9 Soviet Republics to Sign Economy Pact : Unity: The goal of the treaty is an ‘economic community,’ but its political effect may also be significant.

Nine of the Soviet Union’s remaining 12 republics agreed Friday to sign a treaty next week to maintain the country’s economic unity after Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev warned that people’s patience, as well as the Soviet economy itself, had reached the breaking point.

Leaders of the nine republics, putting aside their quarrels with one another and their fears of Russian domination, approved the draft of an agreement establishing an “economic community” on the ruins of the Soviet Union. The treaty is now expected to be signed on Tuesday.

Although the thrust of the accord will be economic--establishing a common market through most of the country--the effect will be political, as well, for the agreement is likely to slow the headlong drives for independence in many of the former Soviet republics and curb some of the current power struggles.

“People’s patience is wearing thin,” Gorbachev told the State Council, now the country’s highest executive body, in opening a meeting that he said was of “extraordinary importance.”

“Their last hope after the August events,” he said referring to the abortive coup by Communist hard-liners, “was that we would act decisively, as we promised, and respond to the urgent needs of the country and people.”

Gorbachev said he hoped that conclusion of the economic accord would open the way for renewed negotiations on a Union Treaty that would lay the constitutional basis for a “Union of Free Sovereign Republics,” a loose confederation of most of the former Soviet republics.

The proposed economic agreement would preserve many links established during seven decades of state ownership and central planning to prevent the complete disintegration of the Soviet economy. It is now shrinking at a rate of more than 17.5% a year, with inflation running more than 300%.

But the accord would also recognize the republics’ ownership of their natural resources and most enterprises on their territory. It would replace central planning with the market forces of supply and demand and it would shift decision-making from bureaucrats to new entrepreneurs.

Among those agreeing to sign the treaty, according to government spokesmen, was Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, whose Cabinet has spent much of the past week denouncing it as a sell-out of Russian interests.

Yeltsin called for the rapid conclusion of all 17 supporting agreements, covering the issuance of money, the banking system, taxation and other key issues and for “an end to the financing of economic bodies without agreement,” in effect a halt to state subsidies to unprofitable enterprises.

But there was no suggestion from Yeltsin, as there had been from some of his closest aides this week, that if Russia, by far the biggest and richest of the Soviet republics, did not get its way then it would go it alone.

Yeltsin, who looked tanned and fit after a 17-day vacation at the Black Sea, is expected to move boldly next week to reassert his authority and end the squabbling among his staff and supporters.

The power struggles around Yeltsin have largely paralyzed the government of not only Russia but the whole country, for the Russian Federation is crucial element in all the strategic decisions now being made.

And when Yeltsin’s top aides, including Russia’s acting prime minister, put into doubt Russia’s participation in the “economic community,” they had heightened the uncertainty over the accord and the very future of the country.

Gorbachev, whose opening remarks were broadcast live on television, decried the efforts to undermine the agreement and weaken the proposed economic community.

“Attempts are being made to set members of the State Council against each other, to sow suspicion with regard to one another, to hamper in every way the adoption of the documents that were worked out on the basis of coordinated positions,” Gorbachev said.

Grigory A. Yavlinsky, the radical, pro-market economist who drafted the agreement, had warned the republic leaders at the start of the five-hour meeting that “not a single republic has either the means or the possibility” of surviving alone, according to Tass.

“The monetary system will disintegrate, production will dwindle and unemployment will begin,” Yavlinsky said. “Certain republics think that they are being undermined by the others when, in fact, it is the (socialist) system that has impoverished all of them.”

Yavlinsky said that the questions raised by the republic leaders could be resolved, either in the final version of the three-year treaty or in its implementing agreements.

Leaders of Armenia, Byelorussia, Kazakhstan, Kirghizia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenia, Uzbekistan and the Ukraine also subscribed to the accord, Tass said.

Azerbaijani President Ayaz Mutalibov said his republic supported the agreement but that the continuing conflict with neighboring Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed Armenia enclave in Azerbaijan, made it difficult for him to sign the treaty.

Representatives of Georgia and Moldova did not participate in the meeting. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are now fully independent and will probably conclude separate economic and trade agreements with the Soviet Union and various republics.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Vitold Fokin, whose republic has vigorously debated the benefits and costs of the proposed community, said prior to the meeting that the treaty was necessary.

“We cannot exist in complete autonomy,” he said. “Such a treaty is utterly essential, provided it does not undermine the state sovereignty of the signatory countries.”