Soviets Call Economic Output Worst Since 1945 : Kremlin: Gorbachev gives KGB and police the power to enter firms to inspect trade, production operations.

Offering news that could doom further attempts at market reform, the Soviet Union reported Saturday that the national economy registered its worst annual performance since World War II, with the gross national product actually dropping for the first time in 45 years.

In the last 12 months, the State Committee for Statistics announced, the deficit-plagued Soviet consumer market underwent “collapse.” All spheres of the economy, it said, were struck by the economic crisis.

The abysmal economic results for 1990, detailed in a special report from the committee printed in the “Economy and Life” weekly, give more potent ammunition to Soviet conservative forces demanding a halt, or even a retreat, in economic and political reforms for the sake of social stability.

Although radicals and progressives will see in the dismal figures another compelling argument for a rapid forced march to a Western-style market, the populace at large will be likely to blame President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s perestroika , now nearing the end of its sixth year.

Last fall, Gorbachev abandoned a 500-day plan that had been proposed to transfer the centralized Soviet economy into a supply-and-demand market system, and obtained increased powers from the legislature to reform the economy by decree.

His latest ukase, targeting “economic sabotage and other economic crimes,” was issued Saturday evening. Gorbachev gave vast additional powers to the KGB and police to freely enter any establishment where business is conducted, with the exception of foreign embassies, and to inspect the trade or production operations under way.

In part, the ukase appeared to target joint ventures between Soviet and foreign firms, which many people here believe are engaged in illegal currency transactions or other shady deals.

But as to the dismal economic report, the Tass news agency said: “It seems that rose-tinted summaries of statistics about the country’s socioeconomic development are a thing of the past.”

According to the State Committee for Statistics, commonly known here as Goskomstat, the Soviet GNP, the total value of goods and services produced in the country, declined by 2% in 1990.

Western experts said it was the first drop in Soviet GNP reported in the entire postwar period. In 1989, the GNP had risen by 3%.

Results were down across the board. Soviet workers produced 3% less in 1990 than the previous year. The trade deficit tripled, to 10 billion rubles, or $5.5 billion at the inflated official commercial exchange rate, in part, because of emergency purchases of foreign consumer goods.

Only a few branches of industry and agriculture met their government-assigned targets. From oil production and coal mining to the harvest of tea leaves and the production of blades for safety razors, output dropped.

“What has increased?” Pravda economic observer Alexander Fedotov asked sarcastically in his newspaper’s commentary on the statistics. The answers gave little cheer:

--The internal state debt rose by more than 150 billion rubles ($83 billion), and now exceeds 550 billion rubles ($305 billion).

--Retail prices in state stores increased by 5.3% on average, services by 3%.

--The state pumped 1 1/2 times more rubles into the economy in 1990 than during the previous year, sharply driving up prices on the dwindling assortment of goods available to consumers.

Despite the drop in labor productivity and the absence on a typical day of 220,000 trained workers from their jobs, largely because of ethnic turmoil and strikes, the average worker’s monthly salary rose by the equivalent of $16.40, to $150. That also fueled inflation.

Commenting on the Goskomstat report, a U.S. specialist on the Soviet economy said that the poor performance was no surprise, and that the published statistics probably understate the gravity of the situation.

“All available information would lead one to believe that the decline (in Soviet GNP) was at least 5%,” Ed Hewett, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in a telephone interview from suburban Washington, D.C.

Performance this year is likely to be even worse, Hewett said.

“Because of the breakdown in the centralized system, factories now have to scrounge around for raw materials. That slows down production,” Hewett said. Moreover, a large part of the goods turned out in 1990 were not sold but stored as inventory, he said. “They don’t have the warehouse space to keep doing that forever,” he said.

In one development reported by Goskomstat that had great long-term implications for the Soviet Union, the Soviet population increased in 1990 at its slowest rate since 1945, with a net gain of 1.4 million, for a total of 290.1 million.

Goskomstat attributed the slower increase to a higher death rate, fewer births, especially among Russians, and in other European areas of the country, and the record emigration of 400,000 people.