Out of Communist Party, and Out of a Plush Job : Soviet Union: A party functionary is fired after joining the opposition Democratic Platform.

MOSCOW —  Today Vyacheslav N. Shostakovsky will stride down the freshly waxed corridor to his second-floor office one final time, sign a paper authorizing its use by a new occupant and find himself no longer in the employ of the Soviet Communist Party.

“I haven’t prepared any insurance policy in advance,” Shostakovsky mused earlier this week as the last hours ticked away in his tenure as rector of the Moscow Higher Party School, one of the party’s top educational establishments and the last stop in Shostakovsky’s 30-year career as a party functionary. “We’ll write up the transfer, and I’ll find myself on the street.”

Fired from the post that paid him the princely salary of 700 rubles monthly, or the equivalent of more than $1,160, the jovial, bearlike Ukrainian who was one of the founders of an internal radical opposition in Communist Party ranks has fought back by filing suit in a Moscow neighborhood court for reinstatement.

It is a quixotic gesture, he readily admits, since the patronage system that the Russians call nomenklatura has long let the Communist Party hierarchy decide who should occupy top jobs in government, the military--and, of course, in the party itself.

“I will certainly lose the trial,” Shostakovsky, 52, acknowledged during an interview, pausing to relight a filter cigarette that stubbornly kept going out. “But I wanted to pose the question, since we are gradually moving toward a state of law.”

The professor from Lvov, a guiding light of the radical Democratic Platform movement, was declared unsuitable for the rector’s job after he announced to last month’s Communist Party congress that he and like-minded delegates were pulling out to form their own party.

“We want this party to be the engine of progress,” Shostakovsky said as he sat behind a table in the office, decorated with mint-green curtains, that had been his since December, 1986. The Communist Party, at least in the short term, will continue to be dominated by “rightists and conservatives,” he contends.

So Shostakovsky, head of the training school for promising Communist functionaries from Moscow and its surrounding regions, will be out of a job. He is apparently serene over the loss in income--with a big laugh, he reveals that his wife, Raisa, is a salaried party secretary in a district of the Soviet capital.

“She did not join Democratic Platform, but naturally she respects my right to an independent opinion,” Shostakovsky says.

Although the more tolerant times of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev mean Shostakovsky’s dismissal will not be the “invitation to the wolves” it once would have been, he says, he fully expects his wife to lose her job too.

The Communist Party, however, has lost its ability to dominate all facets of society, and two Moscow higher educational establishments have proposed that Shostakovsky teach political science to their students, an option the professor with the shaggy gray hair says he will accept with relish.

With his departure from the Higher Party School, however, Shostakovsky leaves a cocoonlike environment most Soviets would envy. At a time of a widespread tobacco shortage, for example, cigarettes are still on sale in the canteen.

The school in northwestern Moscow has its own laundry, and the nondescript neoclassical pile on Gottwald Street--named for a prominent Czechoslovak Communist who was unfailingly loyal to Moscow--is kept off limits to prying eyes by elderly doorkeepers and a high fence.

On the wall of Shostakovsky’s office hang portraits of Gorbachev and Vladimir I. Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union--nothing out of the ordinary there. But in the corner on a shelf, there is a small flag of the would-be independent state of Lithuania.

It is a tip-off to the free-ranging mind of the longtime party official who, along with other Democratic Platform members, hopes by October to foster the creation of affiliated but independent pro-reform parties in the country’s constituent republics.

“I think Soviet society is turning its back on Marxism-Leninism, but at the same time needs a new religion,” says the man whose job it long was to inculcate the old faith. “No wonder. This brainwashing affected millions of people over decades.”

Asked whether the ideal of socialism has died in his country, Shostakovsky reflects and replies that socialism is not the creation of heaven on Earth, calibrated in units of five-year plans. It is an ideal, he says, of social fairness, human freedom and democracy.

“Socialism is dead in the form in which they tried to bring it about here,” he says. “The Bolshevik idea has gone bankrupt.”