(FORTUNE Magazine) – For the second time in three years you're reading laudatory news stories about Soviet leaders identified as prodigious battlers against corruption. The first spate of stories concerned Geidar Aliyev, a KGB official brought into the Politburo by Andropov in 1982 and instantly viewed as ''one of the most attractive and forceful personalities in the Kremlin leadership,'' to quote a smarmy passage in the Washington Post. The main evidence for those flattering adjectives was Aliyev's postulated yeoman service in combating corruption in his native Azerbaijan. The current spate of stories is inviting you to think that the new foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, is equally appealing and for about the same reason. The Post now breathlessly says that Shevardnadze, another KGB graduate, worked wonders in putting the kibosh on assorted black- market personages in his native Georgia, and there is an affecting vignette of Eduard asking indignantly at a 1972 party meeting in this republic: ''Is there nothing that is not for sale here?'' Fellows, the story line is all wrong. Why would you expect us beneficiaries of capitalism to think this particular war against corruption was such a great idea? Why would we be all-over indignant at the spectacle of Trans-Caucasian businessmen bucking the depraved Soviet economic system? Would you really expect us to be on the side of price controllers wearing KGB uniforms? On a less theoretical level, does anybody think the Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani people are worse off because they have an above-average propensity for entrepreneurial activity? By most accounts living standards are higher in those quasi-market economies than in most of Russia. Why assume that entrepreneurs are good for people when operating out of Cupertino, California, but bad when based in Tbilisi, Georgia? We only wish you could buy their stock.