
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 8, 1990                   TAG: 9007080071
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

MOSCOW'S CITY COUNCIL WOULD GIVE APARTMENTS TO PEOPLE LIVING IN THEM

The brash new City Council, opting for a Utopian antidote to Communism, has voted to take the city's entire apartment housing stock from state control and give it away to millions of suffering tenants.

The move by the council's new insurgent majority was made quietly at the end of a busy session last week, and Muscovites have been slowly adjusting to the shocking news.

"I have heard this, but is it true?" asked Roman Rakhmin, a Muscovite who was making the rounds of Banny Pereulok, a Dickensian trove of a back street where city dwellers traditionally trade, plead, connive, bribe and despair in an informal apartment bazaar classically hobbled by the infamous Soviet bureaucracy.

"Great! Fantastic!" said Lina Pryazhevsky of news of the giveaway, in a voice suggesting the council might as well have proclaimed the city to be made of green cheese.

She continued studiously peeking out from under her umbrella at the paper swap-slips pasted on bulletin boards and building walls.

Pryazhevsky was scouting to join one of the elaborate daisy chains of up to dozens of people swapping apartments, in her case simply to trade her single room in Leningrad for one in Moscow, providing, of course, bureaucracies in both cities finish their investigations and stamp permission on her various citizen documents.

Swapping is the only housing transaction most people are allowed under Soviet law.

It is a humiliating, slavish procedure the City Council's new market-minded majority would snuff out with the novelty of ownership.

The city's plan promises to create capitalists by the towerful, because dwellers are to be free to sell their apartments.

No less dramatically, the apartment giveaway would test the true value of the decentralized democracy being enacted by the Soviet Parliament.

Scores of unanswered questions remain on issues like who will pay the upkeep on the more than two million apartments at stake.

Skeptics say the plan is unworkable and will turn out as a lesson to newly democratized voters on how electoral politics can weaken politicians' judgment.

But a year ago skeptics would have bet against the fall of communism in Eastern Europe or the loss of the Soviet party's power monopoly.

So Muscovites are at least curious, to put it mildly, about such a promised novelty.

by CNB