Gorbachev Addresses Uralmash Workers

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

## UNCLASSIFIED

restructuring. In other words, the question is that we should more speedily reform our party along the lines of democratization and by opening up all the possibilities and forms enabling rank-and-file communists to participate in all processes of Party life.

We have taken this onboard and have tried as far as possible to give it expression in the platform and in the draft rules. Perhaps we should have worked on them a bit more, but we published them so that Communists could discuss them, so that they could gather material and critical remarks in time for the congress and come to it with good, necessary documents that would strengthen our party and give it another aspect, and so that communists might feel like masters of their own party. If you take the platform or the party rules, then the main idea is that a Communist should feel that he is in charge within his primary party organization, in his rayon party organisation, and in the Party generally. Therein lies the role of the primary party organization: to allow communists to select their own delegates, and in this way to exert influence on what the congresses decide. We embarked upon this even without changing the rules; we took it to the Central Committee where it was adopted -- district by district, from the primary organizations. We opted to support the desire of Communists to elect their leaders directly -- people they know, rather than electing 20 or 30 people and then finding that the secretary is someone else, and not the person expected by the communists. Decide at your assemblies; decide at your conference on a multi-candidate basis; decide at the congress, when all is said and done. That is the way we phrased it; on a multi-candidate basis, directly. Let the delegates arrive at the congress straight from their constituencies and elect the main party leadership. We want to uphold this idea. It could be that not everything will work out. It could be that we are not quite ready for everything. As the saying goes, there is something here to grasp hold of and to say. Comrades, we must see this through; we must build up our experience; we may come down with some illness; but we have gone in the right direction and taken the correct line.

## LD3004122990TAKE7

[Excerpts] [Gorbachev continues] Following on from this, we invited people to submit alternative points of view and platforms. We want this: we want dissent, we want a contrast in viewpoints. We encourage this. The Democratic Platform -- we published it and started discussing it. Then the platform of a Marxist party appeared -- a Marxist platform. We took it on board it and published it. Now, comrade communists, discuss it! But against that -- and this is why we had to write that letter -- communists are worried that instead of discussing views and going to the congress with some sort of [Gorbachev changes thought] Instead of consolidating and coming along with progressive and far-reaching documents, instead of that, practical work has begun to split the party. To split it. This is not a struggle between opinions, nor a comparison of viewpoints, nor a search for the truth, nor the consolidation of the party, all of which are important. This is already an attempt to split the party in the run-up to the congress-- or perhaps at the congress itself. At this important, indeed crucial stage in the development of the country, the state and society, we cannot expose a force like the Communist Party to attack. There, this is only directed against the splitters and not those who think, who criticize the platform and the draft statutes. When the letter was discussed, we asked what it was they