Soviet Economic Plunge Reported Accelerating : Consumers: Inflation is almost 300% annually. And this year’s harvest will be smaller than a year ago.

The Soviet Union’s dramatic economic free fall is continuing at a rate that economists fear will bring widespread social unrest and new political upheavals despite the defeat of conservatives in last month’s abortive coup d’etat.

Inflation is now running at nearly 300% a year. Industrial production has dropped 14% compared to a year ago, foreign trade is down 30% and the overall economy is shrinking at an annual rate of 12% to 15%, according to government figures.

Translated into consumer terms, there is 15% less meat, 16% less butter, 25% less margarine, 20% less soap and detergent and 35% less clothing for sale compared to a year ago.

The prospects for this winter are grim. The harvest will be substantially smaller than last year’s, and farmers are selling less food to the state because there are fewer consumer goods for them to buy. Even the Ukraine, the country’s breadbasket, will have to import grain to feed its cities.

Coal, oil and gas production have dropped as much as 20%, and serious shortages of electricity and heat are now expected in the country’s major cities this winter. Says economist Pavel Bunich, “I think we’ll have enough food--just--but we may not have enough energy to cook it.”

And inflation is so high that the State Bank cannot print rubles, the Soviet currency, fast enough to keep up, even with its mints working around the clock. By Oct. 1, there will be payless paydays in the Ukraine and other areas, according to bank officials, because of the shortage of ruble notes.

“Our economic collapse, far from being halted or reversed, is still accelerating,” Yevgeny G. Yasin, a leading reform economist, said in an interview. “Our past strategic mistakes remain uncorrected . . . and there is no agreement so far on a way out.”

The coalition of radical reformers and liberals who defeated the conservative putsch a month ago has been unable to turn that victory into decisive economic measures, and many of the economists among them see this failure as once again undermining the country’s political stability.

“Our victory came very late,” Otto Latsis, another prominent reform economist, commented. “It came so disastrously late, in fact, that now we cannot do what is possible. We must do the impossible. And that means there will be no painless solutions.”

The fundamental reform issues--who will own state enterprises, who will manage them and how market forces will replace central planning--remain unresolved despite the defeat of the conservatives who had fought the radical transformation of the economy.

At the same time, the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a state in the wake of the failed coup has accelerated the disintegration of its economy.

Leaders of all but two of the country’s remaining 12 republics agreed last week on the principles for an economic union, which would maintain a common market even as other republics seek political independence. But the specifics of that union and the treaty establishing it must still be negotiated.

“We got them to say yes, but now we must get them to move forward, and move forward together,” Grigory A. Yavlinsky, the principal author of the proposal, said after it was approved.

“There is hope, but every day that passes reduces our possibilities and narrows our options. I am optimistic and yet very conscious that there is a real prospect of catastrophe just ahead.”

Latsis was blunter. “We need an immediate, focused package of big measures, coordinated in contents and in time,” Latsis said. But the country does not have even three or four months for development of the economic union and its associated institutions, he added, and needs to move quickly, even piecemeal, to meet a deadline of “yesterday.”

“The economy’s safety margin has already been exceeded, and people’s patience is at the limit, too,” Latsis said. “A further delay will result not in a stillborn coup, but in true mass protests after which the possibility of a dictatorship will become real once again.”

Disappointment is widespread that the reform coalition under Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin, the Russian Federation president, has been unable to end the indecision that has paralyzed economic reforms for the past year and a half.

“What are they waiting for?” demanded Lev Timofeyev, a radical economist. “If we do not introduce full-fledged private ownership and private enterprise in the next two months, we are in for a catastrophe that will sweep away everything. One can feel the first ripples of upheaval already in society.”

The most pressing problem, Soviet economists agree, is the declining buying power of the country’s currency as a result of uncontrolled government spending and a rapidly rising rate of inflation. Producers, whether they be factories or farmers, are increasingly reluctant to accept rubles in payment, and the result is a spreading breakdown of the market.

“The collapse of the monetary system is imminent because of galloping inflation, the introduction of ration coupons, parallel currencies and other artificial instruments of payment,” Latsis said. “If inflation continues uncontrollably, not only will the people lose their savings and their incomes fall, but production will be badly damaged.

“Producers will realize they should not sell their commodities now because they can sell them later at a higher price. . . . The only incentive will be barter deals and exchanges of goods for other goods.

“But in a country where tens of millions of kinds of goods are produced, widespread exchanges of this kind and the collapse of the monetary system would be tantamount to a stoppage of production.”

The top priority, according to Latsis and other economists, is a sharp and immediate curtailment of the government’s budget deficit--an action that would require a consensus of the major republics.

Vladimir Rayevsky, the first deputy finance minister, said Friday that the budget deficit is likely to amount to more than 200 billion rubles, about $330 billion at the official exchange rate, and is already more than six times the previously estimated $43 billion and rising rapidly.

With government borrowings already more than $180 billion for the year, the State Bank is now printing money as fast as it can for further loans. The amount of money in circulation has increased 74% this year.

“The only limit to the money supply in the Soviet Union today is the capacity of our printing presses,” Yuri Balagurov, manager of the State Bank’s money supply department, told reporters last week. “Nothing much can be done without political will, and there is at present no political will.

“We have plenty of good mechanisms (to control spending and reform the economy), but they are not being applied.”

The Finance Ministry, which like most other central government ministries is without a minister as a result of the coup, was asked to recommend cuts in military spending and capital construction, but reported last week that it could not because of its internal paralysis.

Igor Gaidar, director of the National Institute of Economy’s Higher Commercial School, noted two paradoxical trends in the economy in the four weeks following the coup:

* The central government has the organizational structures to manage the economy but not the authority to do so. The republics now have that political authority but have no way of managing it.

Gaidar and many other pro-market economists urge the rapid decentralization of the bureaucracy to give the republics the ability to manage what is now theirs.

* The coup’s defeat and the collapse of Communist rule opened the way to the radical transformation of the economy but destroyed the central means of carrying out the reforms.

Gaidar said that steps that should be taken by the central government, such as freeing prices from state controls and making the Soviet ruble convertible into foreign currencies, cannot be pushed through because each republic wants to make its own decision on whether to proceed with these measures.