Yeltsin Pledges to Resign if His Market Program Fails : Russia: The republic’s president gives himself a 3-year deadline to implement the economic plan.

Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian republic, was quoted Wednesday as saying he will resign in three years if by then he has not carried out his radical program to bring a market economy to Russia, the largest of the Soviet Union’s 15 republics.

The newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted Yeltsin, who is touring the republic in an effort to build support for his economic policies and investigate local grievances, as saying in an interview:

“I shall resign if people do not trust me and if we do not implement our program within the next three years.”

Yeltsin, who recently quit the Soviet Communist Party, made it clear that he does not think that quitting as president of Russia will be necessary.

“But I’m an optimist,” he added.

Yeltsin’s 500-day program to improve the economy, made public last month, calls for the introduction of private property and foreign investment. Inefficient enterprises would be closed or merged with more successful enterprises.

The final stage envisions the deregulation of prices and the elimination of all state subsidies.

Yeltsin’s plan is more radical than that of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but in an apparent compromise, the leaders agreed last week that a group of economists under their guidance should work out unified guidelines for a future market economy.

In the interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda, Yeltsin, a populist who has often been called Gorbachev’s principal rival on the left, appeared to be distancing himself from Gorbachev’s policies.

He said that the Kremlin’s economic blockade of Lithuania, lifted last month when the maverick republic agreed to suspend its declaration of independence, was a “big political blunder.”

Yeltsin said a treaty now being drafted by Latvia and the Russian republic will be an “equal agreement under two sovereign states,” and he criticized Gorbachev for interpreting such bilateral agreements between republics as threats to the unity of the Soviet Union.

Bilateral talks between Soviet republics are a sign of their growing independence from the center. Traditionally, the outlying republics negotiate only with Moscow.

Yeltsin also confirmed that Maj. Vladimir Lopatin, a reformer, is likely to be appointed head of the new Russian Committee for Public Security, a parallel organization to the KGB.