Counterreformation

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Debates still rage in Moscow about whether hard-liners might try another coup to restore something like the old communist regime. But the real question is, Why should they bother? Already, conservatives -- in a post-Soviet context, those who resist change in the old Kremlin ways -- have been staging a kind of "creeping coup." They have been worming their way into key positions in President Boris Yeltsin's administration and are beginning to bend policy toward continued, or even increased, state control of the economy. Crows Arkady Volsky, head of the anti-Yeltsin faction: "The policies of the reformist government are on the brink of collapse."

That is premature. So far, the drive toward a free-market democracy has been only slowed, not reversed, as economic policy stutters in contradictory directions. One day it moves toward more private capitalism: witness Yeltsin's plan to distribute to all Russian citizens, beginning Oct. 1, vouchers that they can exchange for shares in state-owned businesses. But the next -- or even the same -- day policy veers backward. The former communists succeeded in wangling increased subsidies to keep alive outmoded enterprises that free- marketeers insist should be allowed to go bankrupt. The contradictions could worsen Russia's economic slump by reigniting hyperinflation. And more economic misery could eventually undermine democracy as well -- even though Volsky's Civic Union could theoretically be viewed as a Russian version of that democratic Western institution the loyal opposition.

Elsewhere in what was once the Soviet bloc, the road to capitalist democracy is turning out to be strewn with pitfalls, detours and an occasional reversal. Hardly anyone in the former Soviet republics or the onetime satellite states of Eastern Europe is openly advocating a return to communism -- by that name. But in some countries, the communists who now call themselves socialists have given up hardly any of their control of economic, political and social life. President Ion Iliescu rules Romania less brutally than did his executed predecessor, Nicolae Ceausescu, but with as keen a will to block all reform.

Across the East bloc, diehards are rebelling against the rigors of converting state-run economies to free markets. In Czechoslovakia that backlash is helping to break the country in half. In Poland economic backsliding has aggravated, and been aggravated by, a democracy run riot. Parliament is splintered into 29 political groupings, and a succession of revolving-door governments -- three Prime Ministers in less than a year -- have been unable to get any firm grip on the floundering economy.