The Union: A Long, Mighty Struggle

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The Soviet people now know what it is like not to fear. They have learned the joys (and, yes, the frustrations) of a feisty press. They have had Pasternak returned to them and have openly called for the publication of Solzhenitsyn. They have tasted the fruits of private marketplaces and cooperative cafes, discovered the potential (and, yes, the frustrations) of private entrepreneurship; they have watched candidates debate on television and be asked whether they believe in God. And they have read articles brushing the dust off Trotsky, probing the demonic mind of Stalin and introducing them to the ideas of Lech Walesa.

Most significant, perhaps, is the forthright admission by the Soviets that they are trying to shed the burden of a rigidly centralized economy based on Leninist-Stalinist principles. The eulogies on the death of Communism may be premature, but there are signs that a verdict is being reached in the long twilight struggle between this century's two dominant ideologies. While scrambling to find euphemisms for such apostate phrases as "private property," the Soviets are jettisoning many of their Communist tenets in favor of some that are at the heart of democratic capitalism: contested elections, pluralism, codified individual rights, market incentives and the reward of private enterprise.

The one thing that can be said with certainty about perestroika is that it has exposed how difficult rebuilding the Soviet economy will be. The obstacles are greater, the situation more dire and the fixes more fundamental than even Gorbachev suspected four years ago. "Frankly speaking, comrades, we have underestimated the extent and gravity of the deformations," he told a Party Conference last year. Nikolai Shmelev, one of the country's radical economic gadflies, has put it more vividly: "We are now like a seriously ill man who, after a long time in bed, takes his first step with the greatest degree of difficulty and finds to his horror that he has almost forgotten how to walk."

The overall Soviet economy remains a near shambles. The budget deficit -- caused in part by transfusions to anemic factories and by subsidies for food and housing -- is about 11% of the GNP, by some estimates. The ruble, arbitrarily said to be worth $1.60 but not freely convertible into dollars or other Western currencies, brings as little as 10 cents on the black market. But price controls have repressed the latent inflation, and people have more paper money -- about 300 billion rubles in savings -- than there are goods available for purchase.

Translated to a personal level, this means that day-to-day life in the Soviet Union is as difficult as ever. Not only are big consumer items like refrigerators and washing machines in short supply -- the average wait to buy the cheapest Soviet car is seven years -- but staples of everyday life are also scarce. Long lines snake into the street for such ordinary items as sausage, rice, coffee and candy.

Gorbachev's reforms are part of the problem. He is trying to force factories to become financially profitable, so they are gussying up products in order to price them higher than the everyday models that are price-fixed by the bureaucracy. Moscow consumers were deprived for months this winter of regular soap (32 cents a bar) because enterprises wanted to produce only a luxury soap that they could price at $1.60 a bar.