Gorbachev Warns of Peril if Soviet Union Collapses

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, struggling to halt the Soviet Union’s ever-faster disintegration, warned Tuesday that the country could collapse into civil war and even endanger world peace if its remaining republics do not unite in a new confederation.

“Only a union can protect us against the most horrific of the dangers that threaten: the destruction of links built up over centuries, binding ethnic groups, families and people over a sixth of the Earth’s surface,” Gorbachev said in an appeal to the republics to join the confederation.

“Disintegration is fraught with (the danger of) inter-ethnic, inter-republic clashes, even wars. This would be a catastrophe for the whole international community and would destroy all the achievements of our (new foreign) policy.”

Gorbachev made his dramatic appeal in a message to the legislatures of the Soviet Union’s 12 remaining republics, although all but two have declared their independence. He repeated it in a national television address intended to build popular support for a treaty binding the republics together.

“There is no time to lose--no more political maneuvering is permissible,” Gorbachev said, urging people to demand the rapid ratification of the treaty.

In almost apocalyptic terms, Gorbachev predicted that chaos would sweep the country, its economy would fall into total collapse, minorities would be threatened by rising and conflicting nationalisms and human rights would be seriously endangered.

“Without a union, our common security, as well as the security of any republic, will ultimately erode,” he said.

“Finally, nobody has the right to forget that our state has become a main basis of world development towards a new world order. . . . The collapse of the basis will cause a chain reaction with consequences that are difficult to predict.”

Gorbachev’s urgency clearly stemmed from the overwhelming, 9-to-1 approval that Ukrainian voters gave in a weekend referendum to full independence for the Soviet Union’s second-most-populous republic.

He did not refer directly to the Ukraine, and Andrei S. Grachev, his press secretary, described the vote as “quite predictable.” Independence would give the Ukraine and other republics the opportunity “to take a reasonable and well-thought-out decision on their participation in the future union,” Grachev added.

But political commentators said Tuesday that the Ukrainian vote had virtually ended all Gorbachev’s efforts to hold the country together, since the Russian Federation, the largest Soviet republic, had already declared that it would not sign the proposed Union Treaty establishing the new confederation unless the Ukraine did.

“The breakup of such a multiethnic community will bring misfortunes upon millions of our people, outweighing all possible temporary benefits from secession,” Gorbachev told the republic parliaments, calling this “crisis of statehood” the gravest of the dangers the Soviet Union now faces.

Gorbachev’s two appeals were accompanied by new warnings, including one from him, that conservatives and the military might unite in another coup d’etat to oust him and reverse his reforms.

“There are some who expect a new coup,” Gorbachev told the weekly newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta in an interview to be published today. “It may even be in the works now. Perhaps there is someone from the military-industrial complex, perhaps from the (Communist) party structures.”

While Gorbachev’s intent undoubtedly was “to shock people to think again, to bring them back to common sense,” as one aide put it, the effect was to underscore his desperation as his last hope of reconstituting the Soviet Union and preserving its unity fades.