Gorbachev Fires 3 in Politburo, Elevates Allies

Three members of the Soviet Communist Party’s ruling Politburo were dropped from the Kremlin leadership Wednesday in a consolidation of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s power and a further strengthening of his mandate for faster and broader political and economic reforms.

Two of those retired were conservative holdovers from the now-discredited rule of the late Leonid I. Brezhnev, and their removal from the Politburo underscored Gorbachev’s determination to press ahead with perestroika, as his reform program is known.

To replace them, the party’s policy-making Central Committee promoted two Gorbachev allies, including the new head of the KGB, the Soviet state security agency. Two of the Politburo’s non-voting members also were replaced, again with Gorbachev allies.

Majority of Reformers

The changes appear to give Gorbachev a firm majority of reformers on any issue among the Politburo’s 11 full members and seven candidate, or non-voting, members.

Faced with opposition from conservatives within the party and government bureaucracy, Gorbachev displayed his fundamental political strength by retiring Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky, the longtime leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, and Viktor M. Chebrikov, the party secretary for legal affairs and the former head of the KGB, in a move that warned all other opponents that they also could be ousted.

Viktor P. Nikonov, a full Politburo member and a party secretary for agriculture, was also retired. Although believed to be a Gorbachev supporter and one of the advocates of returning agricultural land to Soviet farmers, Nikonov may simply have become another victim of the party’s inability to solve the worsening food shortages here.

Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, who succeeded Chebrikov as the head of the KGB, was elevated directly to the Politburo from the Central Committee, according to the official news agency Tass. Yuri D. Maslyukov, chairman of the State Planning Commission, was promoted from non-voting to full membership.

The Politburo’s new candidate members are Yevgeny M. Primakov, a leading political scientist, who was elected chairman in June of one of the two houses of the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, and Boris K. Pugo, the head of the party commission overseeing discipline.

Gorbachev, addressing the 251-member Central Committee at the opening of its two-day meeting, called for the appointment of “the most creative people and those who are most devoted to perestroika “ in key positions at all levels of the party to accelerate the pace of reform after what appeared to be several months of hesitation.

“At the present stage of perestroika, we must consolidate the party, the Central Committee and the whole of society and press decisively ahead,” he told the committee.

The party “should not submit to those (who) would live to leave us in the past and put us into reverse gear, or to those who offer adventurist programs instead of serious policies,” Gorbachev said.

And although he thanked the Politburo’s retiring members for “many years of active and fruitful activities,” the announcement of their removal left little doubt that Gorbachev had again outmaneuvered his conservative critics within the Soviet leadership and intended to use the victory to broaden his reforms.

The leadership changes, characterized by Tass as a “major reshuffle,” followed the retirement of a third of the party’s top hierarchy in April and the removal, again on grounds of age, of four Politburo members last autumn.

Still More Reformers

On Tuesday, the Central Committee had approved the calling of a party congress in October, 1990, six months earlier than scheduled, in a move that will bring more reformers into the party’s upper ranks as well as rewrite its “action platform” and probably its constitution.

The Central Committee on Wednesday endorsed Gorbachev’s plans to move the country boldly toward a federal political system with extensive regional autonomy and economic decentralization as a response to the mounting nationalist unrest, now at a critical level.

Warning that the fate of his reforms and the very unity of the country is at stake, Gorbachev closed the meeting with an impassioned speech, which was broadcast on radio and television.

“We cannot expect any success unless we deal very seriously with the problems of inter-ethnic relations,” he said.

“We must act resolutely,” he continued, “but from our discussion I saw that not all understand resoluteness in one and the same way. Some understand it in the old way--that is, to do away with everything quickly. What I mean by resoluteness is a tremendous effort of intellect and courage required from everyone to pursue everything that we have planned without giving way to difficulties.”

Gorbachev demonstrated his own resoluteness in removing two more of his critics from the top leadership--although the leading voice of conservatism, Yegor K. Ligachev, remains the senior Politburo member after himself.

Chebrikov and Shcherbitsky were among the last members of the “Dniepropetrovsk group”--officials who began their careers in that Ukrainian city and rose to the top during the 1970s under Brezhnev, who had also worked there.

Brezhnev’s long, 18-year rule, from 1964 until his death in 1982, is now officially characterized as the “period of stagnation,” and Gorbachev has methodically removed most of his associates from the leadership.

At 71, Shcherbitsky had not only become a symbol of the old, autocratic and conservative party leadership, but he also was viewed by Gorbachev’s allies as a threat to the reform program in the increasingly volatile Ukraine, one of the most politically sensitive areas of the country.

Accused at Demonstrations

Over the past two weeks, demonstrators in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, and in Lvov, in the west of the republic, have demanded his removal, accusing him of undermining Gorbachev’s reforms.

In March, many of his party lieutenants were defeated for election to the Congress of People’s Deputies, and he himself managed to win in Dniepropetrovsk only by running unopposed. He is expected to be removed shortly as the Ukrainian party leader, and a major realignment of the party organization is certain to follow.

Chebrikov, 66, had recently called--as the head of the party’s legal affairs commission--for tough tactics against the fast-growing nationalism movements in many of the country’s constituent republics. He had been moved a year ago from the KGB to the party Secretariat.

Kryuchkov, 65, has worked to reshape the KGB, focusing its efforts on foreign intelligence, international terrorism and serious crimes rather than the enforcement of rigid political orthodoxy.

The removal of Nikonov, 60, from the Politburo came as a surprise to Soviet observers who had seen him as executing many of Gorbachev’s plans for agricultural reform. His departure leaves Ligachev, an opponent of many of those changes, in charge of agriculture, though one of the new party secretaries may take over Nikonov’s responsibilities.

The party’s new ethnic policy, which will be published later this week in full, is to become what Gorbachev called the “political basis for the renewal of the Soviet federation,” a process that will reshape the Soviet Union into a new federal system with “a strong center and strong republics.”

Under development for a year and a half, the policy is intended to give the country’s 15 constituent republics, as well as smaller autonomous regions, the right to own and manage their own resources with a minimum of interference from Moscow’s central planners.

Soviet officials believe that this reversal of more than 50 years of increasing centralism will, along with cultural autonomy, meet most of the mounting demands for “independence” from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, from Armenia and Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains, and now from the Ukraine.

Gorbachev warned again Wednesday that secessionist tendencies will not be tolerated and that the internal borders among the different republics will not be redrawn to satisfy competing territorial claims. Such actions would make perestroika’s goals “unreachable,” he said.

He also rejected calls, largely from the Baltic republics, for separate Communist parties in each republic, asserting that this would destroy the country’s, as well as the party’s, political unity.

Although the new policy was adopted unanimously, according to Tass, the two-day debate appeared sharp and frequently divisive. Conservative party officials called for tougher measures to curb the ethnic unrest, which has swept 10 of the country’s republics, while liberals argued that the problems lay in half-measures and that further reforms were the real solution.

Absamat M. Masliev, the party leader from Kirghiz in Soviet Central Asia, said the new nationalist movements should be prohibited from calling for secession from the Soviet Union, warning that this destabilized the whole country.

“The time has come . . . to bring to order those who openly speak out against our structure, our unity, and sabotage perestroika and abuse democracy,” he said, according to an account of the debate reported by Tass.

Calls for a multiparty system or the transformation of the Communist Party into a union of independent parties constituted “an extremely dangerous and destructive tendency,” he said.

Algirdas K. Brazauskas, the party leader from Lithuania, replied that his republic has no intention of trying to leave the Soviet Union and that the debate over independence there is a reflection of the general political renewal under way.