Thousands Demonstrate Against Premier in Moscow : Soviet Union: Calls for the government’s resignation echo off the Kremlin’s walls. The rally is unprecedented.

MOSCOW —  Thousands of demonstrators, protesting severe shortages of food and consumer goods, marched to the Kremlin on Sunday to demand that Premier Nikolai I. Ryzhkov resign and a new government be appointed to carry out radical economic reforms.

Chanting “Ryzhkov, resign!” and carrying banners that declared “The Economy Is a Disaster,” the demonstrators mounted a fierce attack on Ryzhkov, who has been premier since 1985, and denounced as “a betrayal of perestroika” his proposals for gradual transition to a market-based economy.

The participants, who endorsed a resolution at the end of the rally, also criticized President Mikhail S. Gorbachev for “indecisiveness and inconsistency” and warned: “Gorbachev, you now have your last chance to be with your people!”

Gavriil Popov, the Soviet capital’s radical mayor, told the crowd gathered in Manezh Square just outside the Kremlin that the country is “living through the chain reaction of the collapse of an obsolete system” and said the Ryzhkov government was only prolonging the nation’s agony.

Popov, one of the most prominent of Soviet economists, called on the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature, to adopt the controversial program by which, in just 500 days, the country’s economy would be transformed from state ownership and central planning to private entrepreneurship and market forces.

The Moscow mayor, who quit the Communist Party in July to protest what he called its conservatism, also called for a coalition government, including members of other parties and political movements, to replace the Ryzhkov Cabinet.

The Supreme Soviet is expected this week to resume debating the “500-Day Plan” of Stanislav S. Shatalin, one of Gorbachev’s economic advisers, and Ryzhkov’s recent proposals. The rally was intended to step up pressure for adoption of the more radical program.

Yet the relatively small turnout--10,000 to 12,000 people at the rally and perhaps twice that many marching the five miles through central Moscow in a cold drizzle--deprived the radicals of the massive support they had earlier this year, when about 250,000 people took part in one protest demonstration and more than 100,000 joined another.

Nevertheless, a political rally with cadenced shouts for the government’s resignation echoing off the Kremlin walls and up into Red Square was unprecedented in Soviet history.

“The government’s promises are not and can never be fulfilled,” Mikhail Poltoranin, the information minister of the Russian Federation, told the crowd. “Ryzhkov is loyal to the generals of the partocracy. He is a Trojan horse of those generals in the camp of perestroika. Nikolai Ivanovich (Ryzhkov) must, for once, become a man and say, ‘I am quitting.’ ”

The unremitting attack on Ryzhkov, 60, who had defended his policies on television Saturday evening, continued throughout the 90-minute rally. Sergei B. Stankevich, a political scientist who serves as Popov’s deputy, called on him to “leave with peace.”

“Respected Nikolai Ivanovich,” Stankevich said, addressing the Council of Ministers building just inside the Kremlin walls, “you did something useful for your country, but you have lost the main opportunities (for progress). Your three programs went bankrupt. We do not have revenge in our hearts, but our Mother Russia needs more than you can accomplish.”

By continuing in power, Stankevich said, the government was only compounding the crisis, because no one had confidence in it, no one would even accept that its proposals were perhaps mistaken but were put forward in good faith.

Stankevich was cheered, as were the other speakers, by a crowd of mostly middle-aged, middle class people. There were more maiden aunts and professors in berets than radical youths at the rally and in the march, and intellectuals and staff employees of the many government offices clearly outnumbered blue-collar workers and the unemployed.

“We need a government in whom we have faith, a premier who gives us hope,” Natalya Boiko, a high school chemistry teacher, said as she marched down Tvarskaya Street (formerly Gorky Street) toward the Kremlin. “Ryzhkov’s plan may have merits, but it will fail because no one believes in him.”

Ryzhkov, until now, has retained the confidence of Gorbachev, who appointed him premier in 1985.

What the radicals sought to stress at the rally was that the economic crisis was too severe for half measures, that the time for compromise was past and that Ryzhkov, an industrial manager for most of his career, was yesterday’s man.

“We are moving to a catastrophe,” Telman Gdlyan, a prominent radical deputy, told the rally. “Chaos and illegality have taken over the country, and it has become unmanageable. . . . There is no government in the country now--they are just a puppet group fulfilling the orders of the president and the Communist Party’s Central Committee.”

With social discontent rising amid creeping political paralysis, civil war and widespread bloodshed are quite possible, Gdlyan warned. “I do not exclude the possibility of a coup d’etat and the establishment of a military-party dictatorship,” he said.