Yeltsin Hopeful of Key Accord With Gorbachev : Soviet Union: An agreement between the two men on sharing natural resources would help lay the foundation for economic reforms.

After months of bitter wrangling, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his principal rival, Boris N. Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation, may be near a crucial agreement on how to share the country’s natural resources and industrial base, Yeltsin said Monday.

That agreement, if concluded soon, would help lay the foundation for economic reforms and for a new treaty among the Soviet Union’s constituent republics, including Russia, the largest, on the country’s future as a federal state.

Yeltsin, speaking after a weekend meeting with Gorbachev, said that, for the first time, the central government has agreed to initially negotiate the key issues of how to share the country’s vast wealth and to manage its economy--and only then to tackle how to restructure the Soviet Union and realign relations among the republics and between them and Moscow.

“We experienced pressure until yesterday (Sunday),” Yeltsin told a commission drafting a new Russian constitution. “That pressure was aimed at making us sign a union treaty first and settle all other issues later. . . . We could not accept that, and we won’t.”

But he and Gorbachev had agreed, first in two hours of one-on-one talks and then in another three hours of talks with their prime ministers, that parallel Soviet and Russian commissions would be established to settle the division of powers between the central and republic governments, the ownership of industrial enterprises and the use of natural resources.

The commissions would also discuss changes in the banking system, state finances and economic management. They would then work together on drafting the new union treaty, which Yeltsin said could be ready by the end of the year.

“The document delimiting functions (of the central and Russian governments) will serve as the basis for the federal treaty,” Yeltsin said.

But no treaty would be signed before there were also agreements on sharing of natural resources--including oil, natural gas and gold--and on management of the banking system and financing of the central budget.

As outlined by Yeltsin, the understanding reached with Gorbachev could help end the prolonged impasse exacerbating the country’s triple crisis: economic disintegration virtually unchecked by any reforms; breakup of the Soviet Union as a centralized state, and the inability of the present political situation to resolve these and other issues.

Gorbachev has not commented on his discussions Sunday with Yeltsin, but it was he who approached the Russian populist after a political meeting last week and proposed the Kremlin talks.

The official Soviet news agency Tass described the talks between the two men as “businesslike and principled.”

Although much negotiation lies ahead, Gorbachev appears to have made significant concessions in agreeing that the constituent republics can work out in advance the terms on which they remain in Soviet Union and in recognizing that they have a right, which takes precedence over the claims of the central government, to the resources and enterprises on their territory.

Yeltsin, in return, committed himself and Russia to the Soviet Union and against its breakup. “I am for a strong union and union treaty,” Yeltsin said Monday, denying suggestions made in the conservative press that he was attempting to dismantle the Soviet Union even at the risk of civil war.

Whether this will end the feuding between Gorbachev and Yeltsin is uncertain, but the two appear to understand that they need each other. “The two leaders seem to be ‘doomed’ to cooperation, irrespective of their personal likes and dislikes and their political rivalry,” a political analyst for Tass wrote Monday.

An alliance formed in early August collapsed last month amid angry recriminations after Gorbachev refused to proceed with radical economic reforms as agreed to with Yeltsin, who strongly favored a 500-day “forced march” to develop a market economy.

But Yeltsin found that Russia could not proceed alone or carry out even modest economic reforms without resolving what the central government owns and what belongs to the republic as well as without agreeing about whose laws take precedence.

“A clear-cut distribution of powers between the center and the republics, above all Russia, would be the first step toward eliminating the vacuum of power at various levels,” Tass commentator Andrei Orlov wrote. “It would help remove the dangerous uncertain in relations with other countries and give a fresh impetus to economic reforms.”