Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 29, 1990                   TAG: 9006290710
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/2   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

TASS DEFENDS GORBACHEV

The sharply worded commentary appeared as the policy-making Central Committee began a closed-door Kremlin meeting to debate a report Gorbachev will deliver Monday at the 28th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party.

At the congress, Gorbachev is expected to come under renewed pressure from hard-liners who say he should not hold both the post of party chief and the Soviet presidency.

Tass commentator Andrei Orlov was highly critical of those seeking to unseat Gorbachev as party head or undermine his reform efforts.

"There is an obvious discrepancy between the correct decisions and open resistance to reforms on the part of some party functionaries, who are increasingly aware of the real challenge to their once undisputed power," he wrote.

"A lapse, or a deliberate rejection of perestroika, is fraught with disaster, and not for the party alone," he said.

A day earlier, Communist re- The proposed split in the Communist Party would be the first since 1922, and Gorbachev has warned it would divide and weaken the forces struggling for reform. formers struggled to find common ground to unite them against a resurgent traditionalist wing that is sharply critical of Gorbachev's economic and political changes.

Radicals of the Democratic Platform faction said Thursday they expected to walk away from the party's congress of 4,700.

"In reality, despite the many statements of leaders, the Communist Party has shown it is simply incapable of reforming itself," said Vladimir Lysenko, a leader of the Democratic Platform.

Lysenko told reporters Democratic Platform's 100 delegates will fight for its program, but "if it proves impossible, there will be a statement that either the Communist Party has split or a new party is starting."

Leaders say a poll of party members indicates about 40 percent identify themselves as supporters of Democratic Platform. But they acknowledge many people support the faction not because of its program but simply because it represents a formal challenge to the party bureaucracy.

The proposed split in the Communist Party would be the first since 1922, and Gorbachev has warned it would divide and weaken the forces struggling for reform.

Gorbachev, speaking last week to a congress of Communists from the Russian republic, warned a split in the party would be "a gift" to opponents of reform.

In a nationally televised debate, Fyodor Burlatsky, a respected lawyer and editor of the Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper, appealed for unity between radical reformers, or "leftists," and moderates led by Gorbachev.

"There are no fundamental differences between the center and the left," he said. "The center is no longer afraid of a regulated market economy, a multiparty system, a new treaty between the republics."

Despite arguments that Gorbachev is not moving fast enough with economic reforms and restructuring of the political system or that he is moving closer to the traditionalists, Burlatsky said decisions made in recent months prove the Soviet leader is pushing hard for reform.

However, new party documents fall far short of Democratic Platform's demands that the party give up its claim to try to organize Soviet society, and party cells at workplaces, in the army, the police and the KGB.