MOSCOW — The breathtaking pace of change in the Soviet Union continued unabated Sunday as the defense minister announced plans for an 80% shake-up of the military leadership and the Communist Party hierarchy, just as discredited by the right-wing coup, agreed to abolish its nucleus, the Central Committee.
Appearing on evening TV news, Col. Gen. Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov said his Defense Ministry--one of the hotbeds of support for last week's abortive bid to overthrow President Mikhail S. Gorbachev--will soon be rocked by large-scale personnel changes to rid it of generals and other officers who aided or sympathized with the coup plotters.
"The team will be renewed by 80%," said Shaposhnikov, the former commander of the air force. He took over the job once held by Marshal Dmitri T. Yazov, fired by Gorbachev for his part in the rightists' plot. "The people should be younger, more loyal and incapable of anti-constitutional acts."
On Moscow Radio, Shaposhnikov assured his fellow citizens--who have seen Soviet soldiers deployed in the past 2 1/2 years to lethally repress dissent in Moscow and in the republics of Lithuania and Georgia--that "as long as I am defense minister, our country's armed forces will never in any circumstances be used against the people."
Gorbachev accused the Communist Party hierarchy of participating in the coup or doing nothing to foil it, and on Saturday resigned as party general secretary while ordering Communist cells shut in state organizations and party property confiscated. The Secretariat one day later hotly denied involvement of party leaders in the "criminal plans" but admitted they had failed to wage "organized struggle against the putschists."
"The members of the Central Committee (the party's policy-making body) should evidently make a difficult decision, but the only one possible in present circumstances--to dissolve the Central Committee," the Secretariat said.
That conclusion, which Gorbachev had demanded, would effectively doom the Communist Party's ability to function, as it has for almost three-quarters of a century, as a parallel bureaucracy for government at all levels and the true center of economic and political decision-making in the country. The Secretariat said the country's top Communists should be convened to decide the "further destiny" of the party.
In other developments:
