COLUMN LEFT : Poland Spoke, but Yeltsin Didn’t Hear : The Russian Republic is headed down the absolutist free-market path to disaster.

“I appeal to all citizens of Russia to understand that a one-shot change to market-controlled prices is a dire, compulsory but inescapable step.”

--Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Oct. 28,1991

Yeltsin went on to tell his fellow Russians that his emergency economic program would in the short term bring hard times, unemployment and a plunge in living standards, until “by the fall of 1992 . . . the economy will begin to stabilize and life will gradually begin to improve.”

A few days before Yeltsin’s apocalyptic advisory, another president made a rueful confession to his people. “We have listened to the West,” Lech Walesa told the Poles, “and we made too big a leap.”

Walesa’s confession came on the eve of Poland’s first democratic elections since 1947, and on Sunday the voters gave their verdict on two years of economic reforms. Many expressed their opinion by simply not bothering to go to the polls. The party of Jan Krzyszof Bielecki, the prime minister picked by Walesa to supervise the capitalist transition, came in seventh. The former Communists--now called Social Democracy of the Republic--did surprisingly well. With their allies in the Peasant Party, they took 21% of the vote.

Yeltsin should have studied the Polish results before announcing his crash economic conversion. Speeches like his Monday address were once delivered in Poland. There, too, the apostles of drastic economic surgery proclaimed that there would be unpalatable shock, a drop in living standards, then a new dawn.

Today, Warsaw is by all accounts a cheerier place. The buses are painted pink and neon enlivens the cityscape. But for most Poles the dawn has not arrived. The cost of living has soared and millions have no jobs. There are a few New Rich and a lot of New Poor.

Worse still, there is no conspicuous glimmer of hope on the horizon as the old economic structure is dismembered. The advice of the Western economists is falling on increasingly resentful ears. Jacek Rostowski, an economist from the University of London, calls blithely for “four to five years of 50% unemployment in some (Polish) towns,” to which Poles respond, as many of them did in the polling booths, that the old system doesn’t look so bad.

Against the bleak realities of “crash therapy” in Poland, Yeltsin’s program looks bizarre to the point of criminal irresponsibility. Land will be privatized, state institutions shorn of their budgets, everything tossed into the magic caldron of “market freedom.” Poland’s misfortunes will be repeated on a gigantic scale, with far more traumatic social consequences. Poland is at least ethnically united. In the Russian Republic, economic hard times will translate into nationalist strife.

There is no greater testimony to the failures of the Soviet revolution of 1917 than the folly of the Muscovite intelligentsia in urging the sort of “reforms” now espoused by the populist demagogue Yeltsin (who insists that time and crisis do not permit Russians the luxury of any democratic review of his economic putsch).

This intelligentsia takes as its premise the notion that capitalism can arise by spontaneous combustion, whereas all historical experience shows that nothing could be further from the truth. To build capitalism you need the guidance and constant intervention of a state, such as the one Yeltsin now proposes to disintegrate.

The follies of the Russian intellectuals are nourished by Western economists who similarly preach a phenomenon unknown in the world outside their classrooms, namely that there is such a thing as a “free market” that by itself can generate appropriate output, prices and income.

Earlier this year, Prof. Gaspar Tamas, a member of the Hungarian Parliament, published a dry comment in an English weekly, the Spectator. After noting that in earlier times Western socialists made fools of themselves in “faith trips” to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Tamas noted that now “political pilgrims of the right” are similarly voyaging from the West, thinking that “at last they have found people who do not grumble and who can demonstrate to Western doubters that the fundamental tenets of their world-view are worth believing in.”

Now the combination of Western advisers, notably Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard, and local mystics of the free market promises devastation to the Russian Republic. The West could conceivably bail out Poland and, given its stake in the great experiment, it may well do so, but such salvage for Russia will be far beyond the West’s means. Then, amid the carnage, the free-market gurus will meet the bitter sanction of reality, though they will not be the ones to pay the price.