If Reforms Fail, Yeltsin Says He’ll Resign : Economy: But Gorbachev tells legislators the only solution is to ‘press on.’

Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin said Wednesday that he would resign if his radical economic reforms do not rescue the country from disintegration. But he added that at least half a year will be needed before people feel any improvement.

“I am being asked all the time what would happen if (the government) fails,” Yeltsin said in a television interview. “I believe in our success. If it fails, we will all go, including me. This is our last chance.”

Meanwhile, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev told the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, that the country’s political and economic collapse is accelerating, apparently unchecked by recent efforts of the central government and the Russian Federation to halt the free fall.

“We are in the grips of the desperately dangerous process of disintegration today,” Gorbachev said. “It is not just the country--our very society is falling apart, its economy is crumbling into pieces. . . . Economic ties are snapping.”

Painting a grim picture of falling industrial production, unharvested crops and declining foreign trade, Gorbachev argued for new appropriations to keep the Soviet government functioning. But the amounts were so vast--budget deficits totaling 300 billion rubles, about $513 billion at the official rate of exchange--that they were meaningless, paper money printed as fast as the government presses can work.

“There is only one solution, comrades, and this is to press on with the reforms,” Gorbachev said. “But that will produce results only in the next year at best.”

As he has before, Gorbachev argued for rapid evolution of a new Union Treaty--forming the constitutional basis for a confederation of the country’s republics and thus laying the political foundation for resolution of the economic crisis.

Yeltsin asserted that only through bold deliberate action by the Russian Federation could the country as a whole be saved.

“We have been waiting for the reform for seven years from the (central government), but we did not get a thing,” Yeltsin said. “Only now that the minefield is cleared after the putsch can we move forward energetically. . . . We see that the Soviet Union as a whole has a lot of difficulties in implementing the reforms. Russia must move forward itself and pull the rest of the republics along.”

Seeking to rally popular support for reforms, which he acknowledged would hurt at first, Yeltsin said prices will soar when government subsidies for most products are ended in coming weeks but that wages will be freed from state controls and the poor will be protected.

“We need the people’s support,” Yeltsin said. “Strikes will not help resolve the situation. We simply do not have the reserves (to satisfy demand). . . . But, no, we will not have hunger!”

He predicted that in six months the consumer market will be saturated with goods, at higher prices but freely available. To ensure food supplies, Russia will import 25 million tons of foreign grain, he added.

Yeltsin defended himself against growing criticism that he is gathering too much power into his own hands--he is now prime minister of Russia as well as president. He argued that he needs a vertical power structure to push through the reforms.

In a series of pointed comments, he clarified the growing scope of his “Russia first” approach to politics as well as economic reforms. If the Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s second richest republic, began issuing its own currency, as planned, it would “sweep everything away, including the last salt and matches,” he said, and the Russian Federation would immediately establish trade barriers to protect its markets.