THE MUNICH SUMMIT : Russia Wins Pledge of Aid, on Its Terms : Reforms: IMF director will recommend release of funds, delay of debt repayment after Yeltsin stands firm.

President Boris N. Yeltsin, facing down the leaders of the major industrial nations even before arriving here for their annual summit, has won concessions on how and when his country will implement their prescriptions for economic reform in return for $24 billion in promised aid.

Michel Camdessus, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, told the industrial nations’ finance ministers Monday that, under an agreement reached with Yeltsin over the weekend, he will recommend that the fund release $1 billion in aid next month, $3 billion more in the autumn and $6 billion beyond that to stabilize the ruble.

Camdessus said he will also recommend--and finance ministers appeared ready to agree--that Russia be allowed to suspend for four or five years repayment of the $68 billion that foreign banks and companies have lent to the Soviet Union. More aid would come from bilateral agreements.

Although the second and third stages of this program will depend on the fund’s acceptance of Russia’s future reforms, gone were the hard-and-fast targets that IMF negotiators had set for reducing the budget deficit and controlling inflation. Gone too was the timetable they had wanted for specific reforms, such as the selloff of state-owned enterprises, before any funds were released.

Instead, Camdessus recommended that the Group of Seven recognize that, just as there is a risk that the Western aid would be wasted without such controls, there is also a danger of doing too little too late by imposing conditions that Yeltsin had denounced as “just not possible.”

The agreement, full details of which will be announced later, appeared as well to modify the donors’ philosophical approach. The West will set minimal conditions for its assistance and try instead to underpin Russia’s own efforts to transform its economy into one driven by market forces and private entrepreneurship.

Camdessus said Yeltsin and Yegor T. Gaidar, acting Russian prime minister and architect of the nation’s reforms, “agreed on a set of economic policies that we both believe will strengthen the stabilization program of the Russian government. These are measures that are decided upon and adopted by the Russians.

“My job has been to say, ‘Yes, with that you reach the basic threshold of credibility, and with that you get the first release (of credits).’ I do believe that this package of measures is a significant development of the memorandum of understanding we signed with Russia in April.”

There would still be conditions--”The IMF does not extend borrowing without conditions,” Camdessus insisted--but if President Bush and other leaders of the G-7 industrial nations accept the recommendation of its experts, that will mark the end of prescribing how Russia should proceed with its economic transformation.

Yeltsin, however, had given Camdessus little choice, for he had declared before their meeting that the fund was asking too much in demanding an immediate shift to international prices for oil, gas and coal; in insisting on timely repayment of the Soviet Union’s old debts, and, more broadly, in imposing conditions for the assistance that the Group of Seven had promised in April.

“To force us to our knees for this loan, no!” Yeltsin thundered to journalists on Saturday. “Russia is still a great power.”

According to Russian insiders, Yeltsin was ready to come to Munich without an agreement, thus putting to Western leaders themselves the issue of how stringent should be the conditions for their countries’ assistance.

“Russia wants and needs the help, but it won’t become a beggar,” a Yeltsin economic adviser explained in Moscow. “There is a question of national pride, first of all; there is a question of economic efficiency, too, for we know our country better, and there is the issue of pressure we face from the right, our nationalists.

“The time had come to get tough with the IMF--that sounds funny coming from a country wanting $24 billion in aid, but it was true. What it wanted us to do, such as raising all energy prices immediately, would throw the government out of power.”

Yeltsin had warned Camdessus before their meeting: “There’s a limit to what the people will endure, and after that, that’s it. Patience will be gone, faith in the president will be finished, chaos will begin.”

Camdessus accepted Yeltsin’s point, as did spokesmen for most delegations here. Speaking of the raising of energy prices--which in Russia are so low, at one-tenth the world price, that oil and gas producers lose money--Camdessus said: “Liberalization of energy prices should not go all of a sudden. At the moment, the gap between world and domestic prices is so huge that a degree of progression is in order, and we respect the view of the Russians.”

Until late last month, IMF economists had pushed the Yeltsin government hard for a timetable of increases that would bring domestic prices to international levels within a year, according to Russian officials, and they had made Western assistance conditional on that.

The annual summit of the Group of Seven had, however, already become a deadline for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the other international financial institutions that the world leaders had charged, first in 1990 and again last year, with assisting the former Soviet Union in its transition to a market economy.

“The IMF is so used to bullying countries like Algeria and Ghana that it does not understand, first, that Russia is different and, secondly, that we will not be bullied,” a senior Russian diplomat commented here. “True, telling them to go to hell would be risky, but we had to achieve a correct balance--and get the money.”

Camdessus acknowledged that he had flown to Moscow urgently to meet with Yeltsin and Gaidar to bring the negotiations to a conclusion before the Group of Seven meeting. “I saw we were not far from an arrangement, and after 2 1/2 days of intense talks, including a meeting with President Yeltsin, we reached agreement,” he said.

World Economies at a Glance

Key statistics for each of the seven summit countries. Forecast for this year made by the International Monetary Fund.