Yeltsin Asks Legislature for Crisis Government : Soviet Union: Gorbachev is upstaged by the Russian president, who calls for a vote of no confidence.

Upstaging Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Russian Federation leader Boris N. Yeltsin called Friday on the country’s legislature to replace the government with an emergency “anti-crisis committee” and to seek urgent food aid from the West to stave off famine.

“The economic and political crisis is becoming extremely acute. The patience of the people has reached its limit,” Yeltsin ominously told the Supreme Soviet at a crucial session called by the legislature to assess the deteriorating state of the nation. “At any moment, an explosion can occur.”

The lawmakers had convened to hear Gorbachev report on the country’s economic, social and ethnic troubles, but he dismayed many on both the left and right by delivering a rambling, often testy 80-minute discourse instead of precise remedies that would arrest the downward Soviet spiral.

“No prophet can help Gorbachev now; he’s missed the boat,” one prominent conservative, Vasily Starodubstev, the head of the Peasants Union, said in disgust. Genrikh Igityan, an acerbic Armenian, said Gorbachev seemed as out of touch with Soviet problems as an emigre who had been abroad for years.

By all accounts, Friday’s speech was a bad blunder by Gorbachev, who is trying to stem burgeoning ethnic and political rivalries before they cause the breakup of the country. Moreover, events inside the snow-wreathed Kremlin disclosed an unparalleled lack of confidence in Gorbachev among political decision-makers only two days before he is to leave Moscow for Rome and Paris.

In Paris, the 59-year-old Soviet leader’s ability to ride out his country’s assorted crises will be a major topic of discussion in the corridors of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to be attended by both Gorbachev and President Bush. So will the question of whether the West should aid the Soviet Union to safeguard Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms, and if so, on what scale.

On Wednesday, Soviet lawmakers, alarmed at what they had seen in their districts during a holiday recess, changed their agenda to seek a way out of the country’s crisis. Glowering and confident, Yeltsin strode to the podium to deliver his concise and specific recommendations, a pointed contrast with Gorbachev.

First, the Russian populist--shown by opinion polls to be the country’s most-respected politician--called upon the legislature to follow the Russian Parliament’s lead and pass a vote of no confidence in the government of Prime Minister Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, who is blamed by Yeltsin for hamstringing economic reform.

Second, he said, power must pass from the Council of Ministers, or Soviet Cabinet, that Ryzhkov heads to an “extraordinary anti-crisis committee” that would include representatives of each Soviet republic. Gorbachev “must hold consultations about this with all republics within the next two weeks,” said Yeltsin, who implied that the president should also be accountable to the committee.

Finally, “the No. 1 crisis for Russia and the country is food,” he declared. “The situation is extremely grave; it has no precedent in the past several decades. In some cities, the food stocks are good for two or three days. And this is in the sixth year of perestroika !

“I am convinced that we must cast aside our pride and appeal to the developed Western countries for urgent food aid, perhaps in the form of a lend-lease scheme,” he said.

In addition, Yeltsin said strategic reserves stockpiled by the Soviet government “for the next war” could be tapped if needed and a nationwide system of ration cards issued.

“I believe that the country and the republic (Russia) have the potential of averting famine this winter,” he said, cautioning that time cannot be wasted: “We must take extraordinary, urgent measures to hold on through this winter.”

As the Soviet Union’s state-run economy breaks down, or is shattered into fragments by ethnic and political disputes, food supplies have been disrupted so seriously that rationing was introduced this week in Leningrad and is planned for Moscow.

Gorbachev admitted that current shortages are bad but said his opponents are spreading “vile rumors that the country will be hungry and cold” to discredit his reform drive. This year’s grain harvest was 23 million tons more than in 1989, he said, but some areas--including Yeltsin’s Russia--are not making deliveries of staples such as meat and milk mandated by the Five-Year Plan.

“Separatism will only complicate the situation further,” Gorbachev said, thumping the lectern with his hand for emphasis. “We can only get out of this crisis together.”

He sought to reassure legislators and the nation as a whole that the Soviet leadership knows the way out of the present difficulties. “There is a plan; it just has to be carried out,” he said.

But for lawmakers, Gorbachev’s speech was short on specifics. Many said he made only one identifiable new proposal--a request for a “moratorium” to halt the administrative tug-of-war between the Kremlin and newly assertive parliaments in the republics as a new federal arrangement, the Union Treaty, is formulated.

The president also said personnel changes would be made soon at the top echelons of the Soviet armed forces--intriguing wording that could presage the departure of Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov--and in similarly vague terms, spoke of plans to create a “government with a broad social basis.”

“We wanted to hear a program for action and not excuses and complaints about difficulties and obstacles,” Anatoly A. Sobchak, the progressive mayor of Leningrad, told reporters later. “The issue of the day is not forming a new government, but imposing emergency measures, a state of emergency.”

However, in what could herald a compromise between the two most powerful figures in Soviet politics, Gorbachev adviser Georgy K. Shakhnazarov told journalists that Yeltsin’s proposal for an anti-crisis committee “was exactly the same” as what Gorbachev now has in mind.

Yeltsin last Sunday called upon Gorbachev to form a “coalition government of national unity” and claimed that Gorbachev had agreed to it in principle in their five-hour meeting. The Soviet president, however, told the 542-member legislature that to share power with Russia alone would be unfair to the other 14 Soviet republics.

In debate that is to continue today, a parade of lawmakers and local leaders trooped to the microphone to fix blame for the Soviet Union’s woes and offer solutions.

“There is danger of a social riot,” warned the president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan. He shrugged off Gorbachev’s proposal for a moratorium, saying, “It is clear to all that it won’t go through.”

Despite Gorbachev’s hopes for a rejuvenated Soviet Union, the envoy of Georgia’s newly elected nationalist government, Akaky Asatiani, served official notice that his homeland, which “lost its national independence in 1921 due to Soviet Russia’s aggression,” will not sign the Union Treaty proposed by Gorbachev and is bent on recovering statehood.

Envoys from Latvia and Estonia said they also want no part of even a “new-style” Soviet Union, and the third of the independence-minded Baltic republics, Lithuania, did not even bother to send a representative to address the chamber.

From the sidelines, ousted Communist conservative Yegor K. Ligachev watched the discordant spectacle with relish. “This is like Krilov!” the Siberian said at one point with a laugh, referring to a Russian writer famous for his tale of how a crab, swan and pike hitched to a cart end up pulling it in three directions.