Yeltsin Wants Prime Minister to Resign : Soviet Union: The head of the Russian republic is pushing a crash plan for economic reform. The government backs a conservative version.

Russian republic leader Boris N. Yeltsin, intent on pushing through a crash plan for economic reforms, called Saturday for the Soviet prime minister to resign and accused President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of harboring the unrealistic desire to please everyone.

He told reporters that Gorbachev cannot succeed in his attempts to merge two economic programs--a radical plan based on a 500-day reform recipe and the more conservative government version put together under Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov.

“You can’t cross a hedgehog and a snake,” Yeltsin said, referring to a Soviet children’s joke about the offspring--a loop of barbed wire. “The president apparently wanted to satisfy both sides. That is impossible.”

The deadline ran out Saturday for two competing panels to come up with plans for shifting the country from central planning to a market-driven system, but Gorbachev announced Friday night that “final work” would last another week as the two plans are fused. The merged program is then to go out to legislatures in the 15 Soviet republics for approval.

Yeltsin warned at a news conference that the government program “will lead to collapse,” and said that even for the more radical plan to work, “the first precondition is that the government, with Ryzhkov at its head, resign.”

Living up to his reputation as an unwavering reformer, Yeltsin said that whatever the national government decides, the parliament of his Russian Federation is sure to adopt the 500-day plan and put it into motion.

He thus appeared to back Gorbachev into a corner. The Russian republic encompasses two-thirds of Soviet territory and one-half the population; if the central government balks at the radical plan but Russia goes ahead with it, Moscow will simply lose most of its economic control over the country and Gorbachev will end up looking ineffective.

Soviet observers said Saturday that Gorbachev actually approved of the radical plan but he, too, was living up to his reputation--as the eternal consolidator and something of a softie who would not seek political capital by dumping a comrade, even one as unpopular as Ryzhkov.

“He wants the sheep to be untouched and the wolves to be fed,” Pravda economic commentator Mikhail Gurtovoy said.

Yeltsin said the calls for Ryzhkov’s resignation from other government officials and citizens were becoming ever louder, and warned that a discredited government could not make reforms work.

Yeltsin also called for the resignation of all national government officials whose ministries will implement the reforms--in banking, finance, central planning, central supply and elsewhere--and said a special body should be created to oversee the economic program.

Most of the Soviet republics have agreed to the 500-day plan, so it would be possible to sign an economic agreement among them and the Kremlin that might soon be “the only net keeping the country together,” Yeltsin said.

Gorbachev announced Friday that his leadership plans a six-month economic “stabilization” program before going ahead full-force with market-style reforms. He did not explain the term, but appeared to be referring to wage and price controls, as well as measures to soak up millions of extra rubles that fuel the country’s ubiquitous shortages.

The radical plan, worked out by a team of predominantly young economists under presidential adviser Stanislav A. Shatalin, allots broad decision-making powers to the republic governments. Gurtovoy compared it to an authority who sets the rules of the game, but then allows each team to figure out its strategy and tactics of play.

The plan has not been published, but it is expected to begin with the massive selloff of government property and measures to break the state monopoly in most industries. By the end of the 500 days, it foresees deregulated prices.

In contrast, a plan proposed by Ryzhkov last spring retained strong central control over the economy and would have begun with price rises. It prompted panic-buying across the country and was ultimately sent back for more work--meaning rejection--by the Supreme Soviet legislature.

Yeltsin said Saturday that the Russian Federation, to avoid such a legislative fiasco, is creating a new brain trust of 25 top economic consultants that will include six Soviet emigres living in the West.

He did not name the members, but quipped that they are “very intelligent people, more intelligent than Yeltsin.”