ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, November 6, 1996 TAG: 9611060008
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB WILLIS
THREE WEEKS in Russia, touching on only a part of the world's largest country, do not an expert make. But for me, that time helped bring into focus why Russia is in political turmoil now, and why its future is so agonizingly uncertain.
Americans tend to think that no matter where a person is born, democracy is part of his or her genetic makeup, awaiting only the opportunity for actualization. Winston Churchill knew better, calling democracy "the worst form of government, except for any other.'' It is certainly the most difficult form of government to make work, even when a people, like ours, have two centuries of experience with it.
For more than a millennium, Russia has lived under absolutist forms of rule. No wonder it stumbles and bumbles as it tries out self-rule.
History tells us that self-rule is all the more difficult when times are hard, and times seem indeed hard for the majority of Russians now. Everywhere our tour group (sponsored by Elderhostel, a nonprofit educational organization) went in Russia, we heard that people were having to wait months for their pay. This lag, it appears, affected everyone from street cleaners to teachers to workers in a matrioshka (nested-doll) factory to ballet dancers. How people survive I do not know, although rents in the state-owned apartments remain low, the equivalent of a few dollars a month.
One reason offered us, unofficially, for the slowdown in pay was to help the central government control inflation. If that is one of the reasons, it has succeeded: The ruble, greatly inflated in the past five years, seems to have stabilized at about 5,300 to the dollar.
But another, even darker, reason for the pay lag - according to an English-language magazine published in St. Petersburg - is that managers of privatized companies are thus exerting pressure on employees to sell their shares in the companies: shares made available to each citizen a few years ago when the government began converting from communism to free enterprise.
Although its success is far from assured, that transition is in full swing. The larger cities we visited (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kostroma, Yaroslavl and Nizhniy Novgorod, with populations totaling more than 15 million) teem with activity. Automobiles throng the streets, which are lined with signs in both English and Russian touting local and Western products. No longer are there queues at food counters. There are shops, kiosks and street vendors, many of them willing to accept dollars - as only financial institutions can do legally.
The stolid, solid babushkas are still in evidence, still doing a lot of the scut work; but prosperous-looking men and slender, elegantly garbed women are also a common sight. Russians certainly want to make money, even if, as in the countryside, they seem to have no other means than to stand by the roadside with a bucket of apples for sale.
But only a relative few are making it. One of our lecturers at Moscow State University said that of the city's 11 million residents, half a million are getting rich, while the rest are watching them get rich. The so-called Russian mafia is said to be very powerful. There is no middle class of any consequence, and little prospect of one for many years to come.
Meantime, public services are hurting. At various levels, governments impose myriad taxes but are inefficient in collecting them; to meet persistent deficits, they cut services and withhold pay.
The dry rot of more than 70 years of communism affects the entire culture and economy. Russia still relies on sheer manpower to get much of its work done. As we prepared to leave one of our hotels, the porters picked up our luggage a couple of bags at a time and carried them to the elevator; they had no cart that would enable them to transport several at a time. Another hotel had no freight elevator, and bags had to be moved up and down in one of the small passenger lifts, which could accommodate only four (luggageless) people at once.
We also stayed at a motel: Built in 1991, it was comparatively modern, but had no elevator. Up two flights of stairs went the porters, two bags at a time.
There are some sturdy buildings in Russia, including the "Stalin Gothic'' skyscrapers such as the Hotel Ukraina and Moscow State University in Moscow. And, of course, there are beautiful (if sometimes rundown) buildings centuries old. But a good deal of the country's infrastructure must be shoddy.
Anecdotal evidence: In Yaroslavl, where we stopped to eat before catching a sleeper train to St. Petersburg, our group met a Texan who was there with the engineering firm Stone & Webster to help refurbish an oil refinery outside the city. He said this was supposed to be one of the best refineries in the area, "which isn't saying much. It was built in the 1940s and hasn't been touched since.''
Nothing about the structure, he said, was square; measurements varied. Concrete is breaking up, revealing chunks of debris within. Russian workers at the refinery hadn't been paid since the previous December. A woman hired by the contractor to clean its offices there makes more at that job than she could working at her specialty, civil engineering.
The Texan said Russia has more oil in Siberia than in all of Alaska's North Slope. Siberia is rich in many minerals: To encourage development, the Soviets lured workers there by offering them better wages and social services. But since the collapse of communism, reported the English-language Moscow News in September, "The shipment of goods to the north has become an annual crisis,'' and as winter looms, so does an acute shortage of both fuel and food for the area.
Such stories were multiplied many times. St. Petersburg avoided a major cutback in heat when the power company persuaded authorities to let it divert a federal tax payment of nearly $1 million to back pay for workers. Meantime, it seemed that the city morgue would struggle on amid a pile of rotting corpses: Its refrigerators are too old and creaky to keep the bodies from deteriorating, and the city couldn't spare the $100,000 to replace the equipment. Morgue employees told the English-language St. Petersburg Times they were used to the odor, so didn't mind.
Elsewhere, the threat of strikes is frequent, but seems potent only when a public service such as city heat could be lost. Teachers in a Kostroma school we visited - a model school to all appearances - were among those who hadn't been paid in two months. They kept soldiering.
One of our tour guides said most citizens are weary from all the changes they have lived through since 1991; they want now simply to adjust to these changes and get on with life - as best one can without getting paid. As a people, Russians have amply demonstrated over the centuries their capacity for enduring arduous conditions.
Not all elements may be as patient, and Boris Yeltsin's hold on power seems tenuous. Members of the armed services, whose morale is said to be very low, are also behind in their pay, and they have weapons. Revolts have begun under much less stressful situations. No one can predict what is ahead for Russia, but its economic and political future looks extremely dicey today.
Bob Willis of Fincastle is retired associate editor of this newspaper's editorial page.
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