Gorbachev wants system changed

Press, 20 February 1988, Page 13

Gorbachev wants system changed

NZPA-Reuter Moscow The Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, said yesterday that the Soviet political system needed an overhaul to break with past errors and give it a new dynamism.

However, he told a meeting of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee that there would be no retreat from Marxism-Leninism, which has long been the official Soviet creed. “It is necessary to overhaul the political system in the country,” the official Tass news agency quoted him as telling the meeting in a wide-ranging speech.

He also told the some 300 senior Party officials from all over the Soviet Union: “We are not retreating even one step from socialism, from Marxism-Leninism, from everything that has been gained and created by the people.”

Mr Gorbachev said the principles under which Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party came to power in 1917 had not been realised earlier in building a new social system. Progress had been hampered “by the cult of personality, the system of management by command and administration that formed in the 19305,” he said.

Other obstacles had been “bureaucratic, dogmatic and voluntaristic aberrations and arbitrariness” and stagnation in the 1970 s and early 1980 s. This phrasing is used by Soviet officials to describe first the rule of Josef Stalin from the mid-1920s until 1953, then of Nikita Khrushchev from 1953 to 1964, and of Leonid Brezhnev from 1964 to 1982.

“These phenomena and what has remained of them and come down to the present should become things of the past,” Mr Gorbachev said. Mr Gorbachev, aged 56,

who has launched a wideranging “perestroika” reform drive in Soviet economic and social life since he was ' elected Party chief in March, 1985, acknowledged that there was some concern in the country over possible ideological erosion. “There is confusion in the minds of some people: are we not retreating from socialist positions especially when we introduce new, unaccustomed forms of economic management and social life?” he said.

In a clear reference to conservative critics of the reforms, he said there had emerged “defenders of socialism and mourners for Marxism-Leninism who believe both are under threat.” In fact, he said, “we are striving in the present conditions to revive the Leninist look of our new system, to rid it of accumulated deformations, of everything that shackled society and prevented it from realising the potential of socialism in full measure.”