THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 21, 1996 TAG: 9607220211
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: 80 lines
WAKING THE TEMPESTS
Ordinary Life in the New Russia
ELEANOR RANDOLPH
Simon & Schuster. 431 pp $26.
One cannot venture far into Eleanor Randolph's portrait of post-communist Russia without realizing the subtle irony in the subtitle: An outsider, particularly the American audience for Waking the Tempests, will find little ``ordinary'' about the lives of Russians today.
Randolph, a meticulous Washington Post reporter with a missionary's feel for empathy, had a front-row seat to the deconstruction of Soviet society and the impact it had on a repressed people thrust, wholly unprepared, into a chaos of freedom never experienced in the nation's 1,000-year history.
It is a grim tale. Avoiding the grist that feeds most Western correspondents - Boris Yeltsin's health, Kremlin politics - Randolph introduces us to fatigued physicians, crafty street hustlers, overwhelmed teachers, religious charlatans, crooked cops, medical quacks and a reeling but resilient populace.
Ordinary life? Hardly. Ask a Russian his one wish, and the answer, invariably, will be: ``I want to live a normal life.''
Randolph was in Moscow from 1991-1993, when 70 years of communist rule imploded and the chaos was at its most intense. A Post colleague, David Remnick, wrote the seminal work from the period, Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Remnick's brilliant book won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize and casts a long shadow over any like subsequent works.
But Randolph manages to take a deeper and often more frightening tour through the thickets that everyday people face: A young couple spends days on end standing in lines for a simple two-room apartment, only to watch a year's work nearly collapse in a bureaucratic morass over a telephone line. A sullen teenager with syphilis learns she must spend a month in a clinic and endure more than 200 injections - one every 3 hours - to cure a disease that could be neutralized simply in a country with a reasonable health-care system.
From grisly abortion mills to a struggling kindergarten guided by a caring old teacher, to an octogenarian pediatrician who warns of what the country's pollution is doing to a generation of children, Randolph's work is a downbeat tour through a society in peril.
Setting this work off from Remnick's, and from lesser reports from Moscow in the 1990s, is the compassionate tone of a reporter with a deep concern for women's issues. Russia, though a patriarchal society, has survived through the centuries by the will of its women. As Randolph writes:
``Each time I met a woman like Ira who could overwhelm her audience with wisdom or laughter in the face of difficulties that would demolish all but animal instinct in most of us, I realized that Mother Russia was no whimsical bit of emigre nostalgia. Russia's women were the survivors in a nation besieged by civil war, world war, communism, and now capitalism. Like survivors everywhere, they were not delicate flowers; they could be cold and ugly to strangers or outsiders, people who were alien or simply different. But the best of them kept the ancient stories alive, evoked the old images from Russian folklore, taught their children to love irony, taught them that sadness makes better happiness, that whatever was superficial and obvious was only one meager layer, and that if what you could see around you was too dismal for the human spirit, as it often was, inside the head were far better fantasies and enchantments.''
It was easy for an American to be overwhelmed in the early 1990s by the dreariness of Russian life and the hopelessness its people faced. That moroseness hangs over much of Randolph's book. It was an ugly time.
But a later trip in 1995 left Randolph seeing light where once there had been only shadows: ``Moscow no longer had the look of a dying city, a cluster of dilapidated buildings where every hinge was beginning to rust, every roof starting to leak. Structures that had been settling into piles of historic rubble now were being restored . . . carefully patched and then revived in their original colors . . .
``Many were prospering in the new Russia, but for others, unbridled liberty or unfettered opportunity were simply more government-inspired slogans that benefited somebody else. The Russians are a patient people who endured seven decades waiting for communism to work. How long they would give this difficult experiment with democracy and capitalism was impossible to say.'' MEMO: Staff writer Dave Addis worked in Russia through the fall and
winter of 1992-1993. by CNB