Gorbachev Reportedly Returns to Work on Economy : Reform: Soviet president’s vacation apparently ends early as deadline on rescue plan nears. Experts say a rough draft has been completed.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev reportedly cut short his vacation Thursday, as experts struggled to meet a Sept. 1 deadline for devising a program to rescue the nation’s economy.

Some of the experts, meeting in a suburban dacha , emerged briefly to announce they had completed a rough draft.

Boris N. Yeltsin, the populist president of the Russian Republic and a member of the group working on the project, told reporters that Gorbachev had interrupted his vacation in the Crimea to join the talks, but there was no Kremlin confirmation.

Yeltsin also said that Gorbachev had been in touch almost daily by telephone, and “as far as I know decided to cut short his vacation in order to come here and personally supervise the work.”

Although the program will require parliamentary approval, Thursday’s announcement signaled the end of months of vacillation over whether and how to move to a free-market system. With reform efforts stalled, the economy has worsened steadily amid growing shortages and declining production.

The panel of experts, formed under a breakthrough agreement between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, is working on a 500-day program to switch from a centrally planned economy to a market economy.

The 500-day clock should start ticking on Oct. 1, the group decided Thursday.

It appeared that Gorbachev, who has been pushing for faster economic reform, has aligned himself with the radical economists and spurned a more conservative task force, backed by Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, that is also working on a reform plan.

Yeltsin said he believes that the Ryzhkov commission is needlessly duplicating his group’s effort. He criticized several government ministries, including Defense and Finance, for not providing his group with information it has requested.

He warned that if the 500-day plan is not accepted by the national legislature, something similar will be approved by the legislature of the Russian Republic, which covers two-thirds of the national territory and more than half the population.

The economic recovery plan, which provides for selling state property, canceling government subsidies, and eventually removing almost all price controls, has been given high marks by foreign and Soviet observers alike.

“It breathes new life into the corpse of economic perestroika ,” a Western diplomat said, referring to Gorbachev’s reform and restructuring program.

By breaking the ideological bonds of classical communism and permitting private ownership of property, the program can offer people ownership in exchange for the dislocation it will bring.

“Ivan may be out of a job, but at least he’ll own his apartment,” one analyst said.

Mikhail Grutovoy, an economic observer for the Communist Party daily Pravda, likened the 500-day plan to an airplane capable of making transcontinental flights. The Ryzhkov plan, he said, would never make it off the runway.

“There’s nothing around today that is better than this program,” he said.

But the Yeltsin-endorsed concept has weak points, too. Ilya Konstantinov, a member of the Russian legislature’s committee on economic reform, said it appears to put too little emphasis on helping pensioners, invalids and other groups likely to suffer.

“If you try to bring in reform like that, it could have unpleasant political and social consequences,” he said.

Konstantinov said it worries him that the plan must be worked out so fast, that it could contain mistakes that might doom it to failure.

Grutovoy said in Pravda that the commission was disturbingly lacking in agricultural economists to work out methods for distributing the land of giant state and collective farms among individual farmers.

As laid out by one of its architects, Mikhail Bocharov, a businessman and reform chief for the Russian Republic, the program involves these four stages:

--Day 1 to Day 100: Preparation. Advertising the program and gaining support, inventorying national wealth, including defense assets, working out laws to mandate the reforms and taking measures to cushion the population against economic blows.

--Day 100 to Day 250: Privatization. Selling government assets to private owners to the extent of at least 200 billion rubles ($320 billion), cancellation of all government subsidies, liquidation of many government ministries, enactment of antitrust laws.

--Day 250 to Day 400: Launching the market. Removing price controls while attempting to control inflation and unemployment.

--Day 400 to Day 500: Stabilization. Correcting new imbalances in the economy; for example, investing government savings and importing goods to lower consumer prices.

Grutovoy said the plan foresees “global demilitarization” of the Soviet economy. At present, it is estimated that 15% to 18% of the gross domestic product goes to the military.

“Bocharov wants to scrap communism, bring in market capitalism, and go for it,” the Western diplomat said.

The group announced Thursday that its immediate goal will be to resolve problems with money circulation and strengthen the ruble by Jan. 1.

Grutovoy was permitted to visit the government-owned country house where the experts are working. He said the atmosphere was informal and friendly, with “an economic adviser of the president walking around in the same kind of jogging suit as everybody else.”

Although the plan lays out the basic strategy for reforms, Grutovoy said, it leaves most of the details to the 15 republics, most of which are now clamoring for autonomy.

If it works, the program will become the basis of a new treaty with the 15 republics that Moscow expects to be worked out by Jan. 1.