Gorbachev’s Reforms Could Be Ousted, Too

The apparent right-wing putsch that ousted President Mikhail S. Gorbachev early Monday puts into immediate question all the reforms--in political, economic and foreign policy--that the Soviet leader had implemented in his six years in power.

In proclaiming Gennady I. Yanayev, Gorbachev’s vice-president, the new Soviet president and declaring a six-month state of emergency to halt the country’s slide to “chaos and anarchy,” the new Committee for the State of Emergency made clear that it blames Gorbachev and his perestroika policies for the country’s “profound crisis.”

The crisis itself is not in dispute--Gorbachev himself had spoken of it in the most dire terms--but the causes and the remedies were highly contentious and undoubtedly led to Gorbachev’s removal.

The committee, led by prominent Soviet conservatives, promised to take the “most decisive measures” to pull the country back from what it called the brink of “civil strife,” and these most likely will start with concerted military and police actions to assert its authority.

Tough measures are also likely to follow to restore the much-diminished authority of the Soviet Communist Party, to implement a slower modernization of the country’s economy under the central government bureaucracy and to prevent the devolution of power that Gorbachev envisioned as the new constitutional basis for the country.

The committee’s very first pronouncements appeared to bear out the warning that had come late last week from Alexander N. Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s closest advisers through the perestroika era, that a right-wing coup d’etat was coming.

“I would like to warn society that an influential Stalinist group has formed within the leadership core of the party which is against the political course (followed) since 1985 and is putting the brakes on social progress in the country,” Yakovlev said in his resignation letter. “ . . . The party leadership in our country, despite its declarations, is ridding itself of the democratic wing of the party and is preparing for social revenge--a party and state coup.”

The pressure had been building from the hard-right over the past year, with Gorbachev maneuvering through the spring and early summer to gain the upper hand.

As Gorbachev left for vacation in the Crimea early this month, one of his presidential aides said confidently, “The storm has broken . . . . We won’t have clear sailing, but the (political) weather is finally free from real threats.”

Gorbachev, in fact, had lived with this conservative resistance from the moment he began his political and economic reforms six years ago, but until the apparent coup early Monday morning in Moscow he had always managed to keep his opponents in check with a superb tactical adroitness.

But with growing vehemence and directness the conservatives have accused him of forsaking the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the seven decades of socialism that followed. To their minds, the 61-year-old leader had been putting the Soviet Union on the road toward capitalism and forming an alliance with its old “class enemies” in the West.

Their criticism had long ago spilled out of the old corridors of power in the Kremlin into parliament, the press and even the streets.

Last autumn, Gorbachev had been beaten into a major political retreat when the right--a powerful alliance of Communist Party conservatives, the army and security forces and the country’s military-industrial complex--forced him to abandon plans for a radical economic overhaul.

Through the winter, the right exacted further concessions from Gorbachev, including his nomination last December of Yanayev as vice president.

Only through forming an alliance in the spring with Boris N. Yeltsin, the populist president of the Russian Federation, the country’s largest republic, was Gorbachev able to recover.

He had managed to win agreement from nine of the country’s republics on a Union Treaty that would have laid a new political and constitutional basis for the country. That treaty was to have been signed this week, and that may have prompted the conservatives to act before Gorbachev’s scheduled return to Moscow today.

Conservatives had already denounced the treaty in the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, as likely to lead to the Soviet Union’s complete dissolution as a state. They will now probably move to reassert Soviet authority in the breakaway Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, in other independence-minded regions such as Armenia and Georgia and even in Yeltsin’s sprawling Russian Federation.

Gorbachev had also developed in recent weeks a program to accelerate the country’s move to a free-market economy, including the extensive privatization of state-owned enterprises and liberalized prices.

While much of that program might remain in place under Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov, one of its authors, its implementation could be put into the hands of the government planners who have mismanaged the economy for years.

In foreign policy, Gorbachev had just hosted President Bush and signed a historic treaty reducing the superpowers’ strategic nuclear arsenals by nearly a third. He had gone to London for a meeting with the Group of Seven leading industrial nations to discuss the Soviet Union’s integration into the world economy.

But those moves, like earlier foreign policy initiatives, had added to the conservative backlash as the military and many other people saw their country humbled before one-time foes.

Gorbachev’s latest vision--a Communist Party that would no longer based on Marxism-Leninism--was to have been debated at a special party congress in November or December.

That congress, if it is held as scheduled, appears likely to launch a “corrective movement” marking the party’s return to socialist orthodoxy.