NEWS ANALYSIS : Western Aid Designed to Rescue Yeltsin, Reforms : Restructuring: The huge package may not halt collapse. But it will serve as underpinning for change.

With the economy of Russia and the rest of what was the Soviet Union shrinking week after week, the $24 billion in assistance that the United States and its partners offered Moscow on Wednesday will hardly restore its previous strength--and may not even halt the collapse.

But the Western aid was calculated on a different basis--as a financial underpinning for the economic restructuring finally undertaken by President Boris N. Yeltsin and as clear support for him amid spreading malaise.

Afraid that Yeltsin might be swept away by the growing discontent, just as former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was forced from office, the United States, Germany and the other members of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations announced the rescue program.

Although the amount may seem massive, Russia’s needs are even greater. Some of the country’s Western economic advisers had even talked of initial assistance of as much as $30 billion a year and perhaps even $150 billion to $200 billion over a five- to seven-year period.

In a word, the money will go to keep Russia, once the world’s second-largest industrial power, fed and functioning while its economy is reoriented from state ownership, central planning and military production to market forces stimulating private entrepreneurship.

Most of the new assistance will probably go for imports--everything from grain and meat to clothing and other consumer goods to semi-finished industrial products--that will be bought from the donor countries to fill large gaps in the Russian economy.

However, a fourth of the money--$6 billion--will go for the currency stabilization fund sought by Moscow for more than a year to give the ruble the buying power that is essential if Russians, let alone foreigners, are ever to trust it and accept it in payment.

Farmers, for example, are reluctant to sell their produce because they can buy very little with the rubles they receive for the food, and even giant industrial enterprises now function largely on the basis of barter because of the ruble’s declining value even in domestic trade.

“Currency stabilization is rightly the first priority in this package because no economic reform is possible without establishing trust in the ruble,” said Andrei Pankovsky, a former Kremlin economic adviser. “This assistance is very encouraging, but we must use it effectively.”

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, announcing the package on behalf of the Group of Seven, stressed the immediate need to halt the economic decline, a disastrous 15%-a-year shrinkage of the country’s gross national output, and then the development of a free-market economy.

“The generous offer of assistance from the West in the sense of help for self-reliance has arisen from the recognition that the republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States cannot manage the huge task of economic restructuring by themselves,” Kohl said in Bonn. “The offer at the same time is incentive to successfully carry through the courageous program of reform, particularly in Russia.”

Whether this Western aid will be enough depends, however, on the soundness of these long-delayed economic reforms--eliminating state subsidies, raising prices to cover production costs, increasing taxes to offset government spending, reducing the budget deficit, privatizing state enterprises, laying off unneeded workers and forcing unprofitable factories into bankruptcy.

“Western support is very necessary, but everything depends on what we are able to do ourselves,” Sergei Ignatiev, the deputy finance minister, commented.

The Western promises are, in fact, more than the $17 billion to $20 billion for which Yegor T. Gaidar, Russia’s chief economic strategist, had campaigned so hard, and they reflect the new fear, particularly in the United States, that the reforms might fail and bring in their wake a new totalitarianism here.

On Monday, Yeltsin is to present the next, even more difficult stage of the reform program to the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies, the country’s Parliament, and Gaidar’s critics will try to oust his government and end his effort to lead a forced march to a market economy.

Encountering resistance in the wake of sweeping price increases in January, Gaidar has begun to retreat. Key price increases in the energy sector have been deferred, the government’s budget deficit is far larger than planned, banks are rescuing money-losing enterprises with new loans, plans to convert the munitions industry to civilian production are being scaled back and the selloff of state firms to private entrepreneurs has been slowed.

Horst Koehler, the German Finance Ministry’s state secretary, made clear the West’s expectations that Russia adhere to its strict reform program, noting that its plans would have to be approved and then monitored by the International Monetary Fund for it to receive the promised assistance.

“This means tightening the belt,” Koehler said in Bonn. “Sacrifices must be made there. Going through this process of adjustment is unavoidable.” Otherwise, he said, the West will be “throwing money out the window.”