Russia's new Communist manifesto

The failure of Soviet economic policy was so staggering that it is hard to believe anyone would seriously suggest trying it again. But that is just what the Russian Communist Party proposes. With a few concessions to the changed nature of the Russian economy, the Communists would essentially roll back history and reinstitute the kind of command system that left the Soviet Union in a stupor.

After five years of badly managed economic reform, many Russians would welcome some relief from the vicissitudes of a free market. They are angered by new economic inequities, including the windfall fortunes some of their countrymen made through the government's corrupt privatization program. Elderly citizens especially miss the stable prices, reliable pensions and subsidized housing of the Communist era.

But the answer to these problems is a more honest government, more generous social welfare programs and a better regulated market economy, not the revival of a state-controlled economy. Despite the uneven introduction of economic reform, the Russian economy seems finally to be stabilizing, even beginning to grow. It would be a cruel mistake to dismantle Russia's imperfect but vigorous free market just as it seems ready to deliver real benefits to millions of Russians.

The Communist economic plan unveiled last week asserts the need for government to take back control of production, wages and prices and turn away foreign imports and investors. It would prop up production by showering subsidies on steel factories and other shuttered remnants of the Soviet military-industrial complex.

The program promises to suppress energy prices, repeating a catastrophic Soviet policy that squandered a precious natural resource, sacrificed desperately needed revenue and promoted environmental degradation. The Communists would make huge infrastructure investments and cut taxes, while limiting inflation through the tight control of money creation. All this defies the ordinary laws of economic stability.

The vacuity of the program may be captured best by its assertion of projected growth rates for various sectors of the economy years into the next century. Even the Soviet economic alchemists, with the resources of a superpower at their disposal, could not predict sensible numbers.

The economic advisers to Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist presidential candidate, insist he will not turn back the clock to Soviet-era policies. The advisers say, for example, that a Communist government would not renationalize all the property put into private hands since 1991. That is uncertain. A preliminary draft of the economic program promised wholesale renationalization. It was disowned only after negative public reaction.

The Soviet Union tried to run a large economy by government edict, and failed disastrously. Zyuganov's program would replicate the error. It seems blind to the possibility that government can use regulations and taxes to provide individuals with the incentives to make socially constructive decisions, instead of making all the decisions for them. Though the opening and closing sections of the new Communist economic manifesto pay respect to the principles of democracy, individual rights and private property, the program it outlines would erase all three.

-- The New York Times