The Soviet Union Goes to Market : But will it return home empty-handed?

The Soviet Union’s last hope of avoiding chaos is to get its economic reforms in place fast. That in itself may produce chaos, but Moscow no longer has a choice. As for the West, its only role is to watch, help where it can and be prepared for anything.

Political reform, which seemed so radical at first, seems now to have come so easily by comparison. For the first time in decades, Soviet citizens by the thousands crowded up against the Kremlin walls in a cold drizzle over the weekend and demanded the ouster of a Communist leader without worrying about going to Siberia.

For the more evil-minded, the withering away of the Soviet police state has presented opportunities for prison escapes, hijackings, murder, riots and simple larceny.

Watching such turmoil in a society that recently seemed populated entirely by passive drudges, it is small wonder that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev hesitates to plunge ahead down the dark street that leads to his nation’s uncertain economic future. His prime minister, Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, warns that cutting links between Communist central planners and the Soviet Union’ factories, farms and shops too fast will mean chaos. He could be right.

But meat and bread shortages and cigarette and soap crises make it clear that, as Gorbachev told his Parliament over the weekend: “Old structures are falling apart.” The difficulty is that no new structures are yet in place.

Ryzhkov wants to build them by letting Moscow’s central planners--the same crew that ran the world’s first Communist system into the ground--manage a transition to free markets.

Gorbachev’s only real political rival, Boris N. Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, already has in place a more radical fast-track plan for economic reform.

Gorbachev dawdles, seeming to yearn to have it both ways, but he is likely to settle for economist Stanislav Shat-alin’s version of the Yeltsin plan, shifting the economy toward capitalism over 500 days. Government spending would be slashed and farmers could buy land. The Soviet Union’s 15 republics would probably wind up running their own shows in a loose confederation. Workers could qualify for merit raises and owners show profits, heady changes for the world’s first Communist society. But prices and wages would be allowed to find market levels only after 100 days of controls, in the hope of stabilizing change and avoiding total collapse.

Historically and culturally, Poland is very different from the Soviet Union, but the more far-reaching economic reforms it launched in January may provide some comfort as Moscow ponders its future.

In six months of a market economy without central planning, prices in Poland have gone up 174%, wages have gone down 38%, unemployment has soared, and support for reform is sharply down. But there is neither collapse nor chaos. Yet.

In the end, Gorbachev won’t find answers in Poland or in history. No government has ever given up so much power and capital stock. He has no map. But there is no turning back, for Moscow or the West.