Separatism Could Lead to Civil War, Gorbachev Says : Soviet Union: Unless nationalist challenges are met, he warns, the Communist Party will become irrelevant.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev warned Monday that the failure to halt the growing separatism among the Soviet Union’s ethnic republics could thrust the country into civil war and disintegration such as that in Lebanon.

Gorbachev, opening a meeting of the Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee, also urged party members to recognize the country’s urgent need to develop a market economy--even if it means the abandonment of their long-held views on what socialism is.

And he offered to form “a coalition with all progressive and patriotic forces,” effectively sharing power with the country’s emerging democratic movements on the basis of an “anti-crisis” program to win broader support for the tough reforms ahead.

Battling to reassert his leadership in the midst of a national crisis of confidence, Gorbachev told the party leaders, gathered from around the country for a two-day strategy session, that unless they quickly meet nationalist and economic challenges, the party will soon become irrelevant and probably lose power.

The most important task for the country’s 18 million Communists is to preserve the Soviet Union’s integrity as a state and “resist pressure from separatist forces,” Gorbachev said, according to a text of his speech provided by the official Soviet news agency Tass.

“Let’s be frank,” he declared. “If these tendencies are not overcome and are permitted to develop further, the country could face a real threat of ‘Lebanonization’ and all the well-known consequences of it.”

“Separatists” are creating “an atmosphere of fear and terror,” he continued, and “in these conditions people are afraid to say what they think.”

Establishment of a new federal political structure, allowing the Soviet Union’s different ethnic groups maximum autonomy but preserving the country’s unity, is “gaining decisive importance,” Gorbachev said. “Practically everything boils down to it.”

Although he did not elaborate on his offer to form an “anti-crisis” coalition, he implied a new willingness to work with nationalist and democratic movements outside of the party on the basis of preserving the Soviet Union and establishing a market economy.

Gorbachev’s message was not new, but there was added urgency in his words at the Kremlin meeting, for the country’s economy is disintegrating almost daily, political order is breaking down, much of the government is paralyzed and social unrest is mounting.

Vladimir A. Ivashko, the party’s deputy general secretary, cited the collapsing economy, including the failure to curb inflation, the decline in industrial production and difficulties in bringing in the fall harvest.

“The temperature of our long-seriously-ill society has reached a critical point,” Ivashko said. “Shortages are all pervasive; speculation and price rises that have hit consumers poison the lives of millions of Soviet people every day.”

Above all, there is a loss of confidence--in the reform program, in Gorbachev, in the nation’s ability to cope with its problems--and Gorbachev’s own leadership, both as president and party chief, is being questioned openly.

“The capacity of the president to remain in the center, which I admired in March, does not inspire me with the same delight today,” Irina Ovchinnikova, a political commentator for the newspaper Izvestia, wrote last week in a front-page article. “Like many others, I would prefer more definite, decisive action.”

Describing the party leadership as lacking energy and ideas, a political scientist from Uzbekistan in Soviet Central Asia asked in the party newspaper Pravda on Monday “whether the Communist Party will be preserved.”

“It may well happen that not only the party but also the Soviet Union itself will fall apart,” Ruben Safarov wrote, warning that the country is in danger of breaking up before a new treaty of union can be concluded by the republics. “Then there will be no one to sign the much-touted new treaty.”

And another political scientist, writing in Izvestia on Monday, said: “The moment of truth has come for Gorbachev and his team. Maneuvering between the right and the left has run out of steam. Continuation of this line may result in the president falling behind and never catching up again.

“That is what happened in Eastern Europe to a lot of leaders who started the reforms but failed to drop the old stereotypes and obsolete political course fast enough.”

Gorbachev, replying to such direct and unprecedented criticism, urged the party to redeem its promises of sweeping economic reforms, starting with the development of a market economy governed by supply and demand and based on private as well as state and collective ownership of property.

“The primary reason for our many economic and social difficulties is the state’s monopoly on property,” Gorbachev said, laying the new political creed he wants the party to adopt. “That turns property into no one’s and undermines the motivation for harder work and economic initiative.

“We have an understanding of the need for multiple forms of ownership; when we approach the practical problem there is, unexpectedly, a lack of understanding that grows and becomes an obstacle.”

Although the party’s 28th congress approved a fundamental transformation of the economy after much debate in July, many in its ranks are now balking, Gorbachev said, and the whole reform program is in risk.

“I see the whole problem in the inertia of old thinking,” Gorbachev said. “In this, I see the danger that presently threatens the party--the danger of losing the initiative when changes are overdue. . . .

“All our previous ideology presented socialism as the direct opposition to the market and view recognition of the market as an encroachment on socialism.

“Yes, we are encroaching on socialism,” he continued, “but only that socialism that was built bureaucratically and under which the country veered off the path it embarked upon (with the Bolshevik Revolution) in 1917.”

Justifying the changes in ideological terms, he drew a historical parallel between these reforms and the New Economic Program launched in the 1920s by V. I. Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, arguing that this program is necessary to save the socialist cause and the Soviet Union as a state.

Implicit in his parallel, however, was a comparison between the opponents of the current reforms and those party leaders, notably the late dictator Josef Stalin, who undermined and then killed Lenin’s program.

Gorbachev pledged that the program of economic reforms that he will present next week to the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, will be a bold document, not a hodgepodge of compromises, although debate continues over many of its elements and even its underlying philosophy.

“We cannot allow the party at this difficult, fateful moment to waste its political energy and potential on arguments,” he told the Central Committee. “If that happens, it risks the loss of its authority with the masses.”