Gorbachev Acts to End Control of Prices : Soviet Union: He authorizes most of the nation’s enterprises to negotiate their own wholesale deals for goods to be delivered next year.

The Soviet Union on Thursday took a major step toward ending state control of prices, long a barrier to fundamental economic reform.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, using his new authority to rule by decree, authorized most of the country’s enterprises to negotiate their own wholesale prices for goods to be delivered next year, freeing the firms from central government controls that had limited production and discouraged efficiency.

Although regarded as an essential measure for the radical overhaul of the Soviet economy, price reform has historically been so sensitive that several attempts at economic restructuring have faltered and failed on this issue alone, but no other way has been found to make enterprises here respond to demand and supply.

Gorbachev described the measure as aimed at “broadening the economic independence and increasing the motivation of enterprises to boost their output and production efficiency and create conditions to introduce market relations” as the basis of the country’s economy in the future.

The decree, as reported by the official news agency Tass, appears to confirm the government’s broad decision to use the market forces of supply and demand to force the Soviet Union’s state-owned, centrally planned economy into major changes, although perhaps at a controlled pace.

State officials will be allowed, however, to draw up a list of raw materials and other products whose wholesale prices will remain fixed, though perhaps at different levels, and taxes will be imposed on super-profits to discourage price-gouging.

Gorbachev said he was acting even before his overall reform plan is ready because some elements cannot wait for a consensus to develop; in moving on the issue of wholesale prices, however, he probably preempted further debate when the package is introduced in 10 days.

Economists are still struggling, however, to strike a balance between a plan calling for the radical transformation of the Soviet economy over 500 days and another urging a gradual transition to a market economy.

Valentin Pavlov, the finance minister, told Soviet television that the measure is a compromise and aimed primarily at halting the accelerating disintegration of the country’s economy and at increasing the production of consumer goods, now in extremely short supply.

Pavlov acknowledged that most wholesale prices will rise--most prices are based on a list worked out in the 1930s and updated periodically by the State Price Commission--but he refused to say whether, when or how they would then be passed on to consumers.

“Many retail prices will be lower than the new, negotiated wholesale prices,” he said, “and this will require special consideration.”

Pavlov sought to focus attention on the improved supplies of consumer goods that the government hopes the measure will bring rather than on the inevitable higher prices.

“It is well known that children’s goods do not appear in the shops,” he said. “They are not on sale because enterprises do not want to produce them because they are unprofitable. Under the new decree, providing for negotiated prices, they won’t be unprofitable products.”

The decree says that enterprises can sign contracts with each other for 1991 using negotiated wholesale prices but that they must be based on those outlined by the government in June, 1988.

Profits that rise above state-set limits will go to the federal and republic budgets through taxes on any super-profits that result from the negotiated prices.