U.S. Promise to Aid Soviets Still That--Only a Promise : Diplomacy: Even non-controversial programs are stalled. Administration is assailed for foot-dragging.

More than two months after the Bush Administration began promising economic help to the Soviet Union in the wake of an abortive coup against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the long-awaited “humanitarian aid” still has not appeared--and other, more ambitious forms of assistance are even further behind, officials said Friday.

The long delay in assembling a $1.25-billion package, made up mainly of loans to allow the Soviet Union to buy American grain to help weather a harsh winter, has drawn complaints from Congress, U.S. farm groups eager to sell their products and Soviet officials.

“To move substantial amounts of grain, there’s a good deal of time required,” said Charles Frazier, director of the National Farmers’ Organization. “By the time you load ships, get it over there, get it distributed . . . if you start rolling it this morning, you’re going to catch the late side of the winter in Russia.”

Administration officials said the humanitarian aid package has been virtually complete for almost a month, and White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater promised that President Bush will unveil it “fairly soon,” perhaps as early as next week. Officials also insist that the danger of famine in the Soviet Union has been greatly exaggerated.

But the unexpected roadblocks that held up what was supposed to be only an initial, non-controversial program to help the Soviet people have made it clear that any later, more ambitious programs will have a difficult time getting under way, officials said.

“On the humanitarian side, there isn’t any doubt that it’s going to go forward,” one State Department official said, referring to the $1.25-billion package. “But for anything beyond that, we have no authority and no money. . . . We have a lot of decisions to make that haven’t been made.”

Two months ago, in the aftermath of the failed coup, some officials talked expansively of the prospects for a sweeping technical aid effort, in which U.S. advisers would help the Soviet Union privatize its state-owned farms and factories, introduce free-market prices, turn the almost-worthless ruble into a real currency and plunge into the world economy.

Since then, one official said, “Things have moved backwards.”

The Administration has gone ahead with a flurry of high-level visits to survey Soviet needs and with a handful of small-scale technical aid efforts. But political conditions for large-scale aid have turned sour, at least temporarily, in both Moscow and Washington.

In the Soviet Union, the authority of Gorbachev’s central government has virtually collapsed.

“It’s been a disaster; they’ve wasted two months, and now it’s beginning to get cold,” said an official who monitors Soviet economic policy. “There’s nobody there to give aid to, even if we were ready.”

The struggle for power among the Soviet central government and the remaining 12 increasingly independent republics also raised the specter that Moscow could run out of hard currency to pay the country’s foreign debts because republics and individual enterprises are hoarding their hard-currency earnings. A Soviet default on foreign payments would make further U.S. loans almost impossible.

The disintegration of the Kremlin’s power touched off a major policy debate in Washington over how U.S. aid should be channeled--to the central government to shore up its waning prestige or to the individual republics.

The solution, officials said, will probably be a hybrid: a deal under which the United States will channel grain credits through a central body, such as the new Interstate Economic Committee, but insist on a voice in how the credits are split among the republics.

Meanwhile, the political climate for foreign aid programs in Washington chilled after Democrats charged that President Bush was neglecting the domestic economy. Officials acknowledged that one reason for the delay in launching the humanitarian aid package this week was because the White House was worried about a political backlash. “There was a strong feeling that we ought to give ourselves more time,” one official said.

When the Senate rejected a separate plan backed by Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) that would have transferred $1 billion from the defense budget to Soviet aid--a plan the Administration had waffled over supporting--White House aides took that as a sign that their caution was warranted.

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl contributed to this report.