Economic Reformers Publish Plan : Soviet Union: In Izvestia article, they stress that 500-day program would not increase hardships. Gorbachev has not OKd final package.

Radical economists who have mapped out a 500-day plan to save the Soviet economy took their case to an apprehensive public Tuesday, trying to allay fears that the program would impose even greater hardships on long-suffering consumers who now cannot even count on the supply of bread.

In a full-page article in the government newspaper Izvestia, the task force, headed by presidential adviser Stanislav A. Shatalin, reassured readers that the plan would not bring skyrocketing prices, greater shortages and civil unrest.

Instead, the program, in an ideological break with Soviet socialism of the last seven decades, promises to rescue the country from “the verge of catastrophe” by selling or giving back to the people most of the property that the economists argue was taken from them by the government.

The task force presented private property as the main remedy for the country’s ever-increasing economic ills, from spiraling inflation and falling production to the grinding shortages that brought a rash of consumer unrest this summer.

In the last week, the supply of bread, the main staple of the Soviet diet and the traditional symbol of well-being for Russians, has fallen short in Moscow and other regions.

The economists’ article, amounting to the first public sales pitch on behalf of the program, was somewhat premature: Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his advisers have yet to settle on a final version of the reform plan.

But Vitaly N. Ignatenko, Gorbachev’s press secretary, said that the president basically agrees with the 500-day plan. Gorbachev instructed officials drafting the final program to finish it quickly so it could be brought before the legislatures of the 15 constituent republics within the next few days.

Ignatenko said Gorbachev, who has ordered the plan merged with a more conservative proposal from Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, was still trying to work out crucial compromises on its speed, sequence and provisions for price reform.

The Shatalin group promised that the economic reform would not turn into just one more ill-conceived experiment; it would make the government bear most financial losses rather than the people.

“The program sets itself the task of taking everything possible away from the government and giving it to the people,” the economists said. “This is not an act of revenge but the restoration of social justice.”

In what amounts to a manifesto on the virtues of private property and the market-based economy, the task force outlined its strategy in terms of basic rights, including people’s “right to property,” “free consumer choice and fair prices” and “the civil right to the growth of income and social guarantees.”

The document laid out in general terms how people would be able to buy housing, land and other property from the government and how most state enterprises would turn into private or joint-stock companies.

The many workers who would lose their jobs would receive unemployment compensation--until now nonexistent in the Soviet Union--and retraining, the group promised. According to recent official estimates, 30 million workers may lose their jobs as the economy shifts.

Price rises will focus on luxury items, only gradually affecting more basic goods. This pricing plan contrasted sharply with a reform program backed by Ryzhkov earlier this year that triggered panic buying with its proposal to raise prices by governmental fiat on most consumer goods.

The 500-day plan, with its highly un-Communist approach to property, has brought surprisingly mild criticism so far from Soviet conservatives.

Yegor K. Ligachev, considered the leading hard-liner in the Communist Party Politburo until his retirement in July, told the Tass news agency Tuesday that he backs the idea of mixed forms of property but does not think private ownership should dominate.

Ivan K. Polozkov, head of the Russian Communist Party and considered the leader of the party conservatives these days, withheld judgment on the plan at a news conference Tuesday, saying, “Let’s wait until there is a single program” agreed on by the government.

Polozkov told delegates to a Russian Communist Party congress that Gorbachev’s reform program is “on the brink of collapse,” but he failed to propose an alternative.

The failure of more moderate measures over the last five years has clearly added momentum to acceptance of the 500-day plan.

Yuri N. Prokofiev, Moscow’s party chief, warned at the party congress that dictatorship looms if the government cannot control the economy and ethnic conflicts.

“The tangible danger has arisen that democratization will become an episode in history” as the country passed from communism, “via chaos and disorder, to dictatorship,” he said.

Radicals and liberals have thus far actively supported the 500-day concept, and Boris N. Yeltsin, the reformist president of the vast Russian Federation, began discussion of a 250-page version of the plan in his republic’s Parliament on Monday.