MOSCOW, June 29, 1988 (UPI) - An extraordinary Communist Party conference moved behind closed Kremlin doors today for a second day of debate on Mikhail Gorbachev's proposal to overhaul the Soviet political structure by introducing a presidential system with a strengthened legislature.
Although no journalists were allowed into the Palace of Soviets Tuesday, Gorbachev's four-hour opening address before 4,991 delegates to the 19th Communist Party Conference was broadcast along with excerpts from three other speakers.
Today's plenary session was also off limits to journalists and only 20-minute edited excerpts from speeches were aired. Transcripts of the actual debates will be made public only after the conference concludes its work later this week. Delegates have reserved the right to edit their remarks for the official public record, meaning the transcripts may not reflect the true tone of the closed debates.
In one excerpt, Georgi Razumovsky, head of the credentials committee, charged public opinion had been ignored in the election of some delegates to the conference.
''Openness and democracy in general were characteristic for plenums of the party committees electing delegates,'' he said. ''However, not everywhere and not everybody turned out to be ready for meaningful conversation with the people. Sometimes public opinion was not taken into consideration.''
Gorbachev supporters have complained the elections were rigged in favor of conservatives.
In other reaction to Gorbachev's opening speech, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper said readers had flooded its conference hot line with criticism of the speech and the secretive way business is being conducted.
''A lot of attention is paid to political declarations and very little to the mechanism of their realization ... in any case I expected more,'' said Oleg Timoshin from Minsk.
The first dissonant note of the debate over the human costs of restructuring was sounded Tuesday by Dmitiri Motorny, a delegate from Kiev in the Ukraine, who expressed fears over the threatened closure of failing enterprises.
The difficult road for reform was also underlined by the appointment of Yegor Ligachev as conference chairman. Ligachev is the No. 2 man in the ruling Politburo and has been publicly identified by reformers as the leading conservative.
Warning that political reform is vital if economic restructuring is to succeed, Gorbachev called for a fundamental overhaul of the Soviet system of government to restrain the all-encompassing power of the Communist Party. Through its five-year plans, the party now directs and administers the country's economy.
''One has to have the courage to admit today: if the political system remains immobile, unchanged, we shall not cope with the tasks of perestroika,'' Gorbachev said.
Gorbachev's linkage of political and economic reform set the tone for the four-day conference -- the first since 1941 -- that is considered a key test of support for the Soviet leader's policies.
The main thrust of Gorbachev's proposed reforms is to boost the authority of elected deputies in Soviets' local, regional and national legislative bodies that now have little or no power. The party's ability to dictate policy to the Soviets should be sharply limited, he said.
''All these changes can be sealed by legislative acts as early as next autumn so as to reorganize the national bodies of power after regular elections next spring,'' Gorbachev said.
Gorbachev also presented his proposal for a normal limit of two five-year terms for officials, a method of preventing a repetition of the past lengthy periods in office.
As part of a ''radical renewal of the electoral system,'' Gorbachev also wants a new national legislative body with much greater powers to actually govern than the present Supreme Soviet, which now rubber-stamps party decisions.
Under the proposal, a 2,250-member Congress of People's Deputies would be elected every five years and meet annually. It would elect a standing Supreme Soviet of up to 450 members to handle important matters of state.
The body would be headed by a president, who Gorbachev said would oversee key foreign and domestic policy as opposed to the current figurehead president, Andrei Gromyko. It noted the president would head the Defense Council, a position now held by the general secretary of the party, Gorbachev.
The president could be elected or removed by the Supreme Soviet in a secret ballot. Like similar proposals floated recently by Gorbachev's supporters, it seemed to assume the head of the party would be the president.
Alexander Yakovlev, a Politburo member and close adviser to Gorbachev, told a news conference Tuesday that history would recall the current gathering as ''a conference of the democratization of Soviet society.''
But there was little indication of how state bodies, from Soviets to courts, would be strengthened sufficiently to withstand pressure from party officials. Less ambitious attempts in the past to strengthen Soviets have had little impact.
''We are learning democracy and glasnost, learning to argue and debate and to tell each other the truth,'' Gorbachev said. ''That is, of course, not little.
''But the processes of democratization, both in the center and at the local level, are unfolding too slowly,'' he said.
