FRESH AIR AND HOT AIR

Stephen Handelman reports

on the irrelevance of the Soviet Party Congress

Moscow A WISTFUL, uncharacteristically dispi- rited Mikhail Gorbachev appeared at the re-union of his year at the law school of Moscow University (1955) a few weekends ago. As one of his friends described the scene, he went to his former seat in lecture hall 16 and sat quietly until the others

insisted he go up to the stage. He said a few words, and then announced he had to leave. When his classmates protested, `Misha, don't go. It's Saturday — take the day off.' Mr Gorbachev smiled. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'The next time we meet, in five years, we'll have plenty of time to sit around and talk.'

The friend, a former classmate, said Mr Gorbachev looked tired, even melancholy. No one had expected him to come. 'After- wards, when a group of us talked about it over dinner, we realised he needed to look into the eyes of his friends.' Whether it was the casual remark of a busy man or a revealing glimpse of a leader aware of his own political mortality, Mr Gorbachev's parting comment seemed particularly poig- nant as the 28th Soviet Communist Party Congress plunged into its own quinquen- nial reunion in Moscow this week, with Mr Gorbachev as its apparent chief target.

The opening rituals had barely finished when two delegates rose on points of order on Monday to demand the resignation of the entire Politburo. By midweek, the atmosphere of a trial against Kremlin reformers and their kind had not abated.

'Things,' said the Supreme Soviet chair- man, Anatoly Lukyanov, to Mr Gorbachev at one point, in a stage whisper loud enough to be heard on Soviet Television, 'are getting a little complicated.' This was not, he might have added, how it was supposed to be at all.

Journalists, diplomats and assorted Sovietologists have had the 28th Party

Congress on their 'must' list of internation-

al events for months. The 27th party Congress, in 1986, was a landmark in modern Soviet history. It set the stage for the burst of reforms that have amazed the world. As late as six months ago, this one was envisaged as the crowning set piece of

perestroika, the moment when the last vestiges of Stalinism would be put to rest,

not to mention all the remaining quasi- and neo-Stalinists in the nation's political life. It was meant to illuminate the final stretch towards the renewed socialism Mr Gor- bachev has been promising.

Now he, along with his fellow reformers, plainly wishes it had never taken place.

Instead of bright, shining faces eager to move ahead, the glum, middle-aged look of reaction prevails. What must be particu- larly galling is that, after more than four

years of perestroika, Mr Gorbachev is condemned to fight battles he should have

won long ago. His two-and-a-half hour speech opening the congress could have been written in 1985.

But Mr Gorbachev's trials, as he is trapped between the angry forces of radi- calism and reaction, need to be placed in proper perspective. Communist Party con- gresses in the post-communist decade, not to put too triumphant a tone on it, are about as topical as Victorian melodramas, and not nearly as riveting. Even in the Soviet Union, which shares with places like Cuba, North Korea and China n predilec- tion for these mass displays of party authority, they have become aldistracting obstacle to the work of government. And particularly in the Soviet Union, despite the sound and fury, this one is in grave danger of becoming irrelevant.

While the entire senior party leadership

is held hostage inside the Kremlin's mas- sive palace of congresses for ten days, the disintegration of the party on the ground has been growing apace. Not a day passes without some local committee in Tomsk or Tufa announcing it has formed a 'popular front' or 'democratic party' to challenge the local communist barony. In the self- described 'free political zones' of Moscow and Leningrad, local councils are busily undermining the old party machine. As Moscow's young deputy mayor, Sergei Stankevich, noted proudly the other day, 'the streets have become cleaner' — a comment, perhaps, not just on the unpre- cedented energy demonstrated lately by city works crews but on the general atmos- phere of a capital shrugging off years of civic apathy.

The party of course remains the domi- nant political power — for the moment. With a nominal membership list of 19 million and continued control at every level from the senior ranks of the army to the smallest factory cadre, it is not in immediate danger of East European-style collapse. But, with political alternatives springing up every day, it is no longer a monolith. Mr Nikolai Travkin, a builder from Leningrad, was once one of the 'new faces' of post-1985 Gorbachev-style socialism. He sat on the praesidium of the 27th Party Congress, and was an important figure at the July 1988 Party Conference which laid the foundations of parliamentary reform. Today, Mr Travkin is forming his own party, which he calls the Democratic Party of Russia, and he argues convincingly that he is the wave of the future. 'Wherever I travel, local party officials come to me and say they want to join,' said Mr Travkin, a lean, dark-suited mass of coiled energy in his office barely 100 yards from the Kremlin. 'They always knew enough to get on the winning side.'

Even its huge membership no longer looks quite as forbidding. In a poll taken in Moscow early this month, more than half of those surveyed believed the Party had little or no relationship to their lives, and complained it was run exclusively by a small bureaucratic elite. 'The essence of the [Party's] crisis is that the Party and the people are on different sides of the barri- cades,' said Mr Vladimir Amelin, an analyst for the National Sociological Stu- dies Institute. For a party that once claimed to be in the vanguard of a global workers' revolution, it is a truly sobering thought.

But these are bitter days. The thousands of white-collar apparatchiki — there are few women and only a smattering of workers and peasants — have reason to feel embattled as they carry on in the Kremlin this week and next. History appears to be sweeping past them. It would probably not improve Mr Gorbachev's mood to be reminded of the first Russian Communist 'Congress', held in 1898, in the Byelorussian city of Minsk. Nine delegates showed up, arriving at a tiny wooden house by separate routes to avoid the scrutiny of Tsarist police. They managed to issue a manifesto before disappearing once again

into the underground. 'The Russian pro- letariat needs political freedom as much as it needs fresh air to breathe,' the manifesto said. Whatever happens inside the con- gress halls, outside there is suddenly a great deal more breathing room.

Stephen Handelman is Moscow bureau chief for the Toronto Star.