Yeltsin Promises He Will Take Economic Reforms to People if Blocked by Kremlin : Soviet Union: He pledges to pursue changes that would not lower standards of living.

Boris N. Yeltsin, the new populist president of the Soviet Union’s Russian republic, pledged Saturday to pursue economic reforms that would not lower living standards, and he warned that he would take his case directly to the people if thwarted by conservatives in the Communist Party or the central government.

Yeltsin, speaking in a nationally televised interview, said he has a plan to stabilize the economy without the tough measures--increased food prices, unprecedented unemployment and forced bankruptcies--that Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov intends to implement.

“There is the fundamental difference--in their program, everything is loaded onto the shoulders of the people while with ours that is not so,” Yeltsin said. “By using different economic levers, we can ensure that the people’s living standards do not fall, and in fact they should rise in time.”

He said his government would propose a 500-day economic program aimed at improving the supply of food and consumer goods, stabilizing prices and laying the foundation for long-term development. Attempting to reassure his many critics, he added: “Such a program exists. It’s not just words.”

But Yeltsin, who provided no details of the program, appealed for a “credit of faith”--a grace period of two or three years--to carry it out, although he has harshly criticized Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev for moving too slowly.

“The situation in the republic is complicated,” he said. “There is a crisis . . . but we shall look for a way out. I ask the citizens and voters of the republic to wait.”

The silver-haired Yeltsin, 59, also appealed to coal miners, who struck a year ago for better living and working conditions, to show restraint although the agreement they reached with the government ending the strike last summer has not been fulfilled. A one-day work stoppage has been proposed to mark the first anniversary of the start of the strike later this month.

“They should refrain from anything that would destabilize the situation in Russia even more,” Yeltsin said. “It is so tense now that any spark, any rash action anywhere or even a rash word, could create a real conflagration.”

Last year’s strike by half a million miners disrupted wide sectors of industry through most of the summer with an impact that continued into the autumn. Strikes in key sectors of the Soviet economy were later declared illegal until the end of 1990.

The central government’s program has come under fierce criticism in the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, and is due to be debated this week by deputies. The proposed price increases, including a phased threefold jump in bread prices on July 1, sparked panic buying in Moscow and other cities.

Yeltsin, who won election narrowly two weeks ago over Gorbachev’s strong opposition, said the “unstable” political situation could hinder the introduction of the radical economic changes he plans.

“If there is ever a critical point where understanding cannot be reached, then I will go to the people,” Yeltsin declared. “I will go to the electorate.”

That is no small threat for Yeltsin, who last year demonstrated his widespread popular appeal by winning election to the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament, from an at-large Moscow constituency with 5.1 million votes, 89% of those cast.

As president of Russia, the largest of the Soviet Union’s 15 constituent republics with 165 million of the country’s 290 million people, about two-thirds of its territory and 70% of its wealth, Yeltsin is building a political power base from which he might directly challenge Gorbachev in the future.

In response to moves by Yeltsin and others, the Communist Party leadership on Saturday dropped its longstanding opposition to the establishment of a Russian Communist Party later this month, thus completing the fragmentation of the once politically monolithic Soviet party.

Gorbachev, reversing his own position, told a meeting of the party leadership that “there should be no delaying in founding a Communist Party of the Russian Federation in the light of the existing situation and social expectations.”

“One should act in a well-thought-out way so that this step would not contribute to the development of centrifugal trends, but would be aimed at consolidating the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the whole of society,” he added, according to an account by the Soviet news agency Tass.

This constitutes as severe a political setback for Gorbachev as Yeltsin’s election, for the Soviet leader had argued insistently that, as the country ended the tight centralized control of its economy and gave its constituent republics greater powers, a unified and tightly knit Communist Party would be needed to guide the Soviet Union.

But party conservatives, meeting for the second time in Leningrad this weekend to establish a Russian party devoted to the “interests and leading role of the working class,” forced Gorbachev to agree to the move in the hope that he would be able to muster enough support within the new party to place his men in the leadership and win its backing for his reforms.

Gorbachev will seek to win back both the radicals, supporting Yeltsin, and the conservatives when he addresses the opening of a Russian Communist Party conference in nine days. The Soviet Communist Party is planning a full congress for July 2.

Calling the party congress a political turning point for the country, Gorbachev said it “must consolidate everything that has been gained with such difficulty . . . (and) assess the experience of the five years of perestroika in order to make serious generalizations and forecast the immediate prospects for the party’s activities in the new conditions,” Tass reported.

Gorbachev, who fired Yeltsin as the party leader of Moscow and then removed him from the party’s ruling Politburo, appears to be adopting a more conciliatory attitude toward him.

The Soviet leader told a joint news conference Friday with visiting British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that he and Yeltsin shared common goals, and he stressed the need for a national consensus.

On Thursday, the Russian Parliament approved a draft declaration on sovereignty, stating that the constitution and laws of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, as the Russian republic is formally known, had legal precedence over Soviet law.

Though largely symbolic, the declaration embodied Yeltsin’s personal challenge to Gorbachev as well as laying the basis for a more fundamental challenge to the Soviet political system as it still exists.

Yeltsin’s half-hour interview, broadcast after the main evening news program, had been taped on Thursday, and Yeltsin complained strongly on Saturday about the delaying in televising it.

“This was a planned and organized political provocation,” Yeltsin told the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies at their session in the Kremlin on Saturday morning. “It was an insult for the president of the Russian Parliament, the congress, all Russian deputies and the electorate.”

Mikhail Nenashev, the chairman of the State Committee for Television and Radio, was summoned to explain the move, and he said he had decided to delay the interview to permit the broadcast of an hourlong news conference by Gorbachev and visiting British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher after the news on Friday. There was simply too much political news--”an overload”--for one evening, Nenashev said.