Gorbachev Asks West for $100 Billion

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said Wednesday that the Soviet Union needs $100 billion in Western assistance to underwrite the next stage of its political and economic reforms.

Warning that world stability depended on the success of perestroika , Gorbachev bluntly told the West that, without this massive help, the Soviet Union will not emerge from its deepening crisis.

But if his country gets the assistance, he continued, it will undertake the sweeping reforms that effectively would end its seven decades of state socialism.

“If we, together with you (the West), find $100 billion to resolve the crisis and the question of cooperation with the Soviet Union in order to ensure that perestroika succeeds--that is, to enable the country through deep reforms to open up and reorient itself to the individual domestically and toward the world externally--then I think the game is worth the candle,” Gorbachev said.

Declaring for the first time the amount of aid Moscow is seeking, Gorbachev appealed to the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations for the chance to present the Soviet case at their summit meeting in London in mid-July.

“The need has arisen for the Soviet Union to be able to set out its views--and it has some--at a meeting of the Group of Seven,” the Soviet president told a press conference after a day of talks with Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. “It would be most desirable for this to come this year.”

In Washington, President Bush said he might agree to invite Gorbachev to the meeting and added that he is willing to do whatever will “genuinely help” the Soviet Union reform its economy.

And Secretary of State James A. Baker III, testifying before a House subcommittee, said the Administration will consider direct aid to the Soviets if they enact real economic reforms.

A Bush Administration official, however, said a figure as high as $100 billion is “unrealistic.”

“Their political leadership seems to feel that the West is going to be their economic salvation,” he said. “But the burden is still on the Soviets to come up with some genuine reforms and to show that any money from outside wouldn’t be wasted.”

At his press conference, Gorbachev stated his basic argument in hard-hitting terms that made clear how serious the Soviet crisis is.

“I am convinced that the peoples of those (Western) countries need perestroika as much as we do, especially since the Soviet Union is one of the pillars of today’s world,” he said.

“If that pillar falls, if it disappears, we all should calculate the consequences. It is not possible to remain indifferent or, worse, to fish in troubled waters. That would lead us to a catastrophe. Whatever aspect you take--military, political, economic--these questions are all very serious.”

Andreotti said he favors the Soviet Union’s participation in the Group of Seven summit conference but that it will be up to all members to decide whether to issue the unprecedented invitation and effectively put the Soviet crisis, and the massive aid Gorbachev is seeking, at the top of the agenda.

In addition to Italy, the Group of Seven includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the United States. The European Community also participates.

Gorbachev had already won at least qualified support from Canada, France and Germany, according to Soviet diplomats. But Britain and the United States have been reluctant to see the Soviet Union included, believing that its crisis would dominate the three-day meeting and that a better forum could be found to discuss the problem.

Soviet officials had begun to discuss with their European counterparts the prospect for a follow-up meeting, later in the year, solely to discuss the crisis here, but they judged that just as difficult as getting an invitation to London.

But Gorbachev, cheered by Andreotti’s public endorsement of Soviet participation in the London summit, said, “I am already thinking over what I will say.”

Gorbachev said that he also would welcome Western suggestions. “I would like to hear proposals, suggestions and comments by leaders of the seven regarding our economic cooperation,” he said.

He added that he wants to discuss other issues--international security, disarmament, environmental protection, the use of natural resources--as much as the question of assistance to the Soviet Union.

Soviet participation in the summit--the form is up to the seven to decide, he said--would be “a sign of moving toward a new form of cooperation at a very important stage of perestroika, “ Gorbachev said.

Two years ago, when the Group of Seven met in Paris, Gorbachev wrote President Francois Mitterrand of France asking for the Soviet Union’s inclusion in later meetings on the basis of the altered relationship between East and West. Last year, when the conference was held in Houston, he succeeded through letters to the participants in making Western assistance to the Soviet Union a major topic, although he did not attend.

A study of the Soviet economy by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other agencies that grew out of the Houston meeting concluded that the Soviet Union needed about $30 billion in immediate assistance and probably more as it accelerated and broadened its economic reforms.

Recent estimates, however, have put Moscow’s needs at $15 billion to $20 billion a year for five years. And Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard University economist who has helped Poland move to a market economy and is now studying the Soviet Union, estimates the total at $150 billion.

Teams of Soviet and American economists are working this week at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to complete a program that would not only assess Moscow’s needs for Western assistance but tie that aid to specific reforms, so that prospective donors would be assured that the funds were promoting change rather than shoring up the old centrally planned, state-owned economy.

Gorbachev will dispatch two top Soviet officials--his chief foreign policy adviser, Yevgeny M. Primakov, and Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir Shcherbakov--to Washington next week to brief the Bush Administration on the scope of the crisis here and the updated reform program.

Speaking briefly of the reforms, Gorbachev said the government’s new program is aimed at halting the economy’s rapid disintegration and restoring stability, with severe restraints in the immediate term but then plunging ahead with even more radical reforms.

He said that a wide range of measures will be introduced soon to privatize state-owned enterprises, ensure competition through antitrust laws, encourage foreign investment through guarantees against seizure and open the country to full-scale trade with the West.

Times staff writer Doyle McManus, in Washington, contributed to this story.