Gorbachev Calls for Big Change : Seeks Full-Time Legislature and Elected President

Mikhail S. Gorbachev called today for sweeping change in the Soviet Union, including creation of a full-time legislature with real power and election of a president with duties akin to those of some Western heads of state.

He also proposed that farmers be made masters of the land in a program that would allow them to lease the soil they till to quickly increase production and end chronic food shortages.

It was not immediately clear how the legislative proposals would affect the post of Communist Party general secretary, the job that makes Gorbachev the most powerful man in the country.

Gorbachev spoke of an elected president of the Supreme Soviet who would appoint the head of government and oversee foreign and defense policy.

Right to Privacy

Addressing the party’s first general conference in nearly half a century, Gorbachev also:

--Called for guaranteeing peoples’ right to privacy ostensibly granted by the 1977 Constitution.

--Served notice that the party would not brook organized challenges to its authority.

--Said overhauling the state-run pricing system is “absolutely necessary” to encourage swift saturation of the market with high-quality foodstuffs. Many Soviets already fear that price reform will mean drastically increased food prices.

Hours after Gorbachev spoke, promising freer expression and more attention to the Soviet Union’s more than 100 nationalities, about 200 Crimean Tatars tried to stage a demonstration in downtown Moscow.

Police dragged protesters onto buses and took them away after they unfurled banners demanding a return to the homeland taken away from them in the 1940s.

A few blocks away, police dragged away members of a citizens’ group called the Democratic Union, which advocates a multi-party political system of a sort Gorbachev said Communists could not tolerate.

In a 3 1/2-hour televised speech opening the conference, Gorbachev told the 5,000 delegates that farm policy has to be changed.

Farm Policy Proposal

Stopping short of a call for dismantling the Soviet Union’s system of collective farms, the reform-minded Gorbachev urged “the extensive, countrywide introduction” of a program to let families lease farmland from their collective and state farms and till the soil themselves, rather than as part of salaried farm brigades.

Gorbachev also told the 5,000 delegates that reform of state-set wholesale and retail prices “is absolutely necessary,” despite widespread concern that the cost of food and consumer goods will increase drastically.

In a speech occasionally interrupted by brief applause, Gorbachev told the delegates gathered in the Kremlin’s glass and marble Palace of Congresses that his policy of glasnost, or greater openness, does not mean that he will tolerate formation of new political parties that challenge the rule of the Communist Party.

Nor, he said, should glasnost be abused by those trying to redraw political boundaries, an obvious reference to Soviet Armenia’s efforts to annex a region belonging to the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan.

Rejecting recent calls for more autonomy from delegates representing the Baltic republics, Gorbachev said, “Any obsession with national isolation can only lead to economic and cultural impoverishment.”