Ex-Leningrad Chief Returns Car, Is Back in Party

MOSCOW â€”  The conservative former leader of the Soviet Communist Party in Leningrad, expelled two months ago for using his political influence to buy a Mercedes-Benz at a huge discount, has been readmitted to the party, the official Soviet news agency Tass reported Wednesday.

Yuri F. Solovyov, who had been booted out for “displaying immodesty and violating the normals of party ethics,� agreed to return the car, virtually new but bought for the price of a beaten-up, second-hand Soviet compact, Tass said.

Solovyov, who was an alternate member of the party’s ruling Politburo for four years, hailed his reinstatement as a full political rehabilitation. He described his expulsion as “a horrible injustice, one of the excesses of the system that has always been a medium and nutrient for puppets.�

Only two months ago, however, his ouster was presented in Leningrad as a major step in ending official corruption, in calling party leaders to account for their actions and in easing the grip of conservatives on the city. The scandal was portrayed by the Soviet media as likely to envelop others in the Leningrad leadership.

This all appeared to have been cast aside Wednesday when the party, citing “numerous requests from Communists and public opinion,� reinstated Solovyov. His ouster, in fact, had never been confirmed by the party’s policy-making Central Committee in Moscow, as required by party rules.

Solovyov, 64, was retired as party leader after a humiliating defeat in last year’s parliamentary elections. He failed to gain the required 50% of the votes cast even though running unopposed. He had been left as one of the party’s “dead souls�--people who retain their seats on the party’s Central Committee although they have left the jobs that originally entitled them to such positions.

Although he had strongly resisted the political and economic restructuring under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Solovyov told Tass in an apparent expression of new political convictions that he, in fact, had “long believed that a multi-party system can exist in Soviet society.�

“Let there be two, three or even more parties,� he said, “but it is important that they should channel their activities into creation, rather than into the struggle for power.�