Free Market!

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While no ordinary Soviet citizen had enough stakes to play at the same table with the succession of foreign high-rollers who began flooding into the Soviet Union, the government's promise to break up the bureaucratic apparatus still carried considerable mass appeal.

Now, five years later, the economy is even worse off. The recent spectacle of bread lines forming in the capital city of Moscow during a bumper grain-crop season only further antagonized Soviet consumers already impatient with government excuses.

Program hasn't worked

Why is it that Gorbachev's reforms have been so unpopular among the Soviet people?

This is the riddle which all of Gorbachev's advisers and soothsayers have been trying to solve. Easing the transition to a capitalisttype "market economy" step by step without provoking massive unrest has been the formula followed up to now. But it hasn't worked.

Even before the powerful August 1989 national Soviet miners' strike, there were already an average of 15,000 workers on strike each day during the previous six months.

This accounts for perestroika's numerous twists and turns over the last several years. First, private businesses were encouraged, then the lid was placed on them because of the massive popular reaction to the exorbitant increase in prices. Then last May price increases for basic necessities were announced, only to be quickly withdrawn during a storm of protest.

These detours have been incorrectly attributed to Gorbachev's skillful maneuvering against a conservative opposition inside the Communist Party. But Gorbachev himself admits that it's the resistance of the Soviet people which has slowed perestroika's capitalist-type reforms that call for price hikes which established try.

The enormous economic and social consequences of this historic and liberating accomplishment were never realized due to the revolution's inability to overcome two major obstacles-being surrounded since birth by hostile capitalist countries intent on strangling the economy and the equally disastrous effects resulting from the usurpation of power by the murderous Stalinist dictatorial machine.

Today's Soviet bureaucrats are seeing their special status and favors threatened by mass social upheavals. In virtual unison, the political heirs of Stalin's bureaucratic system have reacted by attempting to exchange their fragile bureaucratic privileges for the seemingly more durable privileges of property ownership.

This explains Gorbachev's love affair with President George Bush and other leaders of the world capitalist system. For their part, M Gorbaches R VAI RY LUCKONCH FOR HE ATLANIA CONDITION Nikolai Petrakov, economic assistant to Gorbachev, reflects a common understanding among most government officials about the pitfalls of perestroika, a premise which laid the basis for a Gorbachev-Yelstin partnership.

Petrakov says, "I believe that building a market economy cannot be started by raising the prices of staple goods, from any viewpoint, psychological included. A market economy has always been used in our country to scare people: It will be like the West-poverty and inflation."

This undoubtedly well-off swivel-chair bureaucrat complains that "a stereotype [about the capitalist market] has been shaped" in his country. And the danger, he observes, is that "the government's policy has backed up this stereotype. It speaks about the market economy, but price increases lead the way.

Instead, the new "500-Day Plan" even if with sufficient capital to take advantage of Gorbachev's proposed unprecedented fire sale of property and resources rightfully belonging to the Soviet people as a whole.

In the real capitalist world, and not the fairy land panacea suggested by Soviet rulers, it's the wealthy few who own the overwhelming bulk of property. It's the Western capitalists and their partners in the Stalinist state bureaucracy who will reap the benefits if the largest land and property auction in history goes on as projected.

The "500-Day Plan" calls for privatizing the bulk of state property, 70 percent of industrial enterprises, and up to 90 percent of the construction and retail trade industry. What Soviet worker or peasant will be able to bid for these properties?

To enlist support from the majority of Soviet citizens, Soviet planners are discussing giving each city dweller a chance to own their current apartment at a discount rate. In the countryside, small land plots would be parceled out to farmhands. Clearly, millions of people would have some form of property, establishing, according to one Soviet observer, "a sense of responsibility associated with owning property"

In the advanced capitalist countries, millions of workers own some form of private property, mostly personal consumer items, cars, and homes. But this hasn't stopped monopoly control of the economy and government by the capitalist minority for one moment. This is the dead-end road being followed by the ruling strata in the Soviet Union today.

But as Gorbachev carefully floats his reactionary proposals, he is undoubtedly mindful that the massive and powerful Soviet working class has more than once sunk his bestlaid plans.