Republics Can Go: Gorbachev : Time to Prepare for Soviet Breakup, He Says : Independence: New demands for local control show how precipitously the president’s clout has fallen. Uzbekistan orders a draft bill for breaking away.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who fought nationalist movements throughout the country only to watch them mushroom into full-fledged drives for independence, said Monday that the time has come to prepare for the breakup of the Soviet Union.

In a historic announcement heralding the demise of the world’s last true empire, Gorbachev told the Soviet national legislature that the 15 republics that make up the country must be given the “right of independent choice.”

“We must take a specific position on republics that are unwilling to sign the Union Treaty,” he said in a key speech to the Supreme Soviet. “Immediately after the Union Treaty is signed, negotiations must be started with those who wish to leave the union. Preparations for this can be started now.”

But the mind-boggling pace of Soviet change, plus Gorbachev’s weakened position since last week’s failed right-wing coup and the meteoric rise of Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, seems to have doomed Gorbachev’s goal of quickly signing the treaty.

The power-sharing compact would preserve crucial functions for a Moscow-based central government and at least a semblance of a single nation-state with today’s borders.

High-ranking officials from the republics said Monday that Gorbachev’s Union Treaty--which had been scheduled for signing a week ago but was aborted because of the putsch--does not correspond to the wholesale shift of authority to the Russian Federation and the other republics.

“The center (the Soviet government) has fully outlived itself. . . . It is dead. It has committed suicide,” said Levon Ter-Petrosyan, the Armenian president whose republic is to vote on secession on Sept. 21. “If this corpse is reanimated, we shall re-create the danger of a catastrophe like the one that has occurred.”

Other leaders Monday spoke of giving the republics new, broader powers--such as to raise and keep armies--and leaving Moscow responsible for mostly minor matters. The republics’ new demands showed how precipitously Gorbachev’s clout has dropped. Asked who now rules the country, Fyodor M. Burlatsky, editor in chief of the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta, said: “It’s the presidents of the republics first. Then comes the president of the Soviet Union.”

In other developments:

* The southwestern republic of Moldova is to vote on independence today. And on the heels of independence declarations by the Ukraine and Byelorussia, the president of the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan ordered his Parliament to quickly devise a draft bill on independence.

* Iceland became the first Western nation to establish diplomatic ties with the Baltic republics, all three of which have proclaimed independence from Moscow. More than a dozen other countries were preparing to recognize the breakaway republics.

* Gorbachev announced steps to throttle the KGB security police, one of the props of the putsch. He said he ordered the new KGB chairman, Vadim V. Bakatin, to submit a reorganization plan to put up an “impenetrable shield” keeping KGB units from taking part in anti-constitutional actions. The KGB Border Guards will be placed under the Defense Ministry, depriving the KGB of an armed force of 230,000.

* Gorbachev also called for all remaining barriers to a free-market economy--intended to replace the current centrally controlled system--to be swept away. With fears growing of winter famine, the government moved to end the nation’s disastrous 60-year experiment with forced collective farming.

* Acting on Gorbachev’s weekend orders stripping the Communist Party of its property and disbanding cells in state organizations, Ukrainian leaders, accusing their republic’s Communist Party of complicity in the coup, ordered the party’s buildings sealed, its bank accounts frozen and documents impounded for an investigation.

* Anatoly I. Lukyanov, the Supreme Soviet chairman and a law-school chum of Gorbachev’s, was suspended from his job until investigations show if he had a role in the coup. On Monday, he rejected accusations that he had been the “chief ideologist” of the plot. “I cannot betray a man with whom 40 years of my life have been connected,” said Lukyanov, who tendered his resignation earlier. Gorbachev also fired the directors of the Tass news agency and the Gostelradio broadcasting company, state-run media put at the service of the State Emergency Committee that briefly seized power during the putsch.

* Nikolai Kruchina, the apparatchik in charge of the party’s property and purse who had not been implicated in the coup, committed suicide by jumping from his seventh-floor Moscow apartment window. On Saturday, Gorbachev’s military adviser, Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, fatally shot himself. Another plotter, Interior Minister Boris K. Pugo, committed suicide last Thursday, authorities said.

* Alexander S. Dzasokhov, the Soviet Communist Party’s top ideologue, predicted that party membership--now at 15 million--will go into a free fall, with only 1 million ultimately remaining.

Taking the Blame

When Gorbachev trooped to the podium in the Supreme Soviet, the 487 lawmakers present and much of the nation watching on television were listening keenly because the 60-year-old Soviet leader--now virtually Yeltsin’s political hostage--would have to try to define a new role for himself.

Speaking calmly but obviously restraining his emotion, Gorbachev said a huge number of things had changed during the three days he was kept in captivity by the rightist junta along with his family at their summer dacha in the Crimea.

“They say that I have come back to a different country,” Gorbachev remarked. “I agree with this. I can add: A man has come back to a different country who looks upon everything--the past, today and future prospects--with different eyes.”

The Soviet leader hand-picked many of the men who later plotted against him, including former Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov, former KGB chief Vladimir A. Kryuchkov and Pugo.

He told the lawmakers that pro-reform forces had been too soft before the putsch on foes who wanted to turn back the clock to the pre- perestroika era.

“Instead of decisive actions, liberalism and indulgence were shown,” Gorbachev said. “In the first place, I blame myself.”

Republics’ New Roles

Gorbachev previously had demanded that republics intending to secede follow procedures laid down last year by a new law. It set a five-year cooling-off period and ordered the central government to demand compensation for factories, power plants, military bases and other facilities built with Soviet money.

But with Yeltsin already having recognized the independence of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia--the Baltic states forcibly absorbed by the Kremlin in 1940--Gorbachev’s old position became untenable. So, he no longer insisted that breakaway republics pay what they say would be inflated bills for what was built in the Soviet era or wait several more years.

Instead, Gorbachev said Monday, republics bent on independence and the Kremlin must negotiate on three points: guarantees to safeguard human rights of Russians and other minority groups in the republics, compensation for residents who want to go elsewhere in the Soviet Union and military facilities that may be kept for a time in a republic.

Latvian Deputy Yuri A. Boyars said that Gorbachev’s statement, plus the earlier recognition from Yeltsin’s Russian government, was “perfectly enough. I think the problem (of Latvia’s independence) is now solved,” he said.

Besides the Baltic republics, Georgia and the Slavic republics of Byelorussia and the Ukraine have now proclaimed independence. The pressure is building even in traditionally backward republics, such as Azerbaijan, to do the same. In Baku, on what had been Lenin Square, about 30,000 Azerbaijanis gathered Monday to demand that the Parliament proclaim independence.

Nursultan Nazarbayev--president of Kazakhstan, the biggest republic after Russia and one of the nine that originally agreed to the Union Treaty--on Monday sought a panoply of rights and responsibilities for the republics. He suggested that Moscow have a lesser role, handling matters such as a unified transport network, communications and “special” issues such as disarmament.

Nazarbayev, emerging as a major political figure akin to Yeltsin, sought a sweeping political New Deal in his Supreme Soviet speech.

He said each republic must be allowed to have its own Foreign Ministry and army, along the lines of the national guards planned or under way in Russia and the Ukraine. In event of a war, he said, the Soviet Defense Ministry could coordinate actions by the republics.

Much was unsaid in the Kazakh leader’s speech. He did not clearly say what, for example, should become of the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) based in his arid Central Asian homeland. But the thrust of his message was clear: “Kazakhstan will never be anybody’s ‘younger brother,’ ” he declared.

Congress to Meet

The Supreme Soviet voted to convene an emergency session of the larger Congress of People’s Deputies, the supreme organ of government power, next Monday. That group will have to decide whether to recognize the Baltics’ independence and rule on the future of central government institutions, including the Congress itself.

Yuri N. Shcherbak, of the Ukraine, said the nation has just gone through a “political Chernobyl” that leveled the machinery of Kremlin rule. He said nothing should be built in place of the institutions that originated or supported the grab for power.

“In August, 1991,” he said, “the old Stalinist union collapsed; the single and indivisible Communist empire collapsed. On the ruins of the old union, sovereign states and republics have already emerged, and new ones will emerge.”

The coup, he said, showed the “bankruptcy of the existing state political system of the U.S.S.R. and President Gorbachev’s inability to ensure the country’s free democratic development.”

He called on the Congress to abolish the presidential form of government and the Cabinet of Ministers, then to dissolve itself and leave behind a “Euro-Asian” economic community of independent states.

Presidency Debated

Historian and radical reformer Yuri N. Afanasyev said the future of the Soviet presidency--an office filled by the Congress--needs to be debated.

“Gorbachev’s era is over,” he said. “The very office he holds is under question.”

Gorbachev endorsed a sort of collective decision-making body based on the Security Council, an advisory body that reports to him. But he clearly intends for there to be a Soviet presidency because he said that immediately following conclusion of the Union Treaty, the campaign should begin for Soviet parliamentary and presidential elections.

The Parliament session will resume today to investigate the coup and the role, if any, of the right-wing parliamentary group Soyuz.

Widely suspected of ties to the plotters, members of Soyuz on Monday denied they had acted in concert with them. “Maybe Marshal Yazov knew what was going on, but I didn’t,” said Army Col. Nikolai S. Petrushenko, one of the group’s prominent members.