Conservative Russian Group Waits in Wings : Politics: Their goal is simple--take over from Yeltsin regime when it is swept away by angry populace.

A month after Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin shut down the Soviet Communist Party, the only organized force opposing him and his policies, a far broader coalition is being formed by his old Communist enemies in alliance with everybody “from anarchists to monarchists.”

“We will have a sufficiently organized conservative movement in Russia by late December or very early January,” said Eduard F. Volodin, a political commentator for Sovietskaya Rossiya, a conservative newspaper, boasting of the breadth of the new movement.

The movement’s declared goal is straightforward: taking over from Yeltsin’s Russian government when it is swept away by an angry populace.

But the new alliance appears to object not so much to the substance of Yeltsin’s reforms as to the methods and approaches he has chosen for converting Russia to a free-market economy. Its leaders see an economic, political and social disaster coming--no later than April and possibly as early as late January--from what they regard as the mindless destruction of Russia’s social and economic fabric by the current leadership.

“Our nearest future is stark,” Volodin declared, sitting in his shabby office atop the gleaming, glass-paneled building of the Pravda Publishing House. “Riots are certain to begin soon--not in any organized way, just the hungry mobs on rampage. If it happens in one or two places, it can be contained. But what if the whole country just blows up?”

This apocalyptic view is shared by other leading members of the neoconservative movement. Tatiana I. Koryagina, a prominent reform economist and once a fervent supporter of Yeltsin, said: “In economic terms, Yeltsin’s reforms have already been defeated before they started in earnest.

“What his team plans to do, especially in removing all price controls amid monopolized production, is suicidal,” Koryagina said, explaining that sellers will be able to charge whatever they want in a country where all goods are in short supply and where they face no competition.

“In no more than two or three months from now, we will have a brief period of strikes, street riots and demonstrations,” she asserted. “Then there will be a tidal wave of crime, brutal and ubiquitous, directed both against institutions and individuals. And after life becomes intolerable, the military will step in.”

This scenario, espoused with little variation by nearly all participants in the coalescing conservative camp, appears increasingly possible as events overtake even the most pessimistic predictions.

Moscow Mayor Gavriil K. Popov announced last week, for example, that the Soviet capital has food for only 10 to 15 days--after which the city’s 9 million residents would have to rely either on “state reserves,” regarded as probably nonexistent, or on imports from the West bought on credit or provided as aid.

Frustrated and bewildered, people are beginning to blame the democrats for their troubles, and recent opinion polls indicate a shift away from popular goals such as “democracy” and “market reforms” toward “order” and “assured food supplies” as the first duty of government.

The conservative backlash gathered momentum noticeably after 10,000 people marched to Red Square on Nov. 7 to celebrate the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Although the traditional parade had been canceled, pro-Communist activists carrying red flags and chanting “Lenin! Lenin!” protested current government policies.

Such a brazenly pro-Communist demonstration in the democratic stronghold emboldened the opposition, and within days an Organizing Committee of the Conservative Movement came into existence.

That movement now has its political action arm in Volodin’s “coordination committee,” a parliamentary wing in the Russian Federation legislature; an economic program worked out by Koryagina and Alexei A. Sergeyev, a prominent political economist, and its own mass media with the daily newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya and the popular St. Petersburg television show “600 Seconds.”

But Yeltsin shrewdly eliminated the chance for any constitutional transfer of power by banning all elections in Russia for one year.

The conservatives, consequently, are relying heavily in their plans on support from the Soviet military. They expect the soldiers to quell the riots, pacify the country and then to invite civilians to form a government, protecting it from any counterattacks.

With memories of the failed coup last August still fresh, the neoconservatives are anxious not to give the impression that they are plotting another takeover. “It won’t be another putsch,” Koryagina insisted. “The military will simply pitch their force against that of the criminal world--they will join the people, not subjugate them, and that’s a crucial difference.”

Three new Communist parties also have been formed to replace the one outlawed by Yeltsin, but so far they have gained relatively few members and no influence. Even the largest of these formal parties, the Russian Communist Workers’ Party, can claim no more than 40,000 members across Russia; founded recently in Ekaterinburg, an industrial center in the Ural Mountains, the party will require months of work before it matures into a cohesive political force.

Because of the general disenchantment with all ideology, the “neoconservative movement,” as it prefers to call itself, is determined to avoid any “isms” as it makes its plans and appeals for support. The movement’s leaders admit that they have only two emotional issues to rely on--social justice and saving a once-great nation from disintegration.

“The state of affairs when 10% of the population is getting richer by the hour and the remaining 90% look with horror at potatoes one ruble apiece simply cannot last,” said Gennady A. Zyuganov, a top official of the disbanded Communist Party’s Central Committee who is now wrapping up its affairs.

He envisions an alternative approach for his movement, if it gains power, saying: “We won’t exclude the opposition from the government. We are already talking to several moderate democrats, inviting them to join us in the name of such fundamental values as the preservation of our statehood.”

He sees not a confederation of the present republics but “a full-blooded state, guaranteeing elementary social justice and security to its citizens, political and economic stability and the revived glasnost for its mass media.”

Both Zyuganov and Koryagina profess adherence to private enterprise “where it can function effectively,” mostly in the economy’s service sector and in the small-scale production of consumer goods. They insist that their first act in power would be to freeze prices, “to let the people breathe while the genuine reforms are being prepared.”

Grebenshikov is a reporter in The Times’ Moscow Bureau.