Yeltsin Sees No Hope for Communist System : Soviet Union: Russian Federation’s newly elected president says his top priority is implementing reforms.

Boris N. Yeltsin, the Russian Federation’s newly elected president with a mandate for change, said Friday that he sees no way to save the Soviet Union’s Communist system and that he will press ahead with radical reforms to bring the country a broad democracy and a market economy.

“I think that Communists, honest Communists, are starting to understand that the system is beginning to collapse and that there is no way to save it,” Yeltsin said, commenting on his election victory this week.

Buoyant after capturing slightly more than 60% of the vote against five opponents, Yeltsin said, “The victory turned out to be convincing.”

Preliminary results, according to the official Soviet news agency Tass, showed that Yeltsin’s 60% compared to about 16% for his main rival, Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, the former Soviet prime minister.

“I am satisfied,” the 60-year-old Yeltsin said, chatting informally with reporters in the ornate reception hall of the Russian Federation headquarters, “but I am worried about the responsibilities that are going to be laid upon me for the fate of Russia, for the rebirth of Russia.”

Asked his plans as the republic’s first popularly elected president, Yeltsin said, “Of course, implementing the reforms is most important--that is why they elected me.”

A top priority, he said, is implementing more than 150 laws already passed by the Russian Parliament that form the foundation of his plans for radical economic reform.

In addition, a 100-day action program, now being drawn up as a timetable for reform, will focus on broadening and accelerating the country’s transformation, Yeltsin said later in an interview with Russian television, but it will avoid measures that only correct present problems and fail to bring real change.

But those changes will come slowly, he warned. “Improvement is possible at the end of 1992,” Yeltsin said. “We should be patient throughout this time.”

Plans are being made to start the privatization of state-owned industries in Russia and to end the long monopolies they have held, he said; land reform will be another priority, so that farmers wanting their own land can get it easily from state and collective farms.

The vote, Yeltsin said, was also a mandate for greater democratization throughout the Russian Federation, the largest of the Soviet Union’s constituent republics, and aides expect Yeltsin to remove from Communist Party control those government offices, enterprises and other institutions that come under the federation.

Yeltsin said Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev telephoned to congratulate him Friday morning and that they discussed further cooperation on reform and on drafting a so-called Union Treaty that will lay a new political basis for the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev’s call was an important political gesture, because the two men have been at odds throughout most of the last four years. Only recently have they begun to cooperate on pulling together an overall plan for political and economic change.

Yeltsin was also completing plans for his trip next week to Washington and New York, including a meeting with President Bush at the White House on Thursday.

Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister, said Yeltsin wants to tell the United States that he is committed both to radical reform and to the Soviet Union’s stability.

“The purpose of the visit is to inform the United States and the world community that Russia, where people made their choice in favor of democracy, is ready to achieve stability . . . through broadening radical and economic reforms,” Kozyrev told a news conference.

Yeltsin is trying not to undermine Gorbachev, Kozyrev said, but to extend Russia’s ties as the biggest and richest of the Soviet republics.

Yeltsin is eager to establish an identity for Russia, separate from the Soviet Union. “Russia should return to Europe, where it has been for 1,000 years,” he said. “At the same time, Russia should be a bridge between Europe and Asia.”

Liberal newspapers on Friday hailed Yeltsin’s victory as a triumph for democracy.

Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the Russian legislature’s newspaper, said that by electing Yeltsin, “we have chosen the market model of economy, its corresponding state structures and the road to a democratic society.”

But conservative newspapers, most of which backed Ryzhkov during the three-week election campaign, did not attempt to hide their bitterness at Yeltsin’s victory.

Sovetskaya Rossiya complained that many voters, unaccustomed to popular democracy, did not understand how to cast their ballots, and this had marred the voting. Last week the paper accused Yeltsin of having ties to the Italian Mafia.