(FORTUNE Magazine) – Did shock therapy fail in Russia? Not according to some U.S. and European economists. They say that the drastic, market-oriented policy can hardly be considered a flop since it has been pursued only sporadically and often incoherently. True, Boris Yeltsin and his reform-minded ministers did free prices, legalize trade, and start privatizing industries. But they failed to gain control of the money supply, resulting in an inflation rate of 900% last year. Not that you should blame the reformers either. The price of controlling the money supply was cutting off the 5.5 trillion rubles in soft credits that the government gave to financially destitute enterprises last year to keep them from going under. Ending those handouts would have triggered a wave of bankruptcies and layoffs that even Yeltsin realized was politically unpalatable. The resulting compromise left prices free but deprived the government of the mechanisms to stabilize the economy. With reformers Yegor Gaidar and Boris Fyodorov out of the cabinet, conservatives will be left to take the blame for increasingly uncontrollable inflation. Senior Moscow pols were already predicting that the new % conservative government would send inflation soaring and be driven from office, perhaps as a result of a cataclysmic general strike that could come as soon as May. Then reform-minded ministers could return to power to reinstate shock therapy. And this time, they might get it right.