Purging of Russia’s old guard continues

Press, 16 January 1986, Page 17

Purging of Russia’s old guard continues

From

MARK FRANKLAND

in London.

Mikhail Gorbachev is on target with his plan to put a new Soviet leadership in place at the Communist Party Congress in February. Victor Grishin, one of the three longest-serving full members of the Politburo, has been pensioned off after 18 years as Party boss of Moscow and is expected also tto lose his Politburo seat when the Party Central Committee next meets. Grishin was preceded into retirement by the Party leaders of three of the five Soviet Central Asian republics — Kirgizia, Tadzhikistan, and Turkmenia. The Communist Party is enter-

ing the last stages of a re-election campaign that began in the autumn at the lowest levels and reaches its climax at the February Congress. Gorbachev has insisted that these election meetings should be outspoken and merciless towards all shortcomings. He has nevertheless allowed Grishin and other leaders on his “black list” to retire rather than be shamingly criticised and thrown out at an election meeting.

The sacking of Grishin has been a textbook case of Kremlin power politics. Gorbachev seems to regard him as a typically complacent member of the old guard who did little to prevent the country sinking

into its present economic difficulties. Grishin’s was the style of the bland machine politician who settles problems behind closed doors — the antithesis of Gorbachev’s. Some Soviet sources insist Grishin led a last-minute campaign to prevent Gorbachev’s election as Party leader, though they cannot substantiate it.

Even with these weighty reasons for sacking Grishin, Gorbachev had to move cautiously. The first

whispering campaign against him began under Andropov and its themes — corruption, abuse of power, favouritism — were repeated last year. Grishin’s family has been dragged in, too.. The gossip was widely assumed to be officially inspired. Press stories about a Moscow housing scandal certainly were. The purpose was to discourage Grishin, his friends, and the men he had put in place during his long

rule in Moscow, from resisting to the end, although the signs are that they put up a fight. Now that Grishin has gone from Moscow, a shake-up of lower Party officials can be expected. Until now Grishin had protected them just as the former premier, Tikhonov, protected his old colleagues in the Government up to his retirement in September. The new Moscow Party boss, Boris Yeltsin, is a typical party apparatchik whose career has been made in the Urals industrial centre of Sverdlovsk. He appears, though, to take easily to the. Gorbachev style.

Last month, in his capacity as Central Committee secretary (appointed only last July), he delivered a punchy speech in Tashkent ticking off a long list of faults to be found in the Uzbekistan capital. The Moscow establishment must now expect a tongue-lashing from its new master. The Gorbachev style demands no less. But the crab-like manner in which Victor Grishin was prised out of the Soviet capital suggests there is a limit to the publicity Gorbachev wants, or dares, to give to the incompetence and misdeeds of the Brezhnev generation. Copyright — London Observer