Gorbachev Calls for Ban on Strikes to Protect Reforms

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev called Monday for a 15-month ban on strikes that he said are destroying the Soviet economy and threatening his whole reform program.

Gorbachev, speaking at the end of a stormy, two-hour debate in the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, said that tough emergency measures are needed quickly to “protect democratization from anarchy and mismanagement.”

Although he had praised striking coal miners in July for “launching a revolution from below” in support of perestroika, as the reform program is known, Gorbachev said that the spreading work stoppages of recent months are now “holding our reforms by the throat.”

Lev A. Voronin, a first deputy prime minister, said the government also proposes to place all rail traffic in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, the three southern Soviet republics in Transcaucasia, under military control to end its prolonged disruption by ethnic unrest in the region and to break Azerbaijan’s economic blockade of Armenia.

“These are necessary measures against the escalation of those negative processes in the economy, especially in those key areas in which the consequences could affect everything that we are doing,” Gorbachev told the deputies, who will vote today on the resolution.

“We will take measures to promote our economic and political reforms, and this will protect the process of democratization so that it is not taken hostage. . . .”

Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov introduced at the same time a package of basic economic reforms intended to transform the Soviet economy from one that, for more than 60 years, has been centrally planned and based on state-owned industries into another, fundamentally different, that will be shaped largely by market forces. This will provide equal status for private entrepreneurs, workers’ collectives and companies owned by their stockholders.

“As long as about 90% of the basic means of production belong in the framework of one owner--the government--all talk about developing a market will remain empty words and progress will be impossible,” he said.

Outlining the Soviet leadership’s break from past socialist orthodoxy and its ideals of “the common ownership of the means of production” and a centrally planned and managed economy, Ryzhkov sketched a dramatically different economic philosophy for the country’s development and a much-altered vision of its future.

In proposing a mixed economy, Ryzhkov said that the government was ready to lease its industrial and commercial enterprises to newly formed companies, groups of workers and even individuals. He added that land and natural resources would continue to be state-owned but would be rented to ensure their profitable use and that a broad range of economic regulators, including taxes, interest and the state’s own purchases and sales of goods, would replace direct central government control.

“People so far do not see the results of perestroika in their standard of living,” Ryzhkov acknowledged, “and some even feel that it would be better to return to the old order-giving method of managing the economy.

“But there is no turning back. Those methods will lead only to an impasse and will not get society out of the difficult situation we are now in.”

The government’s reforms, however, fell far short of what many deputies want.

V. I. Postnikov, a member of the parliamentary economic reform committee, said afterward that measures before the group had overtaken Ryzhkov’s proposals and that deputies favored a greater role for stockholder-owned companies and private entrepreneurs in transforming the economy.

“Even before Ryzhkov presented the draft proposals, we have made significant changes in them,” Postnikov said, adding that while the prime minister and other government officials were vacationing, the deputies had been at work, drawing up their own reform plans.

The various reform proposals will go through weeks of lengthy hearings and sharp debates before the final legislative package emerges, probably at the end of the Supreme Soviet’s autumn session in late November.

Despite their fundamental importance, the proposed laws on property, land ownership and use, leasing of state property, the rights of enterprises and taxation were overshadowed by the government’s simultaneous request on Monday for emergency powers to deal with current labor unrest.

Voronin, introducing the emergency measures, said that the country’s economic crisis, although the result of decades of bad management and muddled policies, had grown more acute as a result of the widespread strikes this year.

Production of consumer goods, already insufficient to meet demand, fell short of its target by $6.15 billion in July and August, Voronin said. Severe fuel shortages threatened to disrupt the several major industries and leave the country without enough electricity and heat at the start of winter. Even before the coal miners’ strike, which idled perhaps 150,000 for two weeks, more than 2 million man-days had been lost through work stoppages this year.

The shortages of consumer goods have driven many people into panic-buying and hoarding in recent weeks, and this has further undermined popular confidence in Gorbachev’s reforms.

Ethnic Discontent

While some of the strikes, particularly that of the coal miners in Siberia, the Ukraine and northern Russia, resulted from serious worker grievances, most of the recent stoppages, in Estonia, Moldavia, Azerbaijan and other constituent republics, have expressed ethnic discontent.

The disruption of rail service--through slowdowns, strikes and even open sabotage--in the southern republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan and in several other regions is beginning to paralyze the rest of railway system, Voronin said. With it, key Soviet industries are now endangered because there are not enough cars to ship raw materials or their goods, he said. In addition, railway bridges have been blown up, he said, and tracks destroyed in the ethnic feuding.

Gorbachev warned Armenia and Azerbaijan last week to end their quarrel over the future of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave of Christian Armenians in Muslim Azerbaijan, or face strong action by the central government.

With more than 85% of its inbound and outbound cargo passing through Azerbaijan, Armenia’s economy has come nearly to a standstill as a result of the month-long blockade. Soviet officials said on Monday that during September more than 30,000 freight cars--a total of 1.6 million tons of goods--bound for Armenia were halted by Azerbaijan.

Stores in some Armenian towns have nothing but dust on their shelves, and ambulances there are being rationed to about 4 1/2 gallons of gas a day.

Vladimir I. Kolesnikov, chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s railway transport subcommittee, supported the government’s call for emergency powers to end the crisis. “All strikes must be declared illegal,” he told the government newspaper Izvestia. “Their initiators must suffer the full force of economic sanctions. . . . The strikers must realize that each successive hour of sabotage destroys the economic foundation of their own families.”

‘Cardiovascular System’

As the primary form of national transport, the Soviet railway system is “the cardiovascular system of the whole Soviet economy,” Kolesnikov said. “If you stop the oxygen, death is immediate. Whatever our other problems, transport must continue uninterrupted.”

Leonid Abalkin, Gorbachev’s senior economic adviser, said after the debate at the evening session of the Supreme Soviet that he favors even tougher measures to halt the country’s economic slide and to ensure that the current budget deficit of $200 billion is cut by more than half in the coming year.

“We are talking about the health of millions,” Abalkin said. “We cannot play with the lives of the people. If we do not stop this process, there will be no Soviet power. And it will be the end of perestroika. “

Only Half the Reserves

With the harsh Russian winter weeks away, the county’s power stations had only half their usual coal reserves, he said, and further work stoppages in the coal mines or on the railways could leave many people without heat.