TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/123091/1230000.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.1 KB | 172 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 26

RUSSIA

Unmerry Christmas


The red flag will be lowered soon, but citizens are more
preoccupied with how to repair the ruined fabric of their daily
lives

By JOHN KOHAN/MOSCOW -- With reporting by Yuri Zarakhovich/
Yaroslavl


    Neighbors are not happy about the barnyard noises and
smells coming from the back of Alexander Torzhenko's house on
a busy street in the center of the south Russian city of
Krasnodar. But the elderly manual laborer and his wife Alexandra
are determined not to give up the pigs or the dozen ducks they
keep in two ramshackle wood shacks on their 15-sq.-yd. plot. In
fact, the couple seem to be settling in for a long siege.
"Around here, they steal," says Torzhenko, so he has dug a
cellar with concrete walls and a heavy metal trapdoor to store
pork and the potatoes he grows on a parcel of rural land in this
rich, black-earth region. "I trust Mikhail Gorbachev when it
comes to one thing," he adds. "He said there would be famine --
and there will be."

    The soil is not as fertile in Bakarevo, a settlement 900
miles to the north on the Volga River, near the city of
Yaroslavl. In fact, Venyamin, who prefers not to give his last
name, cannot scrape a living out of his small landholding. He
works as a ship chandler to support his wife Antonina, her
mother and two young sons. They also have damp earthen cellars
beneath their wooden cottage to store their winter stash: 15
sacks of potatoes, two barrels of salted cabbage, heaps of
onions and carrots, five huge jars of pickles and 40 quarts of
fruit preserves.


    Both families have one thing to celebrate this grim
Yuletide: they are fortunate enough to have stockpiles of food
for the difficult months ahead. Russians may not understand the
notion of the new commonwealth being created by President Boris
Yeltsin, but they can see with their own eyes how the fabric of
daily life has been torn to shreds by six years of political and
economic upheaval.

    They are not expecting any dramatic improvements either
when the red hammer-and-sickle flag is lowered over the
Kremlin, giving way to Russia's white-blue- and-red banner, and
Gorbachev finally steps down as Soviet President. Both might
happen momentarily. Meeting Saturday in the Kazakh capital of
Alma-Ata, presidents of 11 former Soviet republics -- only
Georgia was absent -- signed documents formally creating a
Commonwealth of Independent States to succeed the U.S.S.R. and
settled some of the last details. For example, they agreed to
form a military council to exercise unified control of the armed
services and to have Russia take over the Soviet seat on the
United Nations Security Council.

    That also should enable Yeltsin finally to lift controls
on prices and "privatize" state-owned property. To many
Russians, that prospect is as appetizing as a large dose of
castor oil. With everything in short supply, it is not
surprising that the collectivist ethic has given way to the
principle of every man for himself.

    Social and economic decay are evident everywhere. Domestic
airports look like refugee camps as stranded passengers keep
weary vigil, hoping the state-owned Aeroflot airlines will soon
resume flights canceled by a severe shortage of fuel and spare
parts. With more than 8,000 wells standing idle, oil and gas
production have dropped 10%. Life in the far eastern city of
Khabarovsk, a key industrial and defense center on the Chinese
border, has almost ground to a halt because of dwindling food
and heating oil.

    Nothing causes more alarm for Russians than the prospect
of a bleak winter without food. Famine has recurred with
frightening regularity during seven decades of communist rule.
"Hunger did not start with perestroika," explains Dmitri
Pushkar, a deputy on the Yaroslavl regional council, who
monitors food supplies in the countryside. "It began with the
coming of Soviet power." Vadim, a local taxi driver, puts it
more bluntly: "I remember the postwar famine of 1947, when we
had nothing to eat but nettles and goose feet. So what else is
new?"

    Plenty, according to Vyacheslav Tabolin, a Russian
authority on pediatrics. He fears a major health crisis is
looming for today's undernourished children, because their
parents and grandparents suffered from malnutrition. Health
officials estimate that only 8.5% of schoolchildren in the first
to tenth grades are of a height, weight and build normal for
their age.

    The current food crisis is different from earlier ones in
a crucial respect: the Soviet agricultural system, which turned
rural areas into an enormous food factory for urban centers, has
completely broken down. The food that is being grown is staying
in the countryside. Collective and state farms are refusing to
sell to the new government in the same way that peasants once
held back their harvest from the Bolsheviks. They want a better
deal -- and that means trade in goods, not in worthless paper
rubles.

    Large urban centers like Moscow, St. Petersburg and
Ekaterinburg (known as Sverdlovsk until this year) in the Urals
have been hardest hit. With supplies of milk and meat down 10%
or more from last year, big-city larders are perilously close
to empty. Shoppers have few alternatives short of breeding hens
on their apartment roofs or rabbits on their balconies. They can
wait in long lines to buy whatever meager items city officials
provide or to purchase scarce goods like meat at inflated prices
in the free markets or from street vendors. Explains Natalya,
an assistant director in a Moscow theater: "I can spend a third
of my monthly salary just buying 2 lbs. of pork or a bag of
mandarin oranges."

    City dwellers get little sympathy out in the provinces.
"Muscovites talk about a crisis because they are finally going
hungry," contends Yaroslavl Deputy Pushkar. "But this is the way
the rest of the country has always lived." Olga Ivanova
supplements her meager monthly pension of 205 rubles ($2.28 at
the current tourist rate) by selling eggs on a Yaroslavl street
corner. She vaguely recalls buying smoked ham in a state-run
shop six or seven years ago, but the only meat available now
sells for 40 rubles (44 cents) for 2 lbs., or 20% of her income,
at the free market.

    That is a bargain price for many Muscovites, who are
flooding into the provinces to do their shopping. Annoyed at the
sudden influx from neighboring regions, officials in Krasnodar
set up customs posts on roads out of the territory and
instructed local authorities to search visitors passing and to
confiscate meat, butter and other scarce supplies. The
government in Moscow ordered the draconian measures to cease.

    Greed, envy and desperation have given rise to economic
crime. In the Yaroslavl village of Kamenshchiki, police recently
caught five people dragging the carcass of a cow they had shot
from the pasture of a private farmer; two were habitual
criminals, but three were ordinary citizens. In the Pskov
region, workers on a collective farm were so resentful of the
success of a private grazer that they decided to "confiscate"
140 calves and all his equipment.

    U.S. cargo planes began delivering 300,000 lbs. of surplus
food to Moscow and St. Petersburg last week, adding to the
stream of emergency supplies pouring in from the West. Such
timely help will certainly be welcome, but it cannot solve the
long-term problems of a country that simply did not learn how
to feed itself during seven decades of communist rule. Nor can
it ease the bitterness of many citizens who, though they never
enjoyed abundance, remember how they once lived in a superpower
rather than a patchwork quilt of fledgling states reduced to
begging for help. If Yeltsin and the democrats cannot soon bring
about an economic turnaround, Russians who now wait patiently
in lines may demand any kind of government that will give them
bread. In addition to milk, butter and meat, another vital item
is in short supply these days -- and it is one that no
foreigners can provide: hope for the future.