2 Soviet Economic Envoys to Visit U.S. : Reforms: Gorbachev seeks Bush’s help in obtaining up to $150 billion in aid.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, bidding hard for massive Western assistance to save the Soviet Union from economic collapse, is sending two top officials to Washington next week to explain Moscow’s planned economic reforms and seek President Bush’s help in getting as much as $150 billion in aid.

Vitaly N. Ignatenko, the president’s press secretary, said that Yevgeny M. Primakov, Gorbachev’s chief foreign policy adviser, and Vladimir Shcherbakov, the deputy prime minister in charge of economic reform, will arrive in Washington on Monday for two days of talks with the members of the Council of Economic Advisers and other U.S. officials and then a meeting with Bush.

Gorbachev hopes they will be persuasive enough for Bush to support his request for an invitation to the summit meeting of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations in July so that he can present the Soviet Union’s case himself.

What he wants to sell has already been dubbed the “grand bargain,” in which the Soviet Union would move fully and rapidly away from the state socialism of the last 70 years. In exchange, Moscow would get Western economic assistance that might run $15 billion to $20 billion annually for five years, according to U.S. economists, but could total as much as $150 billion.

The Soviet proposal, which is being worked out with the assistance of American economists, calls for accelerated reforms here, moving an economy that is still based on state ownership and central planning toward one in which market forces, entrepreneurship and private ownership will play growing roles and eventually prevail.

The Soviet Union would commit itself to ending state control of prices, the privatization of most enterprises, strict controls on government spending and an opening of the Soviet Union to trade and foreign investment so that it can participate fully in the world economy after years of isolation.

Gorbachev would also pledge to speed the process of democratization in the Soviet Union and accept its political as well as economic decentralization.

The Western assistance would increase as the reforms were implemented, serving both as an incentive to the Kremlin to accelerate the changes and as an underpinning for them.

For the last two years, Gorbachev has sought inclusion in the Group of Seven summit, which brings together the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States. This year’s meeting in London in July is seen here as decisive in getting large-scale Western assistance to pull the Soviet Union out of its deepening crisis.

As one of Gorbachev’s closest advisers, Primakov is being dispatched to Washington to assure the Bush Administration that Moscow is serious about this proposal--and that it probably represents the Soviet Union’s last chance to avoid political and economic collapse without reverting to totalitarianism.

Ignatenko, briefing journalists on the mission, said that a parallel effort under way this week in Boston under the auspices of Harvard University is bringing together Soviet and Western economists and has the Kremlin’s full backing.

Graham Allison, former dean of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said the economists hope to have a full program, including estimates of the aid needed, ready by Friday for review by the Bush Administration and Soviet leadership.

Allison told a news conference in Boston on Monday that members of the working group thought that the Soviet Union would need $15 billion to $20 billion in assistance a year to carry out the program but acknowledged that other specialists believe that as much as $30 billion will be needed annually for five years.