Soviets to Delay Economic Reforms : Kremlin: The six-month ‘stablization’ program is designed to halt financial decline and consumer unrest. Officials huddle over two rescue plans.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, announcing a shift in course to arrest Soviet economic decline and consumer anger, said Friday his leadership plans a six-month emergency “stabilization” program that will delay the wholesale introduction of long-ballyhooed market reforms.

“I believe we cannot just leap into a market without solving the task of stabilization,” Gorbachev told a news conference. Referring to the quantity and scale of the problems now facing his leadership, he said: “We are living through serious trials. We are running out of time.”

For two days, Gorbachev had met inside the Kremlin with the Presidential Council and the Federation Council, the top advisory bodies of the Soviet executive branch, to forge a national consensus on a new Treaty of Union and an economic rescue plan to replace the Stalin-era system of state planning with a market-driven economy.

The closed session was preoccupied with the crumbling of the Soviet economy and the search for a policy to foster social concord, the president said in a rare solo appearance before the Moscow press corps. The success of his entire reform agenda, Gorbachev said, depends on the search succeeding.

“The question of stabilizing society--the political aspect, the market, interethnic relations--this was the major, central subject of the discussion, and we understood that without solving this question it would be hard to move forward in perestroika, “ he said.

The caucus of Gorbachev’s presidential advisers and leaders of the outlying Soviet republics had been expected to decide which of two competing economic reform plans would be chosen: one drawn up by Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, the prime minister, or a more radical variation being written by a group of economists sponsored by Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin, the radical Russian Federation leader and a member of the Federation Council.

Both blueprints were to have been ready by today. But Gorbachev told reporters that “there was the need to do some additional work, for about a week” and that the selected draft, which he said could combine “positive elements” of both competing plans, would be sent to legislatures of the other 14 republics for their comments.

It was obvious where Gorbachev’s preferences lay: He noted that the group of economists working under Stanislav S. Shatalin, himself a member of the Presidential Council, had devised a plan that “combines organically” the path to a market economy and a decentralization of political authority.

“Attempts to propose a program that would ignore the various states of affairs in the republics--and it is a reality--such a program, I may say, is doomed,” Gorbachev said, in a transparent allusion to the more centralized plan advocated by Ryzhkov.

There is great political pressure on Gorbachev to reject Ryzhkov’s plan. Yeltsin, who advocates a fast privatization of property, has said the Russian Federation, which accounts for more than half the Soviet population and 70% of its foreign trade, will opt for a radical 500-day reform program whatever the “center,” or national government, decides to do.

As the two councils, plus representatives of the republics and various social organizations, were meeting, Soviet media and officials chronicled the further breakdown of the economy. Consumers are now short of both gasoline in Uzbekistan and bread in Moscow, where people returning from vacation have overwhelmed the bakeries’ output.

On Thursday, the health minister, Dr. Igor Denisov, warned the nation--which once boasted that its state-run health care system was better than America’s--that it could run out of medicines by February “because the pharmaceutical industry is crumbling even more rapidly than the rest of the economy.”

Speaking at the Foreign Ministry press center, Gorbachev said the councils had approved a program for economic “stabilization,” a new and still vague term of contemporary Soviet political jargon that, as used by Gorbachev, seems to signify an array of government wage and price controls to eliminate or rein in the effects of impending economic changes.

“In the three (final) months of this year and the first three months of next year, this time will be used to undertake serious measures . . . to stabilize the economy,” he said. “Urgent measures” are envisaged to “tie up hot money, to block the channel for the growth of quick money and incomes,” Gorbachev said.

However, he said, achievement of the market economy remains the ultimate goal, adding that stabilization--in Russian, stabilizatsia --”signifies that we will be able to move more resolutely toward the market.” To that end, some supply-and-demand practices will be introduced in the six-month period, he said.

“We shall act in such a manner that will enable us to introduce market elements and create market infrastructure and, while controlling some positions, to allow more freedom as far as prices for some goods are concerned,” he said.

In a last-ditch attempt to save the multinational conglomerate that is the Soviet Union, Gorbachev is proposing increasing the rights and powers of Russia, the Ukraine and the other republics to found a grouping of “sovereign states.” But he said that in the two days of Kremlin meetings, “there was a strong note in the discussion that we need one economic space, and this means one currency, one customs, one bank.”

As the next phase of drawing up a new union treaty--Gorbachev said a draft had been prepared by the Presidential and Federation councils--a committee will be formed consisting of Gorbachev, Ryzhkov, Supreme Soviet Chairman Anatoly I. Lukyanov and the leaders of the republics, Gorbachev said.