide 58 percent of the delegates to the Soviet Party Congress. Progressives and conservatives denounced Gorbachev equally for mismanaging economic reform, among other things. Clearly rattled, Gorbachev threatened to quit, a ploy he has used before. “Tomorrow, or in 10 or 12 days’ time, there could be another general secretary,” he said. This time, Yegor Ligachev, his most prominent conservative critic, suggested that Gorbachev should indeed give up his leadership of the party if he wants to remain president. “One cannot head the party without dedicating all one’s time to it,” said Ligachev.
Gorbachev aides later denied that he would soon resign as general secretary. “At this particular point, he has to be leader of the party,” says Shishlin. “That doesn’t mean he will stay forever.” Even some of Gorbachev’s critics are loath to vote against him. “I disagree with Gorbachev sometimes,” says liberal editor Vitaly Korotich, “but I believe it is necessary to support him, because we have no one better.” If, as most experts expect, Gorbachev wins another five years at the helm, he will try to complete his transformation of the party. Its remaining powers to frustrate him will be trimmed, and new parties will be allowed to form and contest elections. Only then will the party’s party be truly over.
