Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993 TAG: 9301170246
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Long
IN MOSCOW, LIFE SEEMS SURREAL
The best way to understand day-to-day life in Moscow would be to crawl inside a Salvador Dali painting and set up housekeeping.The colors are clear and the shapes are vaguely recognizable, but everything comes together at impossibly odd and unpredictable angles.
And, like the Dali painting, if you stand back and stare long enough, it all seems to work. Somehow.
An outsider at first believes it's confusing only to foreigners. But the more time one spends among middle-class Russians, the clearer it becomes that the free-market fire-storm burning across Russia has singed everybody, leaving even the natives feeling a bit out of time and place.
One constant, like Dali's colors, is the relentless search for food.
Grocery shopping in Moscow has long been a dreaded ritual of standing in line at the farmers' markets or state-run shops, then elbowing desperately toward a purchase when within arm's reach of the counter.
Buying a quart of milk or a pound of meat might kill a whole morning.
It's still a dreaded ritual, and there are still lines in the frozen slush outside the state-run stores. But the economic reforms pushed painfully into place by President Boris Yeltsin's radical reformers have added dimensions to grocery shopping that were unimaginable just months ago. And a festering anger is growing among the hard-pressed working class.
"Stop, please, I can't stand it anymore," chided Natasha Lepeshkina as she walked into the living room to find her mother and a neighbor in animated debate. "Shopping, shopping, shopping, that's all anyone talks about," Lepeshkina said, her head shaking in mock disgust. " `What's in this store? What's in that store? Where can I find this or that, and how much does it cost?' Please, enough!" she begged. "Talk about something else."
For the older, retired women, there is little else. Stalking the city to search out food for their families is full-time work. And they're good at it.
But the game has changed.
New layers of commerce have grown up atop the state's dismal "Produkty" grocery shops. Commercial food sales - as informal as oranges sold from a box in the street, or as formal as huge, organized indoor farmers' markets - have made a cornucopia of fresh fruit, vegetables, meats, spices and dairy products readily available.
Salesmanship reigns and prices are widely negotiable. A shopper considering a cut of beef was told, "Well, you see, the price is 1,000 rubles, but if you actually buy it's only 800."
Operating at the same market level are the street kiosks - thousands of smallish metal buildings that clog the city's busier sidewalks, offering a jangled array of Russian and imported goods. A single kiosk might lay out a mix of Marlboros from Virginia, fine Armenian cognac, Pakistani sweaters, Brazilian instant coffee, Belgian beer and a dozen other disconnected items.
Paul Newman and Gatorade
The street-market and kiosk prices are beyond the means of the city's poorer residents - 60 percent of Russians, by official estimates, live below the poverty line. In a country where average salaries range from $7 to $11 a month, even the upper-middle class must shop the independent markets carefully.
Even further outside their means are the goodies inside the hard-currency stores. Most workaday Muscovites have never been inside the handful of bright new Western-style supermarkets doing business here.
Hard-currency stores, or dollar stores as they're also called, offer Western goods at Western prices, for Western money. The Irish, Swiss and Austrian merchants are burying Karl Marx' grand experiment in an avalanche of Gatorade, Lay's Potato Chips and Paul Newman Spaghetti Sauce.
Anybody with dollars or Deutsch marks is welcome,but most Muscovites who can get their hands on hard cash are too sane to spend it in these places.
The patrons are a mix of tourists, wealthy Russians, or Western business and government workers who don't have the time or the patience to haunt the street markets. Or anybody who simply needs a special item - maybe Parmesan cheese or barbecue sauce - that can't be bought anywhere else.
As a result of this three-layered food economy, it's common for a loaf of fresh-baked bread from the same factory oven to sell for $1.25 in the dollar store, 8 cents from a woman on the sidewalk outside, or 6 cents at the state-run bakery right next door.
`I felt like a beggar. . . '
Small wonder middle-class Russians are dazed by it all. With inflation shredding their paychecks at an annual rate of 2,000 percent, and unaffordable European and American goods being waved in their faces, resentment is replacing wonder at the outsiders they see living rich and vibrant lives in Moscow.
"Sometimes I feel like a stranger in my own city," said Natasha Lepeshkina, a Moscow native who wouldn't think of living anywhere else.
"These foreigners are buying up everything, at least all the best of everything," she groused as a black Mercedes-Benz with inky shaded windows crawled away from the curb of a freshly remodeled apartment building.
"Why should they live better than I do?"
Working as an interpreter for an American journalist,Lepeshkina paid her first visit to a hard-currency grocery - an Irish supermarket in central Moscow. The visit fell apart in the household cleaning goods aisle as Bing Crosby crooned "White Christmas" over the loudspeaker on a darkening December afternoon.
She had been warned that what she would see might trouble her.
Lepeshkina made it bravely through row after row of fancily packaged foodstuffs, where a small jar of Newman's spaghetti sauce at $3.80 would have cost her two weeks' pay.
But a solid wall of neon-bright floor waxes, laundry soaps, shoe polishes and spray starches melted her customary Russian stoicism.
"Please, we must leave here now," she urged, tugging at her employer's sleeve. "Please."
Her eyes were welling with tears.
On the street outside, she was asked to explain her reaction.
"I felt like a beggar in there," she said, her voice quaking in anger. "These things are not for me.
"But why not me? I am educated, I have a good job, I work very hard. Why can't they pay me enough so I can have some of this? Not all of it, certainly, but just something.
"Why can't there be something like this for me?"
Fenders in the dairy case
The Russian theorists who are coaching this nation's swan dive into the global economic pool answer this way: There will be a difficult period of transition - how long is anybody's guess - after which prices and wages and the ruble's value against the world's hard cash will stabilize, and Russia will climb back to its accustomed position as an economic and political power.
A nation of this size, with its skilled and educated population and immeasurable wealth of oil, coal, forests and other critical raw materials can't miss, they say.
The economists' broad view may well prove correct, in time. But down on the street, in the blue-collar neighborhoods that ring this city of 10 million, where time is measured in the length of a meat line, getting by during that "difficult period of transition" is an unsettling prospect.
Still, there are small signs that the theory is trickling down: Even the half-empty, Khrushchev-era government groceries are flashing signs of the new entrepreneurial spirit.
Little businesses are springing up in the dingy open areas of the state-run stores, where too few goods take up too little space. A card table stacked with Russian-dubbed American videotapes serves as a video-rental shop. A little stand in the hall selling local juices and cookies adds Diet Coke as an option.
In one state store, a big cooler half-filled with eggs, cheese and butter was next to a cooler offering the left-front fender to a Honda Civic, the taillights to an '86 Toyota Corolla and six pairs of ladies' silky black bikini briefs.
It's easy to laugh at a country whose dairy cases feature Honda fenders and ladies' underwear. And it's easy to abandon hope when you realize how far they have to go.
But if you think, instead, of how far they've come in just a year, and how quickly they're learning,you get the feeling that with a little bit of luck and an awful lot of help, they'll get the goods into the right cases pretty quickly.