Legislature Session Put Off for 2 Weeks : Supreme Soviet: Many republics still haven’t chosen delegates. Gorbachev sets Oct. 21 as new meeting date.

Politics in the Soviet Union is still in such chaotic flux that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Friday postponed the opening of the national legislature for two weeks to give republics more time to determine their positions.

The Supreme Soviet was originally supposed to convene at 10 a.m. next Tuesday, but Gorbachev, in a decree published Friday delayed the start of the session until Oct. 21.

A group of lawmakers representing the republics also voted against beginning as scheduled. Ivan D. Laptev, chairman of one of the bicameral legislature’s chambers, the Council of the Union, told a press luncheon that numerous republics, including the Ukraine, Armenia and Azerbaijan, have not even formed or approved their delegations yet.

The former Supreme Soviet was elected in 1989 by the Congress of People’s Deputies, the national Parliament in the country’s complex, two-tier legislative system. But both those institutions vanished in the political restructuring carried out after a conservative putsch failed in August.

Governments in the Soviet Union’s remaining 12 republics are now supposed to name their representatives directly as a way of enhancing their power and converting Moscow-based institutions into organs of consultation and coordination.

Although the overwhelming majority of the Soviet republics have declared their independence from Moscow, Laptev said that 10 of them have now “firmly agreed” to take part in the Supreme Soviet meeting, which he said will likely focus on the urgent need to foster a market based on the laws of supply and demand rather than command socialism.

Of the other republics, “we simply don’t know the position of Georgia,” Laptev said, and Moldova’s refusal may not be final. In Kazakhstan and the Ukraine, parliamentary delegations have been chosen but not yet formally endorsed by the republics’ legislatures.

Serious unrest is continuing, meanwhile, in many areas of the country, fed by the political instability there and at the center.

In Georgia, badly divided for weeks by a feud between President Zviad Gamsakhurdia and other nationalists, national guardsmen hostile to the president abandoned the television and radio building in Tbilisi that had served as the opposition’s makeshift headquarters.

But they refused to lay down their arms, as Gamsakhurdia demands, and skirmishes broke out as they moved out of the city center. According to reports by Soviet and Russian television from Tbilisi, one person was killed and five other people were wounded in the fighting.

Their commander, Tengiz Kitovani, said his men would stay within the limits of Tbilisi to be able to come to the rescue if Gamsakhurdia tries to use force against the opposition. Pro- and anti-Gamsakhurdia rallies continued in the city through the night.

Despite the signing of a communique 10 days ago by the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, a move toward the restoration of civil peace personally brokered by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, a total of 20 people have been killed since then in the territory that both republics claim, Nagorno-Karabakh.

On Friday alone, the Tass news agency said, five people were killed in the Martuninsky region, according to Interior Ministry officials in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Tass quoted an official in the predominantly Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan as saying that because of a blockade by Azerbaijanis, only one day’s supply of flour remains and there is not even enough gasoline for ambulances and fire engines.

According to terms of the Armenia-Azerbaijan agreement signed under Yeltsin’s aegis in the Russian spa town of Zheleznovodsk, the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh was supposed to have been lifted. But the Azerbaijanis tightened it the very day the communique was signed, Tass said.

The Soviet military is concerned about the continuing unrest, as well as the pace of political changes, Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, the U.S. Air Force chief of staff, said Friday after meeting with top Soviet commanders during a week’s visit here.

“They wish that things would settle down a bit,” McPeak told a press conference.

Asked about the possibility for instability within the military as well, McPeak commented, “I think that there is a danger--there always is. Events are moving at kaleidoscopic speed.

“The senior military people I met seem relatively cool-headed about it . . . but events sometimes have a way of getting out of control.”

In a development that may have far-reaching consequences, disputes among the leaders of the Russian Federation, now among the most powerful men in the country, suddenly broke into the open Friday at a meeting of the Russian legislature.

One of Yeltsin’s advisers, jurist Sergei Shakrai, upbraided the acting chairman of the legislature, Ruslan Khasbulatov, who had denounced him the previous day as immature. Both men are considered top candidates to be elected permanent chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet.

Surveying the political and economic situation that has taken root in the country, the Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, sounded a note of alarm by warning that only a few months remain to enact badly needed reforms.

“We have a small credit of time, just three or four months before winter complications,” Kozyrev said in an interview with the newspaper Trud.

If the progressives led by Yeltsin refuse to rapidly demonstrate that they can govern, Kozyrev said, the euphoria sparked by the defeat of Communist conservatives in their August putsch will give way to mistrust, chaos and dictatorship.

Laptev said the Soviet legislature’s most pressing task will be the removal of hindrances that it earlier had placed on the development of an entrepreneurial class and a market economy in the Soviet Union. At the legislative session that is now scheduled to begin Oct. 21, additional guarantees should also be given foreign investors to encourage them to plow badly needed capital into the Soviet Union, he said.