Anger Of Hungry People May Doom Perestroika

AFTER the Soviet parliament adopted the 13th five-year plan for its economy last December, I started to hoard flour. Every time I visited my little local store in Kiev, I would buy a 2-kilo package.

I cannot remember a time when the situation on the Soviet consumer market got better. Meat, cheese, sausage, wine, fish, cakes, tea, chocolates, razor blades, socks, shoes, etc., have slipped ``into deficit,'' while the government statistics showed the production slowly increased.

Where do all these things go, Americans often ask me. Perhaps the same way as people's trust in the government.

The 13th plan, now abandoned, cast the baker's dozen spell over the Soviet consumer. Unable to trust the ambiguous program of ``planned transition to the regulated market,'' the shoppers began to look with apprehension at what still remained on the store shelves: flour, cereals, vermicelli, salt, matches.

But price increases were ruled out. The government admitted that it would not survive in the resulting tumult.

Last week Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov came up with a new, bolder program. However, his plan made it hardly any clearer to an average worker what the transition to a market economy would look like - apart from one thing: a dramatic rise in retail prices. That is why monthly food supplies were snapped up by panic buyers in a matter of hours.

The animalistic thrust of hungry mobs is no longer a possibility but a real threat to the whole program of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. An episode in April, when an old man in Alma-Ata was smashed into a shop window and trampled to death by a crowd rushing to buy milk, can only be a prelude to the nationwide flareup. Anger and frustration have reached a critical point, the Soviet Center for the Study of Public Opinion reported.

When the food stores are bare, children hungry, and parents ready to fight, Gorbachev's democratic reforms, liberalization, and even presidential chair may not have enough legs to stand on.

A significant news item, largely omitted by the American media, has been the landslide victory of Yegor Ligachev, the hardest of hard-liners, in elections to the Soviet Communist Party Congress due to open July 2, one day after the scheduled doubling of bread prices.

The rank-and-file party members gave him 77.9 percent of the vote, almost 20 percent more than Gorbachev received from his constituency. In a situation where everything around seems to collapse, Ligachev's program - and here lies the greatest danger to perestroika - may be most appealing to the Soviet workers: strengthen the command role of the party, ``socialist discipline,'' say no to private property.

The cornerstone of glasnost, Gorbachev's priority of ``universal human values'' over ``class interests,'' has been attacked by a group of workers in the party daily, Pravda: ``But who will defend our interests? Shall we start again the struggle for the socialist ideals through strike committees?''

It will not be only the hard-liners who will accuse Gorbachev at the Congress of selling out the party, ineptness, and lack of leadership.

In the meantime, while the government admits there can be no therapy for the situation without a shock, it offers only a shock without therapy.

Gone are the times when government programs were rubber-stamped by the parliament, handpicked by the party. Moreover, it looks as if the Supreme Soviet in Moscow may not be an ultimate authority when it comes down to Soviet republics, including the largest - Russia proper. Boris Yeltsin's program as he campaigned successfully for the Russian presidency strictly opposed price rises.

The prime minister of Ukraine is also against Ryzhkov's bill. The issue will drown in debate.

But the fuse under the time bomb of Soviet discontent has been lit. Only real shock therapy may save the day with the dramatic change in the structure of economic management - stock market instead of the State Planning and Supplies Committees, acceptance of private ownership of land, concessions to Western businesses, more predictable customs laws, and at least intermediate convertible currency.

If that happens soon enough, Western economic aid may work and be needed.

On the other hand, the foot-dragging over transition to the real market will resuscitate the centralized structures: the countless ministries and committees, the party, the militia, and the army.

When the choice is between perestroika and a slice of bread, the apparatus of distributing ration cards will be much more credible to the man in the street than the ill-defined promise of paradise under a free market.

Unless Gorbachev races full blast now to the New Economic Policy of the 1990s, the flour that I hoarded earlier this year will be useful to my father. For Gorbachev and he remember what I do not: the dismissal of a half-hearted Soviet reformer, Nikita Khrushchev, following two years of flour and bread shortages.

The day the new leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was installed, the shortages ended.

Mikhail Alexseev, editor of current affairs for the Kiev weekly News From Ukraine, is in the United States under the sponsorship of Seattle's Pacifica Foundation.