Reform Critics Out of Touch, Gorbachev Charges

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev lashed back Thursday at conservatives attacking his proposals for radical economic reforms, calling them “hurrah patriots” who are out of touch with the country and who view all the changes as a return to capitalism.

Gorbachev effectively endorsed the newest radical economic program, sharply criticized by even his own prime minister, and said the country will seek Western assistance to finance a rapid transition of the Soviet economy from central planning and state ownership to market forces and entrepreneurship.

“Now that resolute transformations are gaining momentum, all those who are against them are mobilizing, including in the Parliament,” Gorbachev told Jacques Delors, the visiting president of the European Community Commission, according to the official Soviet news agency Tass.

“Conservative forces are in the lead,” Gorbachev continued, “with what we might call ‘hurrah patriots’ among them. These are people who are unable to see things the way they are, who view everything happening in the country now as the road to perdition and a slide back to capitalist slavery.”

Gorbachev said he is committed to “the vigorous translation into life” of both fundamental economic reforms and the implementation of urgent measures to halt the country’s economic collapse. But the country’s first need, he said, is to “step up the pace of the transformation.”

Grigory A. Yavlinsky, a radical, pro-market economist, spent three weeks in the United States working with American economists on a program to accelerate the Soviet Union’s transformation. The goal is to move to a free-market economy with mixed state, collective, private and foreign ownership of industry, agriculture and commerce over the next seven years.

This plan, developed at Harvard University, was virtually rejected Monday by Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov, who is promoting his government’s own “anti-crisis program” and mocking the Yavlinsky formula as “theoretical, a game, something for children.” Conservative lawmakers were just as scathing.

Without formally choosing sides--for the record, Gorbachev believes that Yavlinsky’s and Pavlov’s programs complement one another--the Soviet president effectively endorsed Yavlinsky, saying he is prepared to seek the funds from the Group of Seven major industrialized nations to finance it.

“We do not conceal our need for support,” Gorbachev told Delors, who had come to discuss further aid from the European Community and the West in general in advance of the Group of Seven summit meeting in London next month. “But we are shouldering and we will shoulder the main burden of reforms by ourselves.

“It is necessary, however, to understand that we are all in the same boat and we must solve the pressing world problems together.”