Russia’s Economic Plan: Save Itself First : Moscow: Yeltsin is to outline the reform program today. Collapse of the center is noted.

The Russian Federation, for all its vastness, cannot save the old Soviet Union’s economic unity. It can only save itself.

That is the new philosophy taking hold in the Russian government and expected to underlie the new reform program that President Boris N. Yeltsin has promised to present today at the opening of the republic’s super-parliament, the Congress of People’s Deputies.

Sunk deep in its own crises, the new line goes, Russia should now concentrate mainly on immediate, painful economic reforms and a far tougher policy on trade with the rest of the republics, letting them know that they need Russia, with its wealth of resources, far more than it needs them.

The Russian officials who, in the wake of the failed coup that decimated the central Soviet government, hoped to keep the country together under Russia’s leadership are now turning inward instead.

“After the collapse of the political center, it’s impossible in principle to reanimate a strong economic center capable of carrying out tough reforms,” Yegor Gaidar, a top economist working out the Russian reform plan, said.

Sergei Stankevich, one of Yeltsin’s advisers, told the weekly Soyuz that “until recently, Russia was oriented toward a union,” and its leaders believed that a revamped Soviet Union would continue to exist with Russia, as the largest republic, naturally assuming a leadership role.

“Now,” he said, “the realities are different.”

Disappointed in the flimsy agreement on economic union signed by a mere eight of 15 possible republics earlier this month, Yeltsin’s administration has turned in recent days to churning out plans for its own republic, home to 150 million citizens from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

Yeltsin has already announced that he plans to liberalize prices, and Gaidar disclosed in an interview with the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda that his Russian government brain trust, at work over recent weeks in a suburban dacha, considers tax reform, monetary reform, changes in the export system and rapid privatization the Russian president’s other most urgent tasks.

Gaidar, Stankevich and other officials have broached the possibility of printing a separate Russian currency and correcting the export pricing system that, they say, costs Russia billions of dollars a year.

“Russia does not yet have its own full statehood, it has not yet become itself,” Stankevich said. “Russia continues to carry the entire weight of economic and financial damage. That many voices today say that Russia is being robbed--that’s not just a populist game.”

Gaidar estimated that if goods within the Soviet Union were sold at world prices, Russia, as the repository of most of the Soviet Union’s oil, gas, coal and other natural resources, would show an $8.7-billion trade surplus with the other republics.

If Russia’s economic ties with the republics were broken, said Andrei Nechayev, another member of the Russian economic team, it would be hurt but survive, while for other republics, “it would be slow death.”

Along with disillusionment with the economic treaty, the Russian officials say they have come to their go-it-alone policy because other republics so frequently violate trade obligations to Russia.

The approach may sound selfish, Gaidar said, but it is a “moral choice.”

“If we make a breakthrough, the others will be saved as well,” he said. “If we fail, we will pull the others down too.”

Timing is crucial, officials say, because the rising popular discontent over food shortages and inflation is beginning to be directed at Yeltsin himself, reducing the mass support that has been his political trump card.

If Yeltsin waits, Gaidar said, “we will lose the political reserves for painful market reforms. The reserve of the people’s trust will run out.”

At a press conference last week, leaders of six of the Russian Parliament’s 14 factions said they supported price liberalization and radical economic reform as the only way out of the republic’s crisis.

Yeltsin has come under heavy criticism even from his own allies for failing to turn the tremendous political capital he gained from his courageous role in quashing the coup attempt into immediate, decisive reform measures.

But Stankevich said that Yeltsin had used his recent vacation to “think over the new situation,” and now, “the pause is completed, and decisive measures and radical actions of the kind typical of Yeltsin will follow.”

As proof of his serious approach to the reform plan, Yeltsin is reportedly proposing Svyatoslav Fyodorov, an eye doctor and millionaire entrepreneur who has been a veritable beacon of Soviet private enterprise for years, as his next prime minister.