MOSCOW — He is the foremost conservative within the Soviet Union's ruling Politburo and knows that to the country's radical reformers he is a political ogre.
He is caricatured mercilessly in the unofficial news media, mocked openly on the Moscow stage, featured as a horned devil on political badges, called an "ignoramus" in Parliament and attacked with such ferocity at opposition rallies that his name is almost a curse in today's highly charged vocabulary.
But Yegor K. Ligachev is unmoved by these passions and undeterred in what he regards as his mission--the forthright assertion of traditional socialist values as the Soviet Union proceeds with perestroika, the restructuring of the country's whole political, economic and social system.
"I know what they say about Ligachev, that he's conservative and hidebound, an obstacle to everything progressive," he commented, more bemused than outraged by the radicals' many allegations. "But I belong to the realists, I stick to common sense."
Ligachev, who now oversees agriculture, nevertheless is deeply concerned that the Soviet Union remain socialist even as it goes through a profound transformation affecting the daily life of every citizen.
The goals of the Bolsheviks in the 1917 Russian Revolution have not fundamentally changed, Ligachev contended during an extensive interview with The Times, but new ways must be found to achieve them.
"I am far from thinking we are in a crisis of socialism, a crisis of the Communist Party," Ligachev said. "We face the result of problems accumulated over a long time, problems that stem essentially from the deformation of socialism."
Despite its achievement, he said, "the party is influenced negatively by the extremely destructive consequences of Stalinism and its arbitrariness, its mass repressions, its lawlessness." Moral and ideological decay undermine its authority and influence in society, he said.
As to his conservatism, Ligachev quickly summed it up with a Russian proverb: "Before entering a room, think how you will get out."
"In politics, before taking a decision, you must think of the consequences," he explained. "This we have not always done in perestroika, and we are suffering from our errors as a result. That is the extent of my conservatism. I wholeheartedly support the socialist transformation of our society through perestroika and the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev."
