Russia’s Yeltsin Says ‘Budget War’ Isn’t Over Yet : Soviet Union: In a new challenge to Gorbachev, he says the republic will contribute only two-thirds of what it gave last year to the national budget.

Boris N. Yeltsin, leader of the powerful Russian republic, warned on Saturday that a “budget war” continues to threaten the Soviet Union with collapse, contrary to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s confident predictions of a new national agreement on the economy.

Yeltsin, Gorbachev’s relentless political opponent, said his Russian Federation government would contribute two-thirds of what it gave last year to the 1991 national budget and it simply could not agree to Soviet Finance Ministry demands for nearly $50 billion more.

“So, once again, we’re going to be talking about a budget war,” Yeltsin told reporters.

Despite repeated appeals from the public for the Soviet Union’s two top leaders to reconcile their differences, Yeltsin’s remarks indicated that he has once again assumed the role of spoiler, blocking Gorbachev’s plans to keep the Soviet Union united under the Kremlin’s supreme power.

And Gorbachev, for his part, issued a presidential decree on land reform Saturday night that appeared aimed at overriding a law that Yeltsin’s Russian Federation Parliament passed last month.

Gorbachev’s decree said Soviet plots of land, now owned mainly by state and collective farms, could be owned privately and inherited, but it made no provision for their purchase and sale. The more radical Russian Federation law allows private land to be sold after a farmer has worked it for 10 years.

Although a nationwide referendum on permitting private land ownership is planned this spring, the Soviet president’s decree was meant to speed the process of turning land over to individual farmers.

Gorbachev won broad powers to control the economy last fall and had the right to issue a land reform decree with the force of law, but the move brought him once again into a head-on clash with Yeltsin.

Yeltsin and other leaders of the country’s 15 constituent republics insist they must have near-total power to decide their own policies--including their own budgets.

On Thursday, Gorbachev appeared to have achieved a major breakthrough with the independent-minded republics when he announced an agreement with their leaders on this year’s Soviet budget and the principles for future economic relations. He predicted that the vital accord would preserve the nation’s “political and economic stability.”

Yeltsin did not contradict Gorbachev’s announcement. Then he said Saturday that the republican leaders had not reached a full consensus. This could jeopardize the signing of the final agreement.

Without Russia, the accord would be doomed. The vast republic spreads across almost three-quarters of Soviet territory, is home to more than half the country’s population and dominates its economy.

If there is no agreement among the republics’ leaders, the national legislature is unlikely to meet its deadline this week for approving a budget and economic development plan for 1991, and the central government will remain in economic limbo.

Gorbachev accused Yeltsin late last month of bringing on “the collapse not only of the economy but of the country” by refusing to provide the Russian Federation’s usual share of the budget. He said the Russian defiance could leave the government unable to pay salaries, pensions and military expenses.

Yeltsin said Saturday that Russia is willing to pay about two-thirds of last year’s contribution--almost 80 billion rubles, or $144 billion at the official exchange rate.

The Finance Ministry’s demand on Friday for an additional 27 billion rubles--$48.6 billion--is “indecent,” he said.

Russia does not want the country to disintegrate, Yeltsin said, but “let this be on the president’s conscience.”

Yeltsin said he had sent an alternative version of the agreement to Gorbachev on Saturday with “serious comments.”

The three Baltic republics--Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania--are also reportedly unwilling to approve the economic agreement.

The budget clash is only the latest episode in the conflict between Gorbachev, Yeltsin and other republic leaders over the issue of the division of powers between the central government and the republics.

Although the republican leaders discussed the budget when they met with Gorbachev last week, “there was a more global--and as yet unsolved--problem behind it, namely, the distribution of powers between the national government and the republics,” Nikolai Y. Petrakov, Gorbachev’s economic adviser, told the newspaper Izvestia.

“If it is solved,” Petrakov said, “it will be possible to determine who pays how much to whom and for what.”

As government deliberations have dragged on, the Soviet economy has shown increasing signs of its ill health.

The Rabochaya Tribuna newspaper reported that the central government’s domestic debt now stands at more than $900 billion as a result of years of budget deficits.

Vadim Kirichenko, chairman of the State Statistics Committee, said that 1990 marked the beginning of an absolute drop in the country’s industrial output and national income.

Production of coal and oil, metal and wood products dropped substantially as a result of the country’s growing disorganization and instability, he told the official Soviet news agency Tass.

The economy was also hurt, he said, “by endless showdowns between the center and the republics.”

And, in a move that will bruise Soviet pride even more than declining output and rising deficits, authorities have announced that Moscow, long the country’s showpiece, will begin food rationing on Feb. 1.