Gorbachev Won’t Make It to Nobel Prize Ceremony : Soviet Union: ‘Crucial situation’ will keep Peace Prize winner at home next month, an aide says.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev announced Wednesday that he will postpone his trip to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize because the “crucial situation” in his country demands his full attention.

But the committee which awards the prize refused to postpone the ceremony.

“He would rather receive a Nobel Prize for peace when he feels there is peace in his own country,” said Sergei A. Grigoriev, a Gorbachev spokesman. “This is a very difficult time and the president has a very tough schedule.”

Gorbachev is desperately trying to keep his union together. But at least four republics--Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia--have refused to sign a proposed federal treaty and several others have voiced grave reservations.

“The confusion in relations between republics is destroying the ties that have always existed in the Soviet Union,” Gorbachev told reporters Tuesday.

The day after he had originally planned to travel to Oslo to receive the prize, Dec. 9, Gorbachev will chair a plenary meeting of the Soviet Communist Party’s policy-making Central Committee to discuss the new union treaty.

He is also preoccupied with preparing for a special session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament and supreme body of government, which is to convene Dec. 17. The lawmakers are scheduled to debate, among other things, Gorbachev’s program for restructuring the national government, which envisions giving him direct command of a cabinet-type executive branch.

The president has also been given two weeks to present an emergency program to the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, on relieving the country’s acute food shortages.

“All this demands that the president focus all his concentration on finding solutions to all of these problems,” Grigoriev said.

Although Gorbachev’s 1990 Nobel Prize was met with accolades abroad, his home audience was not nearly as impressed. Many here scoff at Gorbachev’s award, which also carries a cash stipend of $710,000, saying he should not be acclaimed for achievements in foreign policy when people cannot buy even staple foods in the government grocery stores and ethnic tensions continue to flare into bloodshed.

A poll taken by the All-Union Public Opinion Research Center and published this week found that only 26% of the Soviet people questioned considered Gorbachev’s Nobel--the first ever awarded to a Soviet leader--”an important event.”

Gorbachev sent letters of regret to the Swedish and Norwegian Nobel committees, Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland and Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson. He asked that the ceremony be postponed.

In Oslo, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Wednesday that it will not delay the peace prize ceremony until May despite the Gorbachev’s request.

The committee said it must abide by the established practice of awarding the prize on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will established the prizes.

The committee asked Gorbachev “to inform us as soon as possible who you wish to represent you at the ceremony on Dec. 10.”