Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev dealt a fatal blow to the Communist Party Saturday, resigning as its head and calling on its leaders to dismantle the key committee of the vast organization that has ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for 74 years.
In a stunning move, Gorbachev bowed to the democratic reformers who are attacking the party at all levels across the nation of 15 republics.
Gorbachev said he took the steps after he discovered the extent of the party`s involvement in the coup that briefly removed him from power last week. But the moves also seemed designed to salvage what remains of his political career.
Although Gorbachev resigned as the head of the Communist Party, he remains the president of the Soviet Union. By most accounts, it would have been almost impossible for Gorbachev to survive politically without disowning the party that betrayed him.
Gorbachev`s moves against the party were sweeping. He stripped the once-unassailable institution of its political control over the armed forces and the KGB and passed control of its property to the Soviet parliament.
In a decree read on the evening television news program ”Vremya,” the Soviet president said the party`s powerful Central Committee, which sets policy and controls all staff appointments, should be disbanded.
In a separate step, Gorbachev ordered the policy council of the government, the Cabinet of Ministers, to resign.
He named a new committee composed of reformers who seem inclined to pursue radical new economic measures that would drive the Soviet Union toward a more democratic political and economic system.
The new committee was the result of an agreement between Gorbachev and Boris Yelstin, the reformist president of the Russian Republic and now the most powerful politician in the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev did not abolish the party, the single political institution that welded together a land populated by more than 100 ethnic groups, and he remained a member of the organization.
But by demanding its leadership disband, by handing its powers, property and material wealth to reformers, and by driving it from all government organizations, he crippled the party, leaving it to fend for itself in the scramble for power now under way in the Soviet Union.
The moves cleared the way for the burgeoning democratic parties, until now incapable of opposing the wealthy and all-powerful Communist Party, to compete equally.
Just two days ago, before he had been given access to material detailing the role the party played in his ouster, Gorbachev had defended the institution as flawed but fixable.
But Saturday he abandoned hope of reforming it.
”The secretariat and the Politburo of the Communist Party did not oppose the coup d`etat,” Gorbachev said in his statement. ” . . . I do not consider it possible to continue to carry out the functions of the general secretary.”
Stripped of the assets-the jobs, money, cars, country homes, apartments and special food shops-that allowed it to buy loyalty with favors and privilege, the party is almost certain to lose even more members. A quarter of its 18 million faithful have quit in the last 1 1/2 years.
The party`s demise sent shock waves from the independence-minded Baltic states to the vast expanse of the Russian Republic, from the seaside U.S. presidential compound in Maine to capitals around the globe.
President Bush was cautious in his optimism Saturday after learning of Gorbachev`s resignation from the party leadership.
”We welcome this news as another step forward in the reform process,”
the White House statement said.
The generation of pro-democracy reformers seizing the levers of power in the Soviet Union is simultaneously unleashing a wave of euphoria and an air of uncertainty.
The USSR retains one of the most powerful nuclear arsenals on earth, a vast army and 15 republics that are quickly unraveling under a wave of separatism. But the pro-democracy reformers are seizing power in a political vacuum.
No one knows yet whether the structure that the reformers erect in place of the party will be effective. Much of the outcome will depend on the interplay between Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
For his part, Yeltsin has embraced the 500-day reform plan rejected by Gorbachev, and Gorbachev may reconsider his rejection, particularly in the wake of Yeltsin`s role in saving his job and his reforms.
Until now reformers of every stripe-from Communists seeking to improve their party to liberals pushing for a market economy and Western-style democracy-have quarreled among themselves and failed to form cohesive parties. The defeat of the conservative coup might encourage more cooperation.
Some major figures such as Eduard Shevardnadze, a former foreign minister, and Alexander Yakovlev, a former Gorbachev adviser, have joined forces with Yeltsin. But theirs is only a fledging organization, with only the potential to evolve into a major party.
It is not as though the country will stop functioning, although much of it has not been operating effectively for years. The problem is the promise of reform and the long-suffering Soviet people`s patience with the process.
For more than six years, the people have been listening to the rhetoric of promise but finding empty shelves and precious little else to represent results.
The last reformers to offer this kind of rhetoric started talking before the 1917 revolution. Seven decades later, they still hadn`t delivered.
Obviously conditions have improved: From a near-medieval state, the USSR developed into a mighty if badly flawed industrial power. But the promised
”workers` paradise” eluded the endless five-year plans and proclamations of success along the long trail to true communism.
Because of this history, the Russians and their republican counterparts are most wary of rhetoric, and most astute at looking for incremental improvements in their lives.
One of the important implications of communism`s collapse is the elimination of the argument that the hard-liners will be able to take over, pocketing any investment in the nation or tossing it into hopeless military projects.
Bush said it better than anyone else in the hours after the coup failed. The hard-liners had their shot. Now it`s over.
Ironically, the military hard-liners and party conservatives who mastermined the attempted coup appear to have done more in three days to bury the party and old-style Soviet politics than their reformist opponents have done in more than half a decade.
Yeltsin almost immediately signed a decree banning Communist operations in Russia until a complete investigation of the coup was completed. The Moscow City Council subsequently locked the doors of the national party building.
Yeltsin quit the party last year, dramatically storming out of a meeting of its leadership.
