Hamsun imd Bergman. We're remindedof those fraitght dramas, in many cases atug between a stnali nnmher of people,set beside a body of water. Whether anintimate lake, or a cove in a fjord, or anjcky shoreline on a soimd, this settingis a key element in the nnfolding stoi y.Life hy the water, with a towboat or a sail-hoai tied tip, (jr with a little steamer attbe town pier, and with a Hag flyingsomewhere, seems to be .synonymouswith smnnier itself, and summer is whendiama generally happens in Scandina-vian art.

In Kobke's hands, relations betweenpeople are not the contest of wills they

wotilti be in the work of these later fig-tires. Yet his painiing in the ReinhartFoundation, with snnlight and shadowplaying over tlie child, tbe tiprightwomen and the men bent down in tbeboat, might be a primal Nordic scene.Flere. in acorn form, is the fhst appear-ance of that drama abotti the emotionaltemperattire of a family or a faniilylikegT'oup of peojile. Tbe pictttte makes youfeel that, though he led his life as aperennial son, and still makes Daneswonder how mucb importance to givehim, Kdbke was, at least in tbe largei'realm of all Scandinavian art. a kinti offather. •

Shock TreatmentsBY JAGDISH BHAGWATI

Poland's Jump to the Market Economyby Jeffrey Sachs(MIT Press, 160 pp., $19,951

I t is iionic that Jeffrey Sachs'scelebratory account of eco-nomic "shock therapy" inPoland an ives just as the same

therapy seems to have foundered on tbelegendary shoals of Russia. .-Vfter all. ifRussia's failtirc was inspired by Poland'ssuccess, it may be that Poland lias fhiallymanaged to repay Russia for all the n otj-hie that Russia has visited UJJOTI Polandin the pasi. Now that the \irtues of shocktherapy are no longer taken for grantedby all reasonable men and women, a realdebate over its wisdom can begin. Tbestakes of this discussion are bigb: only adispassionate analysis of what wentwrong in Russia yestei day can illuminatetbe problems that await tis there today.

As is often ihe case wben great issuesand arliciilate [jrotagonists are involved,the analysis of shock therapy has beenbedeviled by language. The proponentsof sbock therapy are masters of rhetoric;and tbey have often relied on attractivephrases and misleading analogies toadvance their argumeni. The phraseitself suggests a drastic hut necessary cor-rective to unmanageable disoider; and"big hang"—aiuttber tei ni in the shocktlieiapists' lexicon—suggests nothingless than the creation of the universe.Both imply that we must ptish abead atfull speed; wben tbere is chaos, andeverything is a mess, surely that is therigbt thing to do. Gradtialism, hy con-trast, suggests procrastination, a theoryof latiieness.

Tbe debate over economic reformoften becomes an angry exchange ofanalogies. One side claims tbat you canonly cross a chasm in a single leap. Tbeother side retorts tbat unless you areIndiana Jones, you drop a bridge. Tbenagain, the shock therapists argue, if youwant to cut a dog's lail, you do it withone slash of the knife, not bit hy bit. /\iidthe gradualists reply that you train a dogby setting incrementally escalatingheights fbi' him tojttnip.

Tbe sbock therapists, who strikerather romantic figures on a dreary pol-icy landscape, bave succeeded in sug-gesting that economists who advocategradualisni ai'e knaves or worse. But thetruth is tbat tbe optimal speed of anyreform is an isstte of nutch (ontroversyin theoretical research today, and tbereis no basis for the sweeping presimiptiontbat the more speed, the better. Indeed,gradualist thinking has a distinguishedpast in economics. Adam Stnith, whosecredentials on the subject of markets arenaturally indisptitahle, wrote in TheWmllh nfSalions:

It ni;iy soint-liiiu's Ix- a in;ittcr of delibera-tion, liuw far, or in wbat manner it isjtropei- to restore the free importation offoreign goods. . . wben ]jarii< ular iiiamifiic-turers, by means of high duties oi' probibi-tioiis uptjn all foreign goods which ctjmeinto ctinipeniitin wiib tbeni, bave been sofar extended as lo finploy a great mulii-nide of bands. Hnmanity may in this caserc(|uire tbat freedom of trade should be

restored only by slow fria<fu;iti(nis, and witba j^ood deal of i('sei\e and {iiriiin,s]KTtion.

And in a similar spirit, Keynes wrote in19^3 of tbe danger of haste, citing, iron-ically enough, tbe exatnple of Russiamovitig toward socialism:

Paul Valery's aphoiiMn is wortb (jiioting—"Politital conflicts distort and disturb thepeople's sfit.sr of disiinclion between mat-ters of iinporiaiue and tnalteis t»f turgency."The economic transition of a society is aibing lo be accoinplisbed slowly.... Wehave a fearful exani]jle in Rnssia today ofthe evils of insane and unnecessary baste.Tbe sacrifices and losses of transition willbe vastly greater if llie pace is forced Forit is of tbe nature of economic processes tobe rooicd in time. A rapid transition willinvolve so mucb pure destruction of wealtbthat tbe new state of affairs will be, at first,far worse tban tbe old, and tbe grandexpctimcnt will be discredited.

One (hing is clear: tbe debate overshock therapy c annot he condttcted witbcatchpbrases atid sound hiles. It is onlywhen these distiactions are dismissedtbat the importatit issues come into view.The actual content of tbe reform strat-egy in Poland and Russia, and its con-trastitig forttines in the two countries,are subjects that reqtiire seriotts itivesti-gation. Sachs has ad\ised both the Polishand Russian governments, and so be isan invaluable guide ihrongb these densethickets. His little book presents a pro-tagonist's view witb admirable clarity andconviction. Tbe main subject of his anal-ysis is Poland, hut he draws parallelsbetweeti the "failed" policies of Russiaand Polatid prior to shock tberapy, andargues for the method's promise in Rus-sia after its success in Poland.

O f course, Sacbs's conftdent])iescription for Russiac()titia.sts sbarply witb Rtis-sia's sorry cotiditioti lodav.

John Kenneth (iaibraith once said wittilyof ati ecotioinist foe that his misfortunewas to bave his theories tried (and tobave thetu fail); and Sachs's misfortunemay he tbat bis theories were so success-ful in Poland that tbey were tried againin Russia. Wliat was hold in Polandturned out to be rasb in Russia. Polandeai tied Saclis a place in history. Btit Rtts-sia overwlielnied him, layitig waste, notfor tbe lust titne, to a great ambition.

To tmderstand what happened, it isnecessary to trace tbe decline and disin-tegration of tbe Polisb and Sovieteconomies before tbe introduction ofshock tberapy. Indeed, modern eco-!ioniic bistory wotild do well to distin-guish among four historical phases:(I) the decline imder socialism; (2) thedeepening crisis as foreigti horrowitigwithout reforms led to excessive debt

MARCH 28, 1994 THE NEW REPUBLIC 39

btirdens; (3) the disintegration under"market socialism," when market re-forms were attempted within the Social-ist framework; and (4) shock therapy,with its benign consequences in Polandand malign outcomes in Rtissia.

The eeonoiuic decline under social-ism has been well-docun\enied. Scholarshave long noted that the Easiern bloc'shigh rates of investment unfailingly pro-duced few results. The blood, .sweat andtears were to no avail: growth rates plum-meted; and effieiency and technicalinnovation, the twin sources of increasedprodtictivity from investment, wereincompatible with a regime that decriedinitiative and ignored incentives.

F aeed with the chillingprospect of economic de-cline, [he Socialist regimesof Gorbachev in Moscow

and Gierek in Warsaw passed throughtwo phases of "reform." Initially, bothleaders tried to preserve the inheritedeconomic system. They urged workersto work harder, and they sought toimprove technology' and productivitywith high levels of foreign borrowing.But the results were exactly whateconomists had earlier witnessed in thedeveloping countries: huge foreigndebts were contracted with little eco-nomic payoff. The influx of capitalbought a little time, but it burdenecl theeconomy with interest and repaymentbills that simply could not be met. Con-sider an impoverished peasant who bor-rows and invests with little return andthen Finds himself hopelessly indebted.For Poland and the Soviet Union, theresults were mnch the same.

Thus began the phase of "marketsocialism": market reforms carried outwithin the confines of continued stateownership. State-owned firms were nowallowed to "set wages, inputs and outputs(but typically, not prices)." Sachs con-tends that these reforms were not merelyincomplete and inadequate; becausethey were undertaken without privatiza-tion, he believes they contained theseeds of disaster.

Both Poland and Russia did indeedtake nosedives under market socialism.But was the lack of privatization really toblame? Common sense stiggesLs that pri-vatization should yield greater gains byallowing more play to the proFit motiveas market incentives are introduced. Butlosing these incremental gains is not thesame thing as losing your shirt. Are wetruly faced with the option of going allthe way or going down the tubes? Notreally.

Regardless of privatization, Poland'sand Russia's reforms could not havebeen expected to produce signiFicantresults. A key problem, Sachs notes, was

that the born-again reformers were stillprisoners of the assumptiou that compe-tition (which, in principle, is compatiblewith state-owned enterprises actingtmder new rules) did not matter. Restric-tions on new enterprises, import con-trols and a host of other interferencescontinued, and nipped competition inthe bud. Reforms reinforce each other;one, without others, will not work.

B ut this does not explainthe collapse of marketsocialism. To do so, Sachsfollows a different line of

argument, proposing that the liabilitiesof state ownership were exacerbated bythe growth of democracy. In otherwords, glasnost helped to kill pere-stroika. This is a eounterintuitive andinteresting thesis, because the normalpresmnption at the time was thatdemocracy would briug immediate andpalpable beneFits to a people that hadbeen starved of freedoms for too long.These benefits, it was thought, wouldbuy Gorbachev the time to brii\g theeconomic reforms along in a gradual,measured way. But the general consen-sus today seems to be that Gorbachev'sreforms and Gierek's economic reformsfailed because the terror had died.Reforms freed gigantic state-ownedenterprises from the "command" systemthat communism worked with an ironfist. At the same time, the full play of themarket and the invisible hand were notin place. Hence discipline broke downand so did the economy.

This view is not original with Sacbs,bui he states it well:

L'ndtT Ihe old "command tconomy,"before the Gorbachev reforms, enterprisepolicies were conirolled by central fiat,hacked up by threat of force against work-ers and managers who tried to evade thecommands. When the commands, and thethreat of force, were {mercifully) removedin the enierprise reforms in the second halfof the 1980s, managers and workersattempted, not surprisingly, to increasethoir incomes at the expense ot the siatc hyabsorbing whatever income flow and what-ever assets they could from state enter-prises. They demanded higher wages andstripped assets through various means—either overt or covert.

This argument does not persuade me, atleast in its general form. Sachs seems tothink that wage explosions and assetstripping happened because "whenthere are no capitalists, there is nobodyto represent the interests of capital." Ifstate-owned enterprises had beenreplaced with private enterprise, hebelieves, these rude occtirrences wouldhave heen avoided. But asset stripping,or "looting," is also a fact of life in capi-talist systems with private ownership.

Thus the economists (ieorge Akerlofand Paul Romer have argtied quite per-suasively that our own s&r crisis was inno small measure the result of straight-forward villainy, and not simply due tounwise financial deregulation. Nor areexcessive wage demands a rare problemfor capitalist societies.

Sachs also overlooks an importantaspect of market socialism. Once eco-nomic decision-making was shifted tothe state-owned enterprises, and therewas less retribtuion from the state, itbecame a lot easier to direct suppliesand outputs to more profitable tises.Indeed, as the Sovietologist Padma Desainoted SL-\eKil years ago, the bieakdownof the command system did lead Sovietfarms to ignore the state's procurementdemands and to sell their productsinstead in open rural markets thatfetched higher prices. As fartners'incomes rose, agricultural productioniticreased. Meanwhile state-stippliedtirban shops began to rtm out of food asprocurement flagged. One soliuion tothis problem would have been to directdomestic effort and foreign Fmancialand technical assistance to building abetter transportation system so thatprofit-seeking entrepreneurs cotild shifttheir rural supplies to more profitableurban markets.

I t's important to recognize thatthe ills of market socialismmight have occurred evenwith privatization; and that

some good did occur even without it. Inshort, it was not the absence of privatiza-tion that led to the implosion of Polandand Russia. And ihai is a good thing. Ifmarket reforms could not be ptirstiedwithout privatization in place, we wouldbe in deep and itnmanageable trouble.Privatization takes time, just as buildingan effective population control policy orextending agrictiltural assistance pro-grams takes lime. The critical problemwas, rather, that neither Gierek nor Gor-bachev had the instruments of socialpolicy and of monetary and Fiscal con-trol in place as they experimented withmarket reforms.

If you shift to markets, you deserve toget micro-efflciency. But to reap therewards iu good measure, yoti have touse the social instrtuneiiLs that go withmarkets. A social safely nel and acljust-meut assistance are necessary to reform,especially if you expect enterprises torespond to price signals and lay off work-ers when required. The shift from a soci-ety of entitlement to a society of oppor-tunity, and hence fiom total security tototal insectirity in one's working life, cre-ates the kind of fear thai Americans wit-nessed in their own country during theN.\rrA debate. American workers, com-

40 THE NEW REPUBLIC MARCH 28,1994

ing ot'i a decade when real wages fell,were extiaoidinarily resistant to theadministration's appeal for their sup-port, becau.se they knew that freer trademeans greater fltix and adds to insecu-lity.

A .sucressftil shift lo a marketeconomy requires thesocial instrtimeius thatcapitalism ha.s evolved over

the last century. L'nforttinately, theseiiistrtiments were not readily availableill Moscow and Warsaw for the simplert̂ ason thai ihey liad been tinnecessaryin a Socialist society. Ironically, mone-tary policy also slipped from govern-ment hands even though the mone-tarists were as much in charge tindercomintinism in its heyday as they werein Milton Friedman's Utopias. The mar-kei Socialists might have tried lo haltthe wage explosion with lough mone-tary policies; but they failed to do so. Inplace ot monetary restraint, Poland andRussia practiced an accommodatingmonetary policy that indulged the wageexplosion by printing the money neces-sary to pay for it.

Thi.s iailure of macroeconomic policyhad diOeient causes in Poland and Rus-sia, (iierek simply did not have ihe polit-ical legitimacy to enforce strict disciplineon the workers. Under Gorbachev thislegitimacy existed, al lea.st for a lime, butil did not help. Wlien Yeltsin took con-tiol of Rtissian revenues, Gorbachev hadto print money to pay for So\'iet expen-ditures, and a profligate monetary policyinevitably resulted. Gorbachev had liltlechoice in the matter.

(Contrary to Sachs's conclusion, theabsence of privatization was not the"fatal Haw" that undei mined Gor-bachev's and Gierek's reforms. If therewas a fatal flaw, it was the absence of thesocial and macroeconomic policy instru-ments that are essential to the effectivefunctioning of market capitalism. In anycase, markci socialism did not work, andit became cleai" that a change of coursewas in order.

It may be that Sachs's apocalyptic viewof market socialism predisposed him todrastic measures when he arrived inPoland in [une 1989 at the invitation ofSolidarity. It is also possible that Sachswas simply following orders; he writesthat Solidarity instructed him to draw up"a program of rapid and comprehensivechange." In August 19H9. the Mazo-wiecki government appointed as itsdepiuy ptinie minister for the economythe now celebrated Leszek Balcerowiczto spearhead siicb a program. It is hardlo decide who led whom by the hand. Itis certain, however, that they walkedhand in hand.

The Balcerowicz plan that resulted

must be clearly understood, for it is theessence of shock therapy. Sachs empha-sizes the plan's dramatic and "holistic"features:

I Poland h;idj lo brt-ak decisively iviili llu-(^oiniTiiinist sysiein, to end litdfw/iy tr/orm,and ... to jump to Ike market ironomy |niv iial-ics). The goal wa.s lo create an economy "inthe s[\'le of Wcsicrn Europe," ba.sed on pii-vate ownership, free markets and iniegra-lion into world markets. Tlie plan also com-bined long-ierm niaik<-t reform with ashort-run emergency staliili/ation programto end the incipient hyperinflation.

Like other economists, Sachs defineshyperinflation as a monthly rise iti pricesof' 50 percent or more. The phe-nomenon is a familiar one in SouthAmerica, where it calls to mind the mag-ical realist Fiction of Garcia Marquez. Butit is virtually unknown here or in India,where rates tjf inflation reaching eventwo digits lead to corrective action—anapproach to macroeconomics more con-sonant with the ttanquility of ihe villageof Malgudi in the fiction of R. K.Narayan. Americans can get a better feelfor the phenomenon from the advice totake a taxi instead of a bus under hyper-inflation, since you pay for a bus ridewhen it starts and for a taxi ride when itends.

No macroeconotnist will quarrel with

the proposition that hyperinflation hasto be attacked swiftly and surely. Thisreqtiires a ruthless assatilt on the btidgetdeficit, and on the printing of moneythat (lnances it. Fiscal and monetarypolicies must be geared towatd the taskof macroeconomic stabilization. And soiti 1990 Poland initiated a drastic plan ofaction: food and other hotisehold subsi-dies were slashed or eliminated entirely;cheap ctedits to industry disappeared;and ceilings on borrowing were set.

The novelty of Sachs's plan, however,lay elsewhere. He insisted [hat reformsin the incentive structtue of the Polisheconomy must be carried otit with eqtialspeed. Consider the convertibility of thezluty. The introduction of effective inter-national competition is impossible,economists agree, without a convertiblecurrency that enables traders to importcheaper foreign goods whenever domes-tic good.s are partictilariy expensive. ButSachs rejected the conventional wisdomwhich held that a quick transition toconvertibility for Poland was impossiblesince Western Europe had taken adecade after the Second World War toreach convertibility and most developingcountries were still afflicted witb incon-vertible tui ren(ies. Instead, Sachs per-suaded Poland to inttoduce convertibil-ity practically overnight, setting the

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exchiingf rale at an attractivt-ly low leveland backing it up with a stabilizationfund tbat guarded against speculation.As a result, Poland maintained a stableexchange I'ate throughout 1990, even asits cm rency became convertible.

Shock therapy also mandated a fullliberati/auon of prices. It was expectedthat prices would rise steeply onee, andthen tbey would stabilize as tough mone-tary and fiscal policies cmplied the fueltanks driving hyperinflation. At the sametime, wage discipline was imposedthrough a tax on wage increases tliatexceeded a norm: the so-called "|topi-wek" tax. It was expeeted that tbis curbon raises would limit unemploymentand reduce the need for monetaryrestraint, sinee the government wouldnot have to combat wage increases byreftising to print more money.

Sachs argues persuasively that thistherapy produced dramatic results.Prices rose initially by 77 percent in Jan-uary, by 16 percent in February andthen by less than 4 percent a montb intbe two years afterward. The exchangerate was stable. Foreign exchangereserves actually increased. (Confidencein the currency rose, and Poles beganexchanging dollars for ziotys. But thebad news, as feared by opponents ofshock therapy, was that unemploymentrose dramatically. It increased from anaverage ot'^.rt percent in 1990 to an aver-age of 9.2 percent in U)91 and to an

average of 12.8 percent in 1992. I sus-pect that the trtie rate of unemploymentin Poland was even higher, since firmsprobably kept mostly idle workers ontheir rolls who sbared work with eachother in a makeshift way. Tbe old gagfrom the years of conmiunism was stillgood: asked wbeie the unemployed hadgone, a local wit replied that they wereworking.

Of course, luieniployment rates werehigh in Western Etnope as well. And theywere liigh in Easlern European countriesthat did not undergo shock therapy. Butthe increase in unemployment in Polandwas siuely not unrelated to sbock ther-apy. And the increase was dramatic de-spite the "popiwek" tax that a Solidarity-backed government had succeeded inimposing on Poland's workers, ll is notsin prising, then, that the social contractbegan to fray. In the parliamentary elec-tions of September 1993, Polish votersga\e less than 12 percent of the vote tothe proreform Suchoka government,while returning to the legislature former(-onimunists and future fascists whoadded up lo more than a third of the newParliament. The many successes of tbeBaUerowicz reforms were overshadowedin (he political marketplace by the painattributed to the therapy.

Ibis unfortunate turn of eventsshould give us the clues we need as towhy shock therapy failed in Russia. InPoland the political preconditions exist-

On a MarriageSo you have cbosen the way of the swan;the way, perhaps, that is not nattiralto everyone, bul I will not harp onabout heron, blue bird oi' dotterel,

nor how tbe male flycatcher pairswith two females, keeping a mile between,so neither cops how the other sbaresthe same philandering gentleman.

Did yon know the life-coupling wayof the swan is also that of tbe crow?And there'll be crow-black daysyou'll caw at each other witb !)lind gusto.

But there'll be other times when you'll singthe duet of the black-collared barbetwith the fust part of die song sungby one 8c tbe second by the oiher mate.

'We wish you now many such duet days8c sing for you like the red-eyed vireowho sings nonstop through the summer blazeon this day you take the way of swan Sc crow.

GREG DELANTY

ed for shock iherapy lo be given a fairchance. In Russia the political precondi-tions appear not to have existed at all. InJantiary 1992 Yegor (iaidar. Russia'sdeputy prime minister, annotmct'd a pro-gram of reform that paralleled Poland's.Claidar's plan, devised with Sachs's assis-tance, was to citt Russia's budget deficitfrom an officially estimated 17 percent ofgross domestic product all the way tozero in just fbiu" months. There was noconsensus in support of this bold pro-posal. The Russian economist Yasin Yev-geni has said that the plan was conceivedand anin)inued "Soviet-style"; no effortswere made to consult with Parliament <jrwith the regional governments or withthe people. At the same time, as inPoland, nearly all price controls werelifted, with tbe result that prices immedi-ately rose by 300 percent.

The price increases cut deeply intothe population's cash savings, whichwere widely treasured because mostother productive assets could not belegally held. Meanwhile the link betweenwages and prices was severed by theremoval t)f wage indexation for stateemployees. These developments magni-fied the widespread, and undetstand-able, fear that a rise in unemploymentwould follow from the proposed budgetcuts.

I n a country accustomed tofull employment, in which fullemployment was not only aprinciple of eccmomics but

also a principle of culture, tbe fear ofjoblessness went very deep. For a Rus-sian workf̂ r, the loss of employmentraised a specter of personal disaster thatwent beyond the loss of wages, [ust asbealth instuance in the United States islinked to employment by a strange quirkof wartime history, so much else islinked to <»ne's employment in Russia.Of course, no social safety net was yet inplace: unemployment instuance was stillbeing worked at. But even witb a safetynet, workers had little reason to assumethat new jobs would become available tothem. Meanwhile, a long tradition ofpaternalism toward workers possiblyreinforced the hostility of factory man-agers to economic change.

To be sure, many converts to shocktherapy were aware of the pain that theirpolicies would cause. But it was theirexpectation thai large doses of foreignaid would ease that pain. Sachs himselfwas a party to the so-called "Grand Bar-gain" or "Harvard Plan." which pro-posed that foreign countries deliver asnutch as $30 billion per annum for fiveyears. Though he later withdrew from itssponsorship, be did not abandon tbeniunbers. A funny story made therotmds at tbe time among Russian

42 THE NEW REPUBLIC MARCH 2a, 1994

cxpt'i ts who were disconcerted by thefact that the Harvard plan had lieen ptitlot^ether by Americans who had littleknowledge of Russia's Iiistory, institu-tions or langtiage. Someone asks anAmerican reformer, "How did youbecome an expert on Russia?" He says, "Ihave been there five times." And llieRussian replies, "And if yoti have heen to(he l^athrooni live limes, are you qiiali-lied to be a tirologist?" But the real prol)-lem was not that the authors of thegtaridiose plan knew little about Russia;it was that they did not know enotighabotu [heir own habitat. Ntimbcrs stuba.s $.S0 billion were simply nut of bounds.How could so nuuli aid possibly havebi'en mobilized?

T he stipporters of shocktherapy in Rtissia weresadly miscalctilatiiig theaid they cotild get, confus-

ing exhoitations with expectations.Indeed, when shock therapy wasannotLnced in January 1992, Russia wasnot even a member of the IMF, and(ieorge Bush had not yet committedhimself firmly to any aid at all. The(oniplaint that the IMF did not de-liver what it eventtially promised is fac-Iiially correct. But it is incorrect toimply, as Sachs has implied, that thiswas why the plan did not sticceed.For sliock therapy was already fail-ing, antl the system was leturning to fis-cal and monetary chaos, and so theIMF held up the release of funds untilsome fiscal discipline was restored.This is standard IMF policy every-where in the world, and it stirely hasmerit.

In the end, the Russian system simplycotild not accommodate the demandsthat shock therapy made upon it. Andso shock therapy was reversed, return-ing the regime to targe budget deficitsand high rates of inflation. Political andeconomic realities on the grt)inid droveihe moderates in Parliament to joinhands wiih the extremists. Meanwhilethe ti'clmociats who were wedded toshock therapy branded all who opposedit as Communists, reactionaries, rejec-tionists and worse. The eventtial con-frontation between the Russian Parlia-ment and ilu" Yeltsin governmeni was atragedy whose script liad been wiitteniinwiitingly by the shot k therapists. Theself-deluding world in which they livedwas further in evidence when AndersAslimd. a former Swedish diplomat doti-bling with Sachs as an adviser to Gaidar,wrote in The New York Times, jwai beforeihe disasttous election of December 12,of the certain victory that awaited thereformers.

Wotild more modest efforts to cut thebudget deficit and slow the inflation

have been more acceptable to tlie cotm-try and more readily supported by Ibr-eign assistance? Such a course was feasi-ble. Most analysts agree that Rtissia facedhigh inflation, not hyperinflation, at thetime of tlie shift to shock thcrajjy, andthat this problem allowed a gradualassatilt. The gradtialists contend that theshock therapists achieved too little inattempting too nnith. Of cotirse, the

Family SecretsBY JENNIFER KRAUSS

Across the Bridgeby Mavis Gallant(Random House, 198 pp., $191

F amily is an embatlled coun-try stu rounded by moats inMavis Gallant's precariousworld. The characters in

her stories who escape its confines—castoffs or deserters c:ommitting acts oftreason—are wary adventtiiers, uncer-tain if they are being rescued or takenprisoner. When her younger sister getsmarried and prejjares to embark on anew life in "The Chosen Htisband,"one of four linked stories in the latestcollection, Bei the ('arette looks on thewedding party as if she were compos-ing a photogra|)h, and in the processcapttires her creator's worldview: "It wasan important picture, like a preciseinstrtimenl of measurement: so muchduty, so much love, so much recklesssafety...."

That final oxymoron perfectly encap-stilates the fundamental tensions (jf Gal-lant's work, between atidacity and sliy-ne.ss, insolence and politesse, opennessand stispicion, pride and |)reitidice.From "Madeline's Birthday." the firststory that she published in The NewYorker in 1950, ahottt an American girland a German boy adrift in a foster fam-ily's fonntry house, to "In Plain Sight,'"ptiblished in the same magazine last fall,about a fading French writer and theadvances—and retreat—o( his tipstairsmtise, all of Gallant's short stories con-cern the barriers tbat sepaiate us andthe bridges, treacherous or untried, thatstand before tis to be crossed.

The first fonr stories in her new book,which collects Gallant's work from 1980to 1992, are set in Montreal, where Gal-lant was born and raised, before makingher home in Paris in the '50s. They fol-low the bereft women of the Carette

gradtialists have the advantage of havinga theory that is only a counierfactual.The shock therapists, for their part, triedand failed.

[A(;DISII BHAC.WATI is Arthur Lehman Pro-fessor'of Fconomics at Columbia Univer-sity. He is tbe atithor most recently ofIndia in Transition: Freeing the luonomy{Oxford University Press).

family from 1933 to 1977 as the men intheir lives vanish or die. In "1933," thejust widowed Mme. Carette is forced tomove with her two young daughters,Berthe, 6. and Marie, 4, to a smallerapartmeni in the poor end of the city.()n nioving day—the day when tbeCarettes become "declasse" (the story'soriginal title)—"soft snow, like grayinglace, fell." Later to be tracked onto thertig by French and Irish alike, snow (inGallant's icy Mom real as in Joyce'sDublin) is a leveler; general, it seems, allover Canada. But it is, for (iallant, a lev-eler o\' a bleaker sort—diity and end-lessly melting—and it fails to bring hersolitary pilgrims into harmony with one ,another.

Upstairs the French Mme. Carettemotirns her husband and her formerlife, while downstairs the Irish {andchildless) Mme. (irosjean, the landlord'swife—with whom Mme. Carette won'tdeign to commtmicate—calls vainly intothe night for Arno, the Airedale whosewhereabouts are as unstire as her erranthtisband's. The pair have run off unan-notinced to Pare Lafontiiine, the omni-scient narrator soon reveals, where theyare "trying to play go-fetch-it in thedark." For this is what Gallant's charac-ters do: they repel and beckon oneanother in a kind of half-light, passingjtidgnient, making pronouncements andtlien waiting, contrite, in the shadows,hoping to regain their victims' sympa-thy.

Himian interaction is plagued by mys-tification and misinterpretation in Gal-lant's short stories—as, indeed, are herreaders, who are alternately made tofeel that they are in the know and in thedark. A master of shifting sympathies,

MARCH 28,1994 THF. NKW REPUBLIC 43 \