Party ehided for not clapping on cue

Press, 27 February 1986, Page 6

Party ehided for not clapping on cue

NZPA-Reuter Moscow

The Soviet elite flew into Moscow by chartered plane and checked into top hotels but their leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, soon cut them down to size with some straight talking yesterday. By chiding them for failing to applaud a key point in his speech, Mr Gorbachev highlighted the limited role that the more than 5000 delegates to the twenty-seventh party congress are actually playing in determining party policy. In theory the congress is the highest party body. It meets every five years to elect a policy-making central committee, which in turn elects a Politburo and leading secretaries to administer the country day-to-day. In practice, a Soviet congress is carefully scripted in advance. Ito themes are already de-' cided by the inner Kremlin leadership in prior discussion.

Open dissent in the party was suppressed in

the 19205, although some public debate surfaced at the twentieth and twentysecond congresses, in 1956 and 1961, under the late Nikita Khrushchev.

When Mr Gorbachev's number two, Yegor Ligachev, opened the congress yesterday and asked for votes on procedural points, not a hadd was raised in objection. Nor would the delegates from the 15 Soviet repub-

lies, from Lithuania in the west to Uzbekistan in central Asia, publicly question the themes laid out by Mr Gorbachev today and to be expanded by the Prime Minister, Mr Nikolai Ryzhkov, on Monday in a speech on the economy.

Powerful regional party officials can articulate their interests behind the scenes but, when the time comes for a big public spectacle such as a congress, all hands are expected to be raised in unison.

The party-controlled press will also fully support the line the leadership takes at the congress. Non-communist foreign reporters are barred from the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, where the meeting is being staged. Mr Gorbachev upbraided the delegates yesterday for failing to applaud him when he criticised poor production practices. His tone was jocular but they immediately burst' into a round of hand-clapping. When he made a

second criticism and again drew applause he departed from his prepared text, looked into the congress hall and said, “Now I see I have twice won your applause by reminding you of the need for change.”

The delegates include senior military officials, trade unionists, scientists, Communist youth leaders, and full-time party bureaucrats, and also agricultural and factory workers, for whom the right to attend the congress can mean much local prestige. All have gathered in a snow-blanketed capital lit by chill sunshine and boasting a profusion of bright red flags and party slogans in streets and parks. One delegate presented to Western reporters last week,-Tatyana Barkanova, is a director of an outlet that produces the latest in fashion for Soviet women. • She said she had studied the style of Mr Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, for ideas on clothes design. Soviet television

dwelt briefly on Mrs Gorbachev yesterday as she sat in the congress audience listening to her husband’s marathon speech. Many delegates are staying at Moscow’s Hotel Rossiya, a show-piece edifice just off Red

Square that is closed to ordinary Soviet people. Mr Gorbachev laid the Brezhnev era to rest with a highly critical survey of the state of the Soviet Union. In an energetic fivehour lecture he set out his blueprint for a renewed, more honest and powerful Communist state. He showed unremitting hostility to the United States. Mr Gorbachev dismissed President Ronald Reagan’s response to the Soviet disarmament plan of January 15, and hinted that the United StatesSoviet summit conference due this year could be postponed unless there was progress first on arms cuts. He did not name Mr Brezhnev, who led the party from 1966 to 1982,

but lambasted the sloth and conservatism he said had pervaded the former leadership. He attacked alcoholism, the existence of unearned incomes, the high rate of divorce, and passive trade union leaders. Mr Gorbachev said he would push ahead with a radical shake-up of industry and agriculture, making more Incisive. use of profit and wage incentives.

He made it clear he would not touch the supremacy of central planning and State control of the economy, a basic tenet of Marxism-Lenin-ism.

Among social reforms he proposed were the promotion of more women to important posts in the party and giving women more time off work to have and care for families.

Mr Gorbachev also said that Government was too centralised. Proposals were being drawn up to increase the autonomy of local councils and make them more democratic.

His criticisms of Soviet failings were mild compared with his savaging of the West. Calling the United States “the metropolitan centre of imperialism,” he painted an unyielding picture of an aggressive, exploitative, militarist West, and peaceful, co-operative communist countries.

Moscow would persevere with its latest disarmament proposals, which provide for the elimination of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. He said they were “the central direction of our foreign policy for the coming years”. Mr Reagan’s counterproposal, for the elimination of medium-range missiles within three years, had not coritained any “serious proposals” for reducing.the nuclear threat, he said. Mr Gorbachev told Western Communist Party leaders, among foreign delegations at the Congress, that Moscow respected their independence and right to hold different views.