NOT A FAIRY TALE, IT'S MORE LIKELY A NIGHTMARE

Mikhail Gorbachev, the great survivor, may not be the most powerful man in the reconstituted Soviet Union, but he may be the most needed. Someone has to be around to take the political fall when economic catastrophe hits. Just as Lech Walesa needed Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki to begin to do the dirty work in Poland, Boris Yeltsin needs Gorbachev to preside over the greatest economic debacle since the Great Depression.

Communism has fallen, but the collapsed communist economy lives on. Fairy tale time is over. Brave Boris on the tank is history. Hunger, mobs and social turmoil are the prospects of the future.

To convert to a free market prices will go up, wages will come down and unemployment will grow. Subsidies will be removed and military spending will be cut. In the past, Yeltsin the populist was opposed to higher prices and in favor of higher wages. Walesa sounded the same way, as the working man's friend. He carped at Mazowiecki while the dirty work was done. Yeltsin needs the freedom to carp. He needs Gorbachev to do the dirty, but necessary deeds.

It's mind boggling to contemplate the magnitude of what needs to be done in the Soviet Union. West Germany plans to spend $150 billion over the years ahead on the former East Germany, which has a population of only about 17 million. The Soviet Union with close to 300 million people will need investment in the neighborhood of perhaps $2 to $3 trillion.

More is needed than just a few pages of reading from Adam Smith before turning out the light each night. If the shackles of centralized economic decision-making were the cancer of Communism's demise, then surely decentralization of political and economic decision-making into 15 republics will be the proper medicine for the free market cure. But can this be so?

The republics are enormously interdependent in economic terms. Self-sufficiency would mean abandoning their own suppliers and customers. Nationalism can induce economic isolation. Nationalism breeds autocracy and it, not democracy, is the spectre of the Russian future.

The economic purists believe that there is within the Soviet people a pent up demand both for private entrepreneurship and for a good day's work for a good day's pay. It is as if accepting a free market ideology automatically engenders the motive and spirit to make the system function. If they can run a black market, they can run a white one. Simple as that. But can this be so?

The Soviet Union is light years behind the West in commercial and industrial development. Neither capitalism nor democracy can be created by sleight of hand. It has a work force recognized as notoriously indolent. To say it can be another Switzerland with quaint, separate cantons held together with the glue of a strong currency belies centuries of Russian history and culture.

The bleaker the picture, the more imperative the need for food to get through the winter and for technical assistance to begin the long, long road to recovery. Herbert Hoover, where are you when we really need you?