Soviets Urged to Work Hard for Gorbachev’s Reforms

MOSCOW — The Soviet Communist Party on Saturday called for hard work to defend Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms in an unusually frank keynote address marking the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The address, given at a meeting of the party Central Committee and issued in the name of the committee, was published on the front page of Pravda and other major national newspapers and led hourly broadcasts on Radio Moscow.

It said Gorbachev’s drive for perestroika (reconstruction) is under way but that the bulk of work to make the economy more efficient and public life more open lay ahead.

“For perestroika we must struggle, perestroika must be defended. Here we need consistency, firmness and principles. Character and self-sacrifice are demanded,” said the address to the Soviet people.

Faces Opposition

Gorbachev has made clear that he still faces considerable opposition, especially among middle-level bureaucrats, to his modernization and cleanup program for Soviet society.

Celebrations to mark the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution led by V.I. Lenin will culminate this November in special meetings and cultural events of all kinds.

But Saturday’s address was a key document setting the tone for the celebrations.

Western analysts who remembered the wholly optimistic style of past anniversary addresses said it was unusually frank in speaking of problems as well as achievements.

In addition to hinting at the opposition that Gorbachev faces, the document made veiled reference to recent ethnic disturbances in the country, including nationalist riots in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan.

Past anniversary addresses have always said that the revolution solved the problem of different nationalities living in the Soviet Union, but Saturday’s address admitted that difficulties sometimes arise and have to be tackled.

“The country’s progress is and will continue to be to the benefit of every ethnic group as well as in the interest of the union as a whole,” it said.

The address declared the revolution “the most outstanding event of the 20th Century” and said more than a third of the world’s population has “already cast off the fetters” of capitalism.

“We do not have exploitation of man by man. We do not have unemployment, we do not have national oppression and we do not have poverty and illiteracy,” said the Central Committee, which Gorbachev heads.

But it also alluded to “deviations” from the path of development forged by Lenin, including “violations of legality and democratic norms, manifestations of voluntarism, dogmatism and inertia.”

Those terms long have been used to refer to late Kremlin leaders Josef Stalin, Khrushchev and Leonid I. Brezhnev, who were not mentioned by name in the address.