Moscow Fears It Will Hear, ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ : Economy: Civil-war scenarios are on everyone’s lips as the country’s improverishment grows worse and hopes decline.

The mysterious “great fear” that preceded the French Revolution--that season of hysterical gatherings and sudden outbreaks of random violence--has intrigued historians ever since. The latest theory blames ergot poisoning of the rye crop, among whose symptoms is the sort of temporary madness that sprang up that fateful summer in 1789.

A lot of rye bread is eaten in the Soviet Union, but the ergot fungus is unlikely to be the cause of the new great fear that now grips the country. From a high-ranking officer of the internal-security force whom I met on the Moscow-Leningrad night train, from senior Moscow officials who may have been speaking for effect and from Leningrad industrial managers who were plainly saying only what they thought, I heard the same message:

“With us, it will end as in Romania, or in another Tien An Men.” “There will be blood in the streets.” “When the rioting starts, it will be catastrophic.” “The civil war has already started in the Caucasus; it can spread to Russia at any time.”

When I asked my acquaintances to explain their fears, they began by citing the dramatic impoverishment of the population, except for the “speculators, exploiting cooperators, smugglers and Mafiosi” (they use the Italian word) created by perestroika. Moscow has been printing money non-stop, and because supplies have not increased, prices have shot up. In a country where the median old-age pension is 84 rubles a month, and where 300 rubles amounts to a good monthly salary, last week’s price in Leningrad shops for a small chicken (no other fresh meat was in sight) was 20 rubles; a kilo of apples (the only fruit on sale) costs 5. Nobody need starve, but this winter in Leningrad, many must survive on bread and cabbage (there is a potato shortage).

Poverty does not cause riots. Impoverishment does. But even impoverishment is tolerable if there is hope of better days ahead. There appears to be no such hope in the Soviet Union. Of dozens of industrialists whom I met, not one believed that current economic reforms might succeed. The most visible results of perestroika , the “cooperative” restaurants and shops much celebrated in the West, were said to divert rather than increase production, thereby aggravating shortages in state shops. They, in turn, sell their “stolen goods” at vast profit. The cooperatives, I was told, are “outside civilization,” their owners--some of whom can afford a black-market Mercedes (100,000 rubles)--no better than Mafiosi.

Other offspring of perestroika-- new “self-financing” management rules, joint ventures with Western companies--inspire no hope, either. Even the Leningrad managers who understand the complicated new rules argue that the “wooden” (i.e. grossly inflated) ruble has made a mockery of self-financing. Most joint ventures remain on paper, since Western partners cannot obtain guarantees that they can repatriate future profits in hard currency.

In light of this bitter hopelessness, the civil-war scenarios on everyone’s lips no longer seem unrealistic. Food and vodka riots are already frequent, but they remain locally confined. Even the miners’ strike did not go beyond the coal basins of the eastern Ukraine and Siberia. But any event with nationwide implications, I was told, would bring out rioters in all cities and towns simultaneously, forming a full-scale insurrection. It would escalate into a civil war if Soviet security forces resisted.

Ironically, the great fear may serve to secure Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s position in the Politburo and Central Committee, because his removal would be precisely the sort of precipitating event that might lead to civil war. As one Leningrad manager put it: “Our workers hate Gorbachev’s policies, but if the intelligentsia goes into the streets to protest his removal, they will join in to loot and burn.”

No wonder, then, that the liberalizing wave that has swept Eastern Europe has aroused so little comment in the Soviet Union. The great fear makes even those momentous events seem trivial.