Gorbachev Plans Radical Legislation for Economy

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is aiming to introduce radical legislation by July 1 to turn around the ailing Soviet economy and transform it into a market system, Moscow economists said today.

They said Gorbachev will use his new powers as executive president to push through the far-reaching measures, including price reform and the creation of companies that sell stock.

“The decision is taken. The aim is to remove the state’s monopoly stranglehold on the economy,” said one of the economists, who are close to a team of advisers around Deputy Prime Minister Leonid Abalkin--the man in charge of the Kremlin’s economic reforms.

“The situation is bad and getting worse and we have to move fast,” the economist added.

The Moscow Radio news service Interfax, which in recent months has frequently given advance news of Kremlin plans, disclosed earlier that the new economic package had been prepared by Abalkin.

The economists said Abalkin and his advisers had decided that Poland’s economic reforms provided the best model for the Soviet Union.

“That is essentially what it amounts to,” one economist said. “There will obviously be variants, taking account of differences in the size of our economies, but that is where we are heading. July 1 is the target date.”

Since the Solidarity Administration took over from the Communists in Warsaw last summer, removal of state subsidies and radical financial measures have set Poland on a market path some Soviet ideologists are denouncing as “capitalist.”

But Gorbachev said Thursday that laws and decisions to “de-monopolize” the economy and introduce “a genuine and full-blooded domestic market” as well as price reforms could no longer be delayed.

A move along the Polish path will be a direct challenge to Kremlin conservatives whose standard-bearer, Yegor Ligachev, said last week that events in Eastern Europe were “a massive retreat from socialism.”

Interfax said the new program was aimed at “de-statization of property and the transfer to a market economy. It will lead to the de-monopolization and de-ideologization of the economy and of public life.

“The program envisages financial and banking reform, the passage of a law on share companies, a reform of prices and the introduction of compensatory measures for the population during the transfer to new consumer prices.”

Interfax said the program also envisaged making the Soviet ruble convertible into international hard currencies, but the service gave no time frame for this.