Gorbachev Readies Fast, Radical Economic Cure : Soviet Union: He sees need to shift from central control to a more entrepreneurial system.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said Tuesday that he intends to take a series of quick, radical measures to pull the Soviet economy out of its profound crisis and shift it from central planning and management to a more entrepreneurial system based on market forces.

Gorbachev, addressing the first session of the country’s new, policy-setting Presidential Council, said that the program will attempt to “radicalize economic reforms” and will undertake “the controlled transfer to market relations” and thus introduce a mixed economy here.

A package of integrated measures aimed at establishing “a normal, fully fledged market” will be ready within two weeks, Gorbachev said, and will include a new mechanism to set state prices, an end to the government’s chronic budget deficit, banking reform, a revamped credit policy, a new system of fiscal controls and the break-up of the state’s present industrial monopolies.

Other steps will be taken shortly, he continued, to put into effect agricultural reforms, including the allocation of land to farmers for cultivation outside the plans of state farms or collective farms.

In the future, state-owned enterprises will continue to predominate in the Soviet economy, Gorbachev said, but the ways that they are managed will change substantially. There will also develop new, small enterprises, many owned by collectives, others by entrepreneurs and their families and some the result of foreign investment, he said.

Altogether, at least 20 measures are planned, according to informed Soviet economists, with some, such as the establishment of a bond market and setting new state prices for agricultural produce, to be enacted by presidential decree. Others would be introduced as emergency legislation, including laws on price reform and foreign investment.

While all these measures have long been debated by Soviet economists and many have been accepted in principle by the government, Gorbachev told the council that he now intends to implement them, using his new powers as executive president when required.

“We are at a critical point that calls for well-considered decisions,” Gorbachev said, according to an account of his speech by the official news agency Tass, but he gave no details of the actual policy changes nor a timetable.

Social discontent is rising quickly, Gorbachev noted, attributing this to the lack of economic development and arguing that the “further radicalization of perestroika” is the only solution.

“Society is unquiet and unstable,” he said. “Order and discipline have slackened. Inter-ethnic relations have become exacerbated. People experience a lot of difficulties and disappointments and want a quicker solution to problems and a calm and normal atmosphere. . . .

“It is this failure to solve economic problems,” he continued, “that is the cause of the social and, to a considerable extent, ethnic tension.”

The government’s reforms up to now have not succeeded in transforming the country’s economy, Gorbachev said, and in many respects have made it worse, largely because many of the reforms were never or only half-heartedly implemented.

With state enterprises monopolizing the market and without the economic levers, such as taxes, fiscal controls and price policy, that are common in capitalist countries, the Soviet Union has had no real market governed by supply and demand, and little has changed, he said.