Vadim A Medvedev

However dramatic the changes that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has worked in the Soviet Union over the last five years, they were just a prologue to the battle now being waged over the future of the country. The struggle is over the nature of its political system, the type of economy it will have, how it will use its remaining influence as a superpower, what kind of society it will be.

After 13 years as a loyal member of the Soviet Communist Party, Leonid Vinogradov stood before his fellow factory workers, gave an impassioned speech about his decision to turn his back on the ideals he had long held sacred and handed in his party card. "Communism is a good fairy tale, but in 70 years it has not given us anything," said Vinogradov, 44, a worker on the assembly line at Moscow's big Automatic Calculating Machines Plant, which produces electronic goods primarily for military use.

The Soviet Communist Party realigned its top policy-making body Tuesday, retiring nearly a quarter of the members of its Central Committee and bringing in younger supporters of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his reform program. Dozens of older officials associated with the late President Leonid I. Brezhnev--figures such as former Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko--and his now discredited policies were effectively purged in the move. The changes are meant to free Gorbachev from the restraints imposed by conservative criticism in the committee and to allow him to act more decisively.

Did he agree with the old adage, the Soviet prime minister was asked, that each revolution, including perestroika, consumes its children? "The dinner has already begun," Nikolai I. Ryzhkov replied without hesitation. Ryzhkov probably feels that he is on the menu himself this week as the revolution wrought by perestroika, President Mikhail S.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, confronted with sharp criticism of his reforms, warned the Communist Party's policy-making Central Committee last weekend that he would resign if he lost its support for his approach to perestroika , Soviet officials reported Monday. Apparently stung by conservatives' harsh attacks on his domestic policies, Gorbachev lashed out sharply when a party leader from the Siberian industrial and coal mining center of Kemerovo criticized his foreign policy as well.

As conservatives ridiculed President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's efforts at Western-style economic reform Wednesday, the Kremlin chief conceded that his leadership should resign in two years if it hasn't succeeded in bringing about change by then.

Staunch conservatives in the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party on Tuesday attacked with vehemence and venom President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's proposals for greater democracy, forcing the party's Central Committee to extend for another day its crucial meeting on transformation of the country's political system.

The dramatic victory that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has won in reshaping the Kremlin's political hierarchy will quickly be reduced to the basics of Soviet life--how much food he can put on the table. That yardstick may seem unfair for Gorbachev, who is engaged in making great and far-reaching changes in the whole Soviet system, but the quick test by which he will be judged will be his ability to improve Soviet living standards.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, opening a crucial congress of the Soviet Union's ruling Communist Party, defended his program of political and economic reforms Monday and appealed for support to prevent a conservative takeover of the party leadership that would end perestroika.

If Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev is to succeed in revitalizing the world's second-largest economy, he must gain increasing control over the huge and inherently conservative bureaucracy of the Communist Party. There is no evidence of organized political opposition to Gorbachev, but the Soviet leader has acknowledged the existence of rising resistance to reforms from within the party, a political machine whose power extends across two continents and into every corner of Soviet society.