Soviet Conservatives Calling for a State of Emergency : Reforms: Their leader accuses Gorbachev of failing to pull the nation out of its crisis.

Conservative leaders of the Soviet Parliament called Saturday for a state of emergency to be put into effect across the country to halt its slide into economic and political chaos.

Chairmen of the Soyuz group of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament, accused Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev of failing to bring the country out of its crisis and of leading it instead toward even greater disaster.

A conference of members of Soyuz parliamentary group and its affiliates in republic and local governments plans to vote today on whether to call for a special session of the Congress of People’s Deputies, the country’s highest legislative body, to consider imposing rule by the Kremlin and to debate Gorbachev’s continuation as president.

“If Gorbachev is not going to undertake emergency rule, then he must resign,” Yuri V. Blokhin, the Soyuz chairman, said in an interview after the conference. “We do not want to be at the point of total starvation by the end of the year.”

The situation in the Soviet Union has grown so grave that even some leading liberals are calling for a more authoritarian rule.

“It seems to me that the experience of the last six years shows that during a transition period we need a special system of administrative authority,” Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov, one of the country’s leading radical reformers, told reporters Saturday. “But if we are talking about a strong executive authority, where’s the guarantee that this authority will not grow into another totalitarianism as in our history?”

The best guarantees, Popov said, would be frequent elections of presidents and governors, a free press, a ban on Communist Party influence over the KGB security agency and the military and a very strong opposition party.

A new, less authoritarian system could be put into place once the Soviet Union is back on its feet, Popov argued.

“A strong central authority with these guarantees will ensure that, in 10 to 15 years, we will have a stable country and normal, functioning economy,” Popov told a conference for the media organized by the Washington-based Cato Institute, a conservative political foundation.

The Moscow mayor remarked on how unusual it is that liberals have started calling for a return to strong administrative authority. But he stressed that there is no other way to bring the country through “a transition period, which will be one of great hardships.”

Living standards have dropped significantly in the last few years. In the latest big blow to consumers, the government drastically raised prices on food and consumer items across the board at the beginning of the month for the first time in decades. In return, some wage earners are given small monthly compensations.

Alexander N. Yakovlev, a senior Gorbachev adviser and once the leading liberal in the Communist Party’s old Politburo, warned in a lengthy article published on Saturday against returning to authoritarian means.

“Authoritarianism may return without the thunder of a coup--without mass repressions and purges,” Yakovlev said in an article published by one of the largest Soviet newspapers, Komsomolskaya Pravda. “It might even be soft and educated.

“But always and everywhere, in all the times and in every people, pure authoritarianism--whatever gloves it wears--finally leads to a slowdown of social development.”

The Soyuz and Cato conferences preceded what could be a critical week in Soviet politics for Gorbachev, who returned Saturday night from South Korea after a trip to Japan that was far from successful.

On Monday, the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, plans to debate the government’s latest anti-crisis program, which Gorbachev has endorsed. Tuesday, this project will be discussed by the Federation Council, a gathering of the leaders of the 15 constituent republics. On Wednesday and Thursday leaders of the Communist Party are expected to consider Gorbachev’s position as general secretary of the party in a plenary meeting. And on Friday, Russia’s new independent labor unions are planning a strike to protest the price increases.

A move to convene an extraordinary session of the 2,250-member Congress of People’s Deputies requires the support of at least one-fifth of the Parliament’s members. And only the Congress, which elected Gorbachev, can impeach him.