Confusion, Anxiety Reign in Russia : Economics: Questions about Yeltsin’s reforms lead only to more questions.

From the halls of Parliament to the pages of Izvestia, worried Russians on Tuesday chewed over what little they knew and understood of their president’s new plan for painful economic reforms, their anxious questions leading mainly to nothing but more questions.

In the marble entrance lobby at the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, Mikhail Leontiev, the economics editor of the now-independent newspaper, held court before a gaggle of mainly Soviet correspondents trying to make sense of Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin’s new program.

“So, in just how many years or decades will all this straighten out?” one Russian reporter asked Leontiev after a long description of how inflation will run wild for almost a year, then be followed by a drop in investment, the confusion of a new currency and other economic ills.

Leontiev had no easy answers.

Izvestia, the prestigious daily, carried a page full of commentaries by columnists trying all too obviously to rein in the doubts and fears behind their questions.

Commentator Mikhail Krushinsky wondered whether Yeltsin’s promise to sell off thousands of small, state-owned factories within three months was realistic. And what about his claim that it was possible to get through the paperwork of privatizing a business within five days?

“I’d like to think that there has been deep calculation behind every number here,” he said with poignant skepticism. “And that the president understands what powerful forces will rise against him now.”

In the highest remaining Soviet economic council, the men trying to manage the country’s crisis had their own doubts--also expressed as questions.

Soviet Deputy Economics Minister Vladimir Gribov told the Tass news agency that, although he saw no alternative, he is afraid that Yeltsin’s plan will be extremely difficult to put into effect. He stressed that, if freeing prices is accompanied by removing limits on wages as Yeltsin intends, “we’ll go through the Yugoslav experience, when two years ago inflation rose at 7% a day.”

Although much in Yeltsin’s plan points to the creation of a new Russian currency to replace the Soviet ruble, Deputy Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Saburov said he does not believe that the step could be carried out. It is too “technically complex,” he said, apparently referring to problems the government is running into with its outdated official printing presses.

Confusion about Yeltsin’s plan is natural, Ruslan Khasbulatov, the newly elected chairman of the Russian Congress told reporters, because Yeltsin’s speech on Monday “wasn’t an economic program.”

Now, said Khasbulatov, himself an economist, “Work is under way and decisions are being prepared” for decrees needed to carry out Yeltsin’s plans to free prices, encourage private enterprise, improve the tax system, break up collective farms and remove import-export barriers.

Meanwhile, at the Congress, lawmakers complained that they have yet to see the program in full and have to resort to rumors and questionable documents to figure out just what Yeltsin had in mind. Purported drafts of Yeltsin’s request for greater executive powers to force through the reforms made the rounds from hand to hand in the corridors.

And one lawmaker told Russian television that he and many of his colleagues spent much of the day in the corridors because they were angry that the Parliament had not voted to discuss Yeltsin’s plans immediately and to demand more clarification.

Lawmakers in the neighboring republic of Belarus (formerly Byelorussia) also expressed deep concerns as the ripples from Yeltsin’s declaration spread to other parts of the old Soviet Union.

They spent much of their session on Tuesday discussing what to do if the Russian Federation starts demanding that they pay hefty world prices for its oil and gas and agonizing about how far behind they have fallen in economic reforms, according to reports from the capital, Minsk.

Viktor K. Grebenshikov, a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau, contributed to this report.