Russia’s Assets: No Wheeling and Dealing : Economy: Slow sales of state property not the only bug in Yeltsin’s program. Unemployment and prices are both on the way up.

MOSCOW — Remember the prosperous Russia of yeoman property holders that President Boris N. Yeltsin evoked last week? Well, there are still plenty of bugs in the system, his lieutenants admitted Monday.

Thirty-two of Russia’s regions, at last word, hadn’t even created the government committees that are supposed to preside over the massive selloff of state-owned factories and assets, the man in charge reported.

Possessive bureaucrats in some areas, such as Tatarstan, Bashkortostan and the Stavropol and Krasnoyarsk regions, haven’t even let milk stores and vegetable markets out of their hands, as they were supposed to under a national program for “small-scale privatization” that began earlier.

In certain locales, only one or two stores--and sometimes none--have been sold off to a labor collective or to private investors.

Only 4% of Russia’s restaurants and cafes have been bought by individuals who have actually paid for their purchases; the percentage for retail stores is a slightly higher, but still unspectacular, 8%.

“This creates a danger,” said Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly B. Chubais, the czar of Russia’s privatization program.

In some regions, Chubais explained, private property, the bedrock of Yeltsin’s program for a democratic, market-driven Russia, is taking firm hold. In other areas, something that looks suspiciously like the old state-run economy still survives.

On Monday, Chubais and other leading members of the government met with Yeltsin’s provincial prefects and local elected officials and administrators to discuss how to get economic reforms moving faster beyond the Moscow city limits.

“We cannot agree that the reform is stalled in the regions,” declared Valery A. Makharadze, the gruff deputy prime minister who chaired the daylong session. But there was plenty of evidence to the contrary, along with just plain gloomy news.

In a report distributed at the meeting, the Federal Service on Employment forecast that unemployment in Russia will skyrocket to 2.5 million, up from the current official figure of 350,000, by December.

What’s more, the employment service predicted, as uneconomical businesses deprived of state subsidies wither and fail, the job pool will shrink rapidly, so by year’s end there should be no fewer than 10 candidates for every available job.

Acting Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar said the “sharp growth” in layoffs should begin in September. Especially hard-hit will be the country’s defense industries, whose products are no longer needed for a global military standoff with the United States.

“The decline in industrial output continues and will do so for some time,” Gaidar acknowledged to reporters during a break in the proceedings, which took place in a white marble building near the Kremlin that had belonged to the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee.

Gaidar also predicted a rise in the prices paid by already hard-hit Russian consumers for basic foodstuffs, including bread, since his government has been forced this summer to pay wheat farmers more for what is turning out to be a mediocre harvest.

Concerned over the possibility of bread shortages this winter, Yeltsin ordered a national grain reserve established so that areas that do not grow enough grain to feed themselves, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, can have a dependable source of supply, the Interfax news agency reported Monday.

Few details of Yeltsin’s unpublished decree were given, but Interfax said the reserve will include grain grown in Russia and imports from former Soviet republics and the West. A presidential spokesman told the news agency that the reserve’s purpose was to guarantee the Russian population a source of bread.

Deputy Prime Minister Alexander A. Shokhin told the meeting that the outflow of currency from Russia--even with all the 90-day rollovers conceded on debt owed to Western governments and commercial banks--is running two to three times greater than export earnings.

He said Russia will request even more deferrals of foreign debt repayment during negotiations this week with the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations in Paris. Without more postponements, Russia’s economy cannot function normally, Shokhin said.

Last Wednesday, marking the one-year anniversary of his triumph over an attempted coup d’etat by Communist hard-liners, Yeltsin unveiled a long-awaited plan to give every Russian a “privatization voucher” to be used to buy a slice of a state-owned business earmarked for sale.

Each person is to get a voucher worth 10,000 rubles--$61 at current exchange rates.

According to the timetable outlined by Chubais, a list of every Russian citizen is to be drawn up in each region. On Oct. 1, distribution of vouchers to Russians, through the network of state-run savings banks, is to begin.

A total of 4,242 enterprises with fixed assets of at least 50 million rubles (about $300,000) and 1,000 workers each are subject to privatization, except for special cases such as nuclear power plants, railroads and other assets deemed to be of strategic importance.

Starting Dec. 1, Russians will begin to use their vouchers by buying a personal stake in a state-owned enterprise.

Again, however, there is a gap between Moscow’s vision and Russian reality. According to the latest available data, Chubais said, about a quarter of the factories and businesses affected haven’t formed the committees that, by law, are supposed to decide by Oct. 1 how to turn the enterprises into stock-issuing corporations.

On the bright side, said Chubais, who is chairman of the State Property Committee, 1,312 firms that are too small to warrant mandatory privatization want to become publicly held anyway.