Next Step : Soviets Race to Regain Momentum : The zeal for change since the August putsch has waned. The time for a turnaround, many say, is now or never.

“Life punishes those who are late.”

It was October, 1989, and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet president, was warning Erich Honecker, East Germany’s Communist leader, on socialism’s urgent need of fundamental reforms.

Honecker mocked Gorbachev’s words--and within days popular protests were under way that swept Honecker and his comrades from power and led, a year later, to Germany’s reunification and the disappearance of the German Democratic Republic.

“Life punishes those who are late.”

Now that piece of folk advice is a warning to the Soviet Union and to Gorbachev himself.

Almost three months have passed since the defeat of the conservative coup d’etat, and so little has been done to pull the country out of its multiple crises that even Gorbachev is beginning to despair.

“We have frivolously and irresponsibly squandered the ‘capital’ we won after the putsch,” he told the State Council, the country’s top executive body, in a somber, foreboding speech last week.

“When I speak of this capital, I mean the hope that had come to people, the belief we all had that we could manage the situation, lead the country firm along the path of reforms and cope with the crisis more quickly.”

In a word, the political energy that came from the coup’s defeat--that conviction everyone seemed to have that things could at last be put right--has been lost, dissipated by the same indecision that has stalled perestroika for nearly two years and that had contributed to the coup.

“Since the August putsch, we have seen no real actions by the government,” Ruslan Khasbulatov, chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet, the legislature of the country’s largest republic, commented last week. “This is very dangerous, especially as a certain power vacuum has emerged. . . .”

At the top of the political pyramid, the leaders appear to spend most of their time fighting for power in the name of reform and drafting plans that are rarely implemented; at the bottom, the people are growing more and more restive, with social discontent beginning to flare into violence.

“Democracy has been installed only in Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg),” Alexander N. Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s senior adviser, warned at the end of last week. “One should not believe the central squares of these cities represent the whole of the country.

“There is a danger of an explosion . . . . Personally, I am afraid of a ‘revolution of empty plates.’ Any scoundrel capable of raping the nation could use such a situation.”

Chronic Russian pessimism is taking an even deeper hold on the people as the food lines lengthen, the days shorten to seven or eight hours of gloom and the winter’s first snows remind everyone of the severe hardships to come.

“The central Urals region is close to the brink of a disaster,” the leaders of the local governments, the major enterprises and the labor unions in Ekaterinburg wrote in a letter last week to Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who was once the Communist Party leader in the region when it was known as Sverdlovsk.

A major industrial center, Ekaterinburg is facing a serious threat of hunger this winter, the leaders wrote. No butter or vegetable oil is sold there now, dairy products have been sharply curtailed, bread is rationed--and often still not available. Social tensions are rising rapidly, the leaders warned, and “an immense explosion seems very likely.”

Could they, the letter asked, increase the export of the weapons and military equipment the region produces rather than cut them back as Moscow plans? Or perhaps they could sell the high-quality metals they manufacture, even though these are in short supply here?

“The people must eat,” the leaders of Ekaterinburg wrote. “Who will feed them?”

An opinion survey in Russia earlier this autumn for the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta showed that 67% of the respondents expected tougher times economically and 47% thought there would be further political trouble. In another poll, 57% said nothing had changed since the collapse of the coup.

Such warning lights are flashing across the Soviet Union each day--so many in fact that they rarely rate more than a paragraph in the national newspapers.

A man in St. Petersburg killed in broad daylight for a sack of potatoes. A 29-year-old man run over on the Moscow Metro while retrieving a sausage he had dropped on the tracks--it was too valuable to leave. Riots spreading through the prison system over declining rations. An airport runway occupied by angry passengers after outbound flights had been canceled for lack of fuel. Payless paydays in provincial cities as banks run out of cash. Strikes by bus drivers, power-station workers and other municipal employees in more than a dozen cities.

“By spring, the country will be on the verge of civil war,” Vladimir Zhirinovsky, president of the Liberal Democratic Party and an advocate of a strong, militaristic government in the czarist mold, said. “A new regime will come to power. Then there will be order, good order, tough order. There will be no choice.”

Zhirinovsky, who won 6 million votes in Russia’s presidential election last June to come in third, said the country’s economic collapse remains unchecked--and thus his prospects for election as the Soviet president next year quite good.

The Soviet economy is shrinking at an annual rate of 12% this year compared to last, when it also contracted, and could decline a further 14% next year, according to projections by the Soviet Ministry of Economy, with unemployment jumping from 3 million to perhaps 25 million.

Inflation is running nearly 3% a week, or about 450% a year. The Soviet ruble is now worth about 2 cents on the open market here, reducing the wages of an average factory worker to the equivalent of $10 or $12 a month. Export earnings have declined so sharply that Moscow may have to suspend repayments on its $68 billion in foreign debts this week.

The State Statistics Committee reported last week that there is 10% to 15% less meat, milk, sugar and eggs on sale. Demand for bread and pasta products has consequently risen--but 80% of Soviet cities do not have flour regularly on sale.

“A revolt would be most likely in December,” Maj. Gen. Viktor Ivanenko, the head of the Russian Federal Security Agency, the successor to the KGB, warned last week. “The main danger is a series of directed social explosions. The people are exasperated. Rumors are flying around about prices being freed (from government controls) very soon. Add to that the irregular supplies of the most basic foodstuffs . . . . “

“Life punishes those who are late.”

Returning to Moscow from three days of captivity by the coup’s plotters last August, Gorbachev realized how late he was in implementing the reforms that he had charted over the past six years.

He had retreated in the face of conservative pressure, Gorbachev acknowledged, he had been timid where boldness was called for, he had been indecisive, he had vacillated.

But all that is over, Gorbachev pledged in an extraordinary political confession before the nation, and goaded by Yeltsin, the hero of the resistance to the coup, the Soviet president began to act.

He effectively dissolved the Communist Party and nationalized its assets. With the backing of Yeltsin, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and other republic leaders, he pushed the Congress of People’s Deputies into altering the whole constitutional basis of the Soviet Union. He allowed the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania their freedom. He cleared the way for the fundamental changes necessary for a free-market economy here.

And then it all stalled, and the reasons for that abrupt loss of momentum tell much about the country’s prospects.

The “democrats” had triumphed at the barricades outside Yeltsin’s headquarters in August, but they did not come to power with a prepared program as they might have after an election campaign. The issues that had caused Gorbachev to vacillate so much, particularly in the past year, remained unresolved, even in the minds of reformers, for they were, indeed, difficult.

The seat of power moreover was unclear. Yeltsin had repeatedly asserted his political primacy, even to the point of bullying Gorbachev in public. But Gorbachev, not Yeltsin, was the link in so many of the ongoing changes, the leader able to mediate among the different republics, and for the West the reassuring face amid the huge upheaval here.

Yeltsin’s supporters, the ascendant democrats, grew increasingly quarrelsome and greedy as they approached real power. They had never defined their interests much beyond opposition to the Communist Party--and now they were to govern a superpower stretching across a sixth of the Earth. Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s senior adviser, caustically described them last week as “unrestrained political narcissists.”

The result has consequently been more reform proposals, new programs, further debate and much back-room squabbling over the spoils of victory. The State Council under Gorbachev has virtually absolute power. Yeltsin has almost the same authority within Russia. Yet, there is still no clear, comprehensive action plan.

“All our laws resemble the Czar Cannon that never fired and the Czar Bell that never rang out,” Yakovlev complained.

On Friday, most of the central government will be dissolved under a decision of the State Council to decentralize management of the economy, but its responsibilities have not yet been delegated to new agencies.

Ten of the remaining 12 republics have now signed a treaty establishing a common market to preserve a unified economy, but the 22 implementing agreements are far from complete, leaving the economy still at the mercy of the central planners--or allowing it to slide fully into chaos.

Work on a Union Treaty creating a loosely structured confederation among the republics proceeds, but fitfully despite Gorbachev’s warning that, “Without solving the problem of statehood, economic problems will always arise.” The Soviet Union has ceased to exist as a state, but a successor has not been devised.

Yeltsin, assuming the premiership of Russia last week, said he would shortly begin the rapid transformation of the country’s state-owned, centrally planned economy to one based increasingly on private entrepreneurship. Tough measures are needed, he said, and sacrifice will be required.

But aides now say that the decisive step, the freeing of prices from state control, probably will not come until January or later, and most of the other essential elements, such as land reform and the privatization of state-owned enterprises, are again fading for lack of resolve.

“The country is suffocating because it has no clarity on these major issues,” Gorbachev complained. “This is very dangerous, and the State Council--that is us, comrades--is responsible for everything.” He might have again said:

“Life punishes those who are late.”