A group of legislators today demanded imposition of a state of emergency and a freeze on all political parties and parliaments to help pull the Soviet Union out of its political and economic crisis. The group, which included the right-wing Soyuz group of parliamentarians as well as the reformist Liberal-Democratic Party, all but called for a military coup as a means of solving the nation's problems. The group's leaders announced the legislators were forming a National Salvation Committee and demanded transfer of power to it, the state news agency Tass and the independent news agency Interfax reported. The committee asked the army to help implement the plan, calling the military, ``the sole force still resisting the disintegration of the state,'' Interfax reported. Vladimir Zhirinovski, a leader of the Liberal-Democratic Party and spokesman for the committee, said in a telephone interview that the coalition represented 400 lawmakers in the 2,250-member Congress of Peoples' Deputies. Sentiment for a crackdown also is widespread in the Communist Party, which holds a majority in most of legislative bodies on the national and local level. Many Communists want President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to call a state of emergency and enforce it through the armed forces and the KGB security police. The National Salvation Committee seemed to have the same goals, although its goals were not spelled out clearly during the news conference its leaders called today to announce the group's existence. With all but one of the 15 Soviet republics seeking some form of independence or autonomy from central government, many officials fear for the very structure of the Soviet Union. The Soviet economy also is crumbling as the old command system is failing and grocery shelves in major cities are bare. Across the capital, Russian Federation President Boris Yeltsin harshly warned military officers at the Dzerzhinsky Military Academy that ``if the army enters our boiling society as an active factor, confrontation will increase many times, and carry the society to catastrophe.''
