Gorbachev Wins Sweeping Power : Soviet Union: Lawmakers’ action puts the president on a collision course with Yeltsin. Deputies again put off choosing an economic reform plan.

Pressured and cajoled by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Soviet lawmakers granted him vast emergency powers Monday to remold an economy shattered by more than 70 years of state socialism, but they delayed their own key decision on how to create a supply-and-demand system in its place.

On a tumultuous day that some Supreme Soviet deputies saw as producing decisions menacing their authority but that highlighted the parliamentary paralysis, Gorbachev received overwhelming backing on his request for still greater authority in the economic and social spheres. And with a deft maneuver, he safeguarded the position of embattled Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov.

Gorbachev’s reinforced powers, however, deeply troubled some legislators and put the Kremlin leadership on a collision course with the president of the Russian Federation, Boris N. Yeltsin, who has rejected the idea of a more-powerful Gorbachev as a menace to the sovereignty of the largest of the 15 Soviet republics.

“It is yet another crude blunder by the Supreme Soviet, which further sinks into the abyss of dishonesty,” Mikhail N. Poltoranin, the Russian Federation’s information minister, said Monday night by telephone. “Gorbachev needs those special powers to restrain those who have begun hopping too fast, namely Russia.”

In a 305-36 vote, with 41 abstentions, the Supreme Soviet in effect empowered Gorbachev until March 31, 1992 to make law single-handedly, if need be, in the fields of economic management, property relations, the budgetary and financial systems, salaries, price formation and the reinforcement of law and order.

Its motivation was twofold: to allow for “extraordinary measures” to lift the Soviet Union out of its current emergencies and to empower Gorbachev to prepare the way for market reforms, even if he must violate existing law to do so.

In an often emotional and sometimes angry speech, Gorbachev said the extra powers he requested Friday are indispensable to halt the crisis spreading through Soviet society, where consumer goods are in scant supply and disgruntlement is rising fast.

“From all the TV screens, the newspapers, from friends and enemies, literate or illiterate, we can hear a single cry--there must be a strong executive power,” Gorbachev said. “Priority now belongs to ensuring stability--political, legal, economic.”

To little avail, some in the legislature objected that they were giving Gorbachev a virtual blank check or that the law provided for incomplete oversight of his actions. Yuri Boldyrev, a progressive from Leningrad, complained that Gorbachev had been extended “absolutely unlimited powers.”

Leningrad’s mayor, jurist Anatoly A. Sobchak, sought an amendment that would have required that the legislature ratify each Gorbachev ukase, instead of leaving it to lawmakers to take the initiative to request that he modify or rescind decrees they disagree with. But Sobchak’s proposal failed decisively on a 94 to 211 vote, and Gorbachev reminded him that he too has endorsed the strengthening of executive powers.

Outside the hall, there was dissent on a modest scale. A dozen or so protesters chanting “The people don’t trust Gorbachev!” gathered at the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate, carrying signs that read: “A President--Not an Emperor.”

Poltoranin said the vote would not deter Russia’s leadership from implementing its own 500-day plan that provides for the sale or lease of most state-owned enterprises and the quick transition to a market economy. Russian leaders had viewed Gorbachev’s request for more powers as a warning that he might dissolve Russia’s legislature, which Yeltsin chairs.

Although the time limit placed on Gorbachev’s powers was designed to run concurrently with the national version of the 500-day plan, Gorbachev successfully managed to keep the Supreme Soviet from formally endorsing either that program, developed by his close economic adviser Stanislav S. Shatalin, or a more conservative reform agenda drawn up by Ryzhkov.

Gorbachev held a closed-door meeting with Shatalin, Ryzhkov and some Supreme Soviet committee chairmen and then, over protests, including some from the economist himself, asked that both Shatalin’s and Ryzhkov’s plans, along with some other documents, become the joint “basis” of a final program to be worked out by Oct. 15 by a committee to be appointed by Gorbachev.

That motion, which some deputies criticized as a retreat from the Shatalin program’s resolute pro-market approach, passed 285 to 36, with 60 absentions.

“If you want to save (Ryzhkov’s) government by this maneuver, then you will discredit the Supreme Soviet,” an irritated Gennady I. Filshin, an economist from Novosibirsk, told Gorbachev.

An unemotional man who prefers drab suits and the measured tones of a technocrat, Ryzhkov has indicated that he will resign if the 500-day plan is passed, and radicals and progressives want him replaced with a prime minister who will implement the program.

Ryzhkov, who will celebrate his 61st birthday Friday, sees the Shatalin plan as a formula for disaster. He told the nation Sunday in a television interview that an overnight end to state ownership of industry and agriculture would plunge the county into chaos. He said the transition to a market system will take “years, not days.”

Gorbachev, who watched the legislative proceedings from a special section of the dais decorated with a Soviet flag, came to the defense of Ryzhkov, his comrade-in-arms virtually since he became Soviet leader 5 1/2 years ago.

“Everyone knows in what times the government is working, and a considerable part of those people who strongly criticize it at the same time support its position to continue its policy,” Gorbachev asserted.

Hours of indecisive parliamentary debate and five separate votes on a single clause of the motion on the economic program showed how reluctant most of the Supreme Soviet’s members were to commit themselves, and how malleable they were as a result in Gorbachev’s hands.

At one point, 218 deputies voted to make the 500-day plan based on recommendations from Shatalin the sole basis of the final blueprint for reform, but that was 43 short of the 261 needed to pass. Many of those “yes” votes obviously reversed themselves after Gorbachev intervened.

A moody Shatalin said that his program, by nature, could never be merged with Ryzhkov’s, no matter how hard the legislature tried.

“Even the Supreme Soviet does not have the power to repeal the Maxwell equation or Ohm’s law,” he said, referring to two 19th-Century discoveries about the properties of electricity.

THE CHANGING SOVIET PRESIDENCY

Before 1990: The nominal head of the Soviet state, the equivalent of a president in non-Soviet terms, was the chairman, or Speaker, of the Supreme Soviet, the rubber-stamp national legislature. In the Soviet Union’s collegial style of leadership, the office was largely ceremonial. Real power lay with the Communist Party and its general secretary, who sometimes also assumed the ceremonial presidency for the added prestige abroad. This is what Mikhail S. Gorbachev, already party secretary, did in October, 1988, displacing former Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko.

In March, 1990: With Gorbachev seeking to switch political power from the party to the government, the Congress of People’s Deputies, or Parliament, amended the Soviet constitution to create an executive presidency--specifically using the title of president. The holder of the new office now has the power to propose and veto legislation; appoint the prime minister subject to Parliament’s consent; represent the country abroad and negotiate treaties; chair the Defense Council and declare war if the country is attacked; call a national referendum; issue decrees that are binding on the country; order a state of emergency or martial law in any area (with the consent of the republic involved), and overrule a decision of the Council of Ministers, or government, if it violates the constitution and endangers people’s rights and freedoms. Parliament elected Gorbachev uncontested to a five-year term.

On Monday: The Supreme Soviet granted Gorbachev a part of its own powers until March 31, 1992. He now, in effect, can make the law in a given number of areas: property relations, the organization of economic management, the budgetary and financial systems, salaries, price formation and the “reinforcement of the legal order”--that is, the fight against crime. He can also take “organizational steps to accelerate the formation of a national market” and ensure the coordination to that end of actions by the constituent Soviet republics and the country’s other territorial formations. He is subject to the theoretical control of the Supreme Soviet.