Gorbachev OKs Split Authority, Yeltsin Says

President Boris N. Yeltsin of the Russian republic said today that Mikhail S. Gorbachev has agreed to divide authority between their rival governments, a major step toward ending the nationwide paralysis of power.

The agreement appeared to mark a major concession by the Soviet president, who has not yet commented publicly on his five-hour meeting Sunday with Yeltsin, his political archrival.

“Russia has chosen its path and is on its way,” Yeltsin told Russia’s Parliament today in the most detailed account yet of Sunday’s session.

The two men have appointed commissions that are discussing how the two governments should divide such fundamental responsibilities as foreign affairs, national security, taxation, banking and currency, Yeltsin said.

The commissions’ decisions would redefine the very basis of power in the Soviet Union. The vast Russian republic is home to half the Soviet Union’s 287 million people and composes two-thirds of its territory.

Yeltsin said he had proposed to Gorbachev “a new system of state power: the formation of a coalition government of national unity in which the candidates for several posts would be proposed by the Russian Parliament.”

The Russian president was greeted with laughter and applause in the chamber when he added that he “did not ask for many posts, just three, prime minister, defense and finances,” jobs that form the crux of Soviet power.

The nation has undergone a crisis of authority since a declaration of sovereignty last June by the Russian republic, which has the lion’s share of the nation’s natural resources and wealth.

The result has been a series of conflicting laws and decrees issued by Yeltsin and Gorbachev and the national and Russian parliaments that have virtually paralyzed commerce across the country, worsening the already dire shortages of food and other consumer goods.

“We are starting the process that should have started after we passed our declaration” of Russian sovereignty in June, Yeltsin said.

He said he told the Soviet president that the crisis was caused because “you are conducting a policy of diktat from the center,” in violation of the old Soviet constitution and violation of recent agreements between the two men.

“You did not officially recognize the division of functions between the center and Russia,” Yeltsin said.

“The same happened with the economic program, that is, everything is coming from the center,” with Gorbachev unwilling to share power with the national and Russian parliaments, Yeltsin told the lawmakers.