A Country of Skeptics

By JAMES CARNEY/PUSHKINO

When Olga Labus went to work last week at Communist Party headquarters in the Russian town of Pushkino, 20 miles from Moscow, she found the doors locked. The plaque identifying the building had been pried off the wall, and the flag stand next to the door was empty. By order of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who a few days before had been the world's top communist, Labus and tens of thousands of people like her across the Soviet Union were out of a job.

"I am a communist, and I believe we must have a Communist Party in our country," said the 31-year-old mother of two, who worked in the economic department of the Pushkino party committee. "But now I don't know what will happen. Everything is changing too quickly." In towns like Pushkino (pop. 90,000), many Russians view the tumult sweeping Moscow with more anxiety and skepticism than do their big-city compatriots. While they welcomed the failure of the hard-line coup and admire Russian President Boris Yeltsin for his courage, they wonder if the destruction of Soviet communism will bring them anything more than uncertainty and hardship. An old man walking down the street waved his hand in the air with dismissive contempt. "I don't know anything, and I don't care," he said without stopping. "I'm just a little person trying to buy some bread."

He was not alone. The drama of the past two weeks has done little to alter the daily routine in Pushkino. On the sidewalk in front of state stores, residents lined up to choose from the usual meager selection of canned goods and wilting vegetables, the relentless rain of an early autumn only adding to their discomfort. Outside the textile factory where he works, Ivan Shlykov, 47, waited for a bus under a shelter latticed with a hammer and sickle. "They can throw away all these symbols and drive the Communist Party underground," he said, "but what difference does it make?"

When Yeltsin became president of Russia last June, he carried most of the republic's cities by large majorities, but he did not fare so well in rural areas, where resistance to change remains strong. In Leshkovo, a village about 35 miles northeast of Moscow, the prospect of Yeltsin's wresting control of Russia from the shattered central government did not impress Nikolai Petrovich, a 67-year-old pensioner, whose refusal to give his last name betrayed a fear of contact with foreigners rarely found nowadays in urban areas.

A retired factory worker and World War II veteran, Petrovich receives 280 rubles (about $150) a month from the state and grows his own vegetables on a small private plot adjacent to his cottage. His television doesn't work, so he picked up news of the coup and its aftermath from friends in the village. "Yeltsin? He's no different," said Petrovich, his eyes nervously scanning Leshkovo's only road for passersby. "Politicians always make promises about how life will be better, but they never fulfill them. I've been around a long time, and I've seen things change in Moscow again and again, but nothing changes for us. For peasants and workers, it just gets worse. Why should it be any different now?"

Three cottages down the road, Nadezhda Kuznetsova and her daughter Valya had just arrived from the nearby town of Zagorsk to visit friends. Kuznetsova, 37, belongs to an evangelical church whose following in Russia has been growing since Gorbachev did away with state suppression of religion last year. Unless the current instability leads to a new crackdown on spiritual freedom, she said, she doubted the political upheaval in Moscow would affect her life. "Just because all these people are leaving the Communist Party doesn't mean we're suddenly living in a democratic country," she said. "I'm sure the same people will be running things. They just won't call themselves communists anymore."

Not all Russians who live outside Moscow are so skeptical. In Zagorsk (pop. 90,000), only four miles from Leshkovo, the prerevolutionary white, blue and red flag of Russia was flying over the town-council building that had once been shared with the party committee. Down the street, some vandals had gone a step further in trying to erase the symbolism of the past by splashing yellow paint across a monument to Vladimir Zagorsky, the Bolshevik functionary after whom the town had been renamed.

Modern notions of progress emanating from the big cities of Russia have for centuries run into resistance in the provinces, and in Russia the provinces begin just beyond city limits. But this time the democratic ideas that thwarted a coup and brought down the Communist Party came from the bottom up, from the people on the streets of Moscow and Leningrad who refused to be cowed by tanks. Much of provincial Russia did not wait passively for the outcome of the confrontation in Moscow before local governments declared their support for Yeltsin and refused to obey orders from the hardline coup leaders.

Beyond the urban centers of Russia, the tendency to cling to old ways could still derail the process of democratic reform. But there are Russians who share with Muscovites an appetite for wholesale change and who see in the ruins of the old system the chance to build a new, better nation. Just around the corner from the closed Communist Party headquarters in Pushkino, the director of a local publishing house, Arkadi Petrov, was busy thinking of ways to use the office space now vacated by the party: a music school for children, a new health clinic or the expansion of Petrov's own enterprise. "This was long overdue," said Petrov of the party's demise. "Maybe now we can become a normal country."