Soviet Conservatives Want Gorbachev’s Power Limited : Rebellion: Criticizing perestroika, the deputies seek a bigger role for hard-line Prime Minister Pavlov.

MOSCOW — Conservative Soviet lawmakers, rebelling against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s domestic and foreign policies, demanded Tuesday that his broad powers be cut and given to his hard-line prime minister.

Blaming Gorbachev for the Soviet Union’s profound political and economic crisis, conservative deputies in the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, called for a national congress in July with the goal of halting Gorbachev’s reforms and reducing his authority.

“A great power has been reduced to the lowly status of a beggar, standing by others’ doors with outstretched hands instead of working on its problems here where they are,” Yevgeny V. Kogan, a leader of the conservative Soyuz group, told lawmakers.

Kogan and others were angered by a plan, supported by Gorbachev, to seek tens of billions of dollars in Western assistance to underwrite the transition from central planning to a free-market economy. They demanded to know what the Soviet Union was obliged to do in seeking these funds.

As the debate continued Tuesday, its second day, more bitterness poured forth--over the worsening crisis, over perestroika and the changes it has brought, over Gorbachev’s renewed determination to push for greater changes.

“Let’s strip the president of his powers,” said Sazhi Umalatova, a Communist Party deputy, who at an earlier legislative session had proposed a vote of no confidence in Gorbachev. “He’s not using (the special powers) anyway--let’s give them to someone who will.”

Umalatova, like other conservatives, favors granting Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov the authority to manage the Soviet economy by decree--power that Gorbachev was given but has not used extensively. Pavlov, a tough-minded economist, has taken a hard line since assuming office in January.

Breaking sharply with Gorbachev on economic strategy, Pavlov sought the additional authority on Monday without informing the president. On Tuesday, he asserted that, although appointed by the president, he is independent under the Soviet constitution.

The legislators opposed not only the next stage of Gorbachev’s economic reforms and Western assistance but also his foreign policy and the new federal system he is working out with republic leaders--and in two days of Kremlin debate, Soviet politics were a shambles.

There were angry divisions on economic policy, not the consensus Gorbachev wanted before his crucial discussions next month with leaders of the Group of Seven, the world’s major industrialized democracies, on possible assistance.

The agreement he painfully worked out with Soviet republic leaders on a new constitutional basis was threatened by the lawmakers, who resent their exclusion from those talks and now fear their replacement in new elections.

Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, Interior Minister Boris K. Pugo and Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, the head of the KGB security and intelligence agency, told the deputies in closed-door sessions that the country is on the defensive abroad and threatened with internal collapse because of the president’s policies.

Yuri V. Blokhin, the Soyuz chairman and deputy chairman of the parliamentary commission on economic reform, said that Gorbachev “lacked the political courage” to lead the country out of the crisis. “He has done nothing, he is doing nothing and, I dare say, he will do nothing,” Blokhin said.

But a handful of liberal deputies sided with Gorbachev and accused the conservatives of launching a “constitutional coup d’etat. “

“Let’s not dramatize things,” Vitaly N. Ignatenko, Gorbachev’s press secretary, said. “One should not see in this proposal (of Pavlov) a challenge to the president. . . .”

Viktor K. Grebenshikov, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this story.