Russia Unmerry Christmas

By John Kohan/Moscow

Neighbors are not happy about the barnyard noises and smells coming from the back of Alexander Torzhenko's house on a busy street in the center of the south Russian city of Krasnodar. But the elderly manual laborer and his wife Alexandra are determined not to give up the pigs or the dozen ducks they keep in two ramshackle wood shacks on their 15-sq.-yd. plot. In fact, the couple seem to be settling in for a long siege. "Around here, they steal," says Torzhenko, so he has dug a cellar with concrete walls and a heavy metal trapdoor to store pork and the potatoes he grows on a parcel of rural land in this rich, black-earth region. "I trust Mikhail Gorbachev when it comes to one thing," he adds. "He said there would be famine -- and there will be."

The soil is not as fertile in Bakarevo, a settlement 900 miles to the north on the Volga River, near the city of Yaroslavl. In fact, Venyamin, who prefers not to give his last name, cannot scrape a living out of his small landholding. He works as a ship chandler to support his wife Antonina, her mother and two young sons. They also have damp earthen cellars beneath their wooden cottage to store their winter stash: 15 sacks of potatoes, two barrels of salted cabbage, heaps of onions and carrots, five huge jars of pickles and 40 quarts of fruit preserves.

Both families have one thing to celebrate this grim Yuletide: they are fortunate enough to have stockpiles of food for the difficult months ahead. Russians may not understand the notion of the new commonwealth being created by President Boris Yeltsin, but they can see with their own eyes how the fabric of daily life has been torn to shreds by six years of political and economic upheaval.

They are not expecting any dramatic improvements either when the red hammer- and-sickle flag is lowered over the Kremlin, giving way to Russia's white- blue- and-red banner, and Gorbachev finally steps down as Soviet President. Both might happen momentarily. Meeting Saturday in the Kazakh capital of Alma- Ata, presidents of 11 former Soviet republics -- only Georgia was absent -- signed documents formally creating a Commonwealth of Independent States to succeed the U.S.S.R. and settled some of the last details. For example, they agreed to form a military council to exercise unified control of the armed services and to have Russia take over the Soviet seat on the United Nations Security Council.

That also should enable Yeltsin finally to lift controls on prices and "privatize" state-owned property. To many Russians, that prospect is as appetizing as a large dose of castor oil. With everything in short supply, it is not surprising that the collectivist ethic has given way to the principle of every man for himself.

Social and economic decay are evident everywhere. Domestic airports look like refugee camps as stranded passengers keep weary vigil, hoping the state- owned Aeroflot airlines will soon resume flights canceled by a severe shortage of fuel and spare parts. With more than 8,000 wells standing idle, oil and gas production have dropped 10%. Life in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk, a key industrial and defense center on the Chinese border, has almost ground to a halt because of dwindling food and heating oil.

Nothing causes more alarm for Russians than the prospect of a bleak winter without food. Famine has recurred with frightening regularity during seven decades of communist rule. "Hunger did not start with perestroika," explains Dmitri Pushkar, a deputy on the Yaroslavl regional council, who monitors food supplies in the countryside. "It began with the coming of Soviet power." Vadim, a local taxi driver, puts it more bluntly: "I remember the postwar famine of 1947, when we had nothing to eat but nettles and goose feet. So what else is new?"

Plenty, according to Vyacheslav Tabolin, a Russian authority on pediatrics. He fears a major health crisis is looming for today's undernourished children, because their parents and grandparents suffered from malnutrition. Health officials estimate that only 8.5% of schoolchildren in the first to tenth grades are of a height, weight and build normal for their age.

The current food crisis is different from earlier ones in a crucial respect: the Soviet agricultural system, which turned rural areas into an enormous food factory for urban centers, has completely broken down. The food that is being grown is staying in the countryside. Collective and state farms are refusing to sell to the new government in the same way that peasants once held back / their harvest from the Bolsheviks. They want a better deal -- and that means trade in goods, not in worthless paper rubles.

Large urban centers like Moscow, St. Petersburg and Ekaterinburg (known as Sverdlovsk until this year) in the Urals have been hardest hit. With supplies of milk and meat down 10% or more from last year, big-city larders are perilously close to empty. Shoppers have few alternatives short of breeding hens on their apartment roofs or rabbits on their balconies. They can wait in long lines to buy whatever meager items city officials provide or to purchase scarce goods like meat at inflated prices in the free markets or from street vendors. Explains Natalya, an assistant director in a Moscow theater: "I can spend a third of my monthly salary just buying 2 lbs. of pork or a bag of mandarin oranges."

City dwellers get little sympathy out in the provinces. "Muscovites talk about a crisis because they are finally going hungry," contends Yaroslavl Deputy Pushkar. "But this is the way the rest of the country has always lived." Olga Ivanova supplements her meager monthly pension of 205 rubles ($2.28 at the current tourist rate) by selling eggs on a Yaroslavl street corner. She vaguely recalls buying smoked ham in a state-run shop six or seven years ago, but the only meat available now sells for 40 rubles (44 cents) for 2 lbs., or 20% of her income, at the free market.

That is a bargain price for many Muscovites, who are flooding into the provinces to do their shopping. Annoyed at the sudden influx from neighboring regions, officials in Krasnodar set up customs posts on roads out of the territory and instructed local authorities to search visitors passing and to confiscate meat, butter and other scarce supplies. The government in Moscow ordered the draconian measures to cease.

Greed, envy and desperation have given rise to economic crime. In the Yaroslavl village of Kamenshchiki, police recently caught five people dragging the carcass of a cow they had shot from the pasture of a private farmer; two were habitual criminals, but three were ordinary citizens. In the Pskov region, workers on a collective farm were so resentful of the success of a private grazer that they decided to "confiscate" 140 calves and all his equipment.

U.S. cargo planes began delivering 300,000 lbs. of surplus food to Moscow and St. Petersburg last week, adding to the stream of emergency supplies pouring in from the West. Such timely help will certainly be welcome, but it cannot solve the long-term problems of a country that simply did not learn how to feed itself during seven decades of communist rule. Nor can it ease the bitterness of many citizens who, though they never enjoyed abundance, remember how they once lived in a superpower rather than a patchwork quilt of fledgling states reduced to begging for help. If Yeltsin and the democrats cannot soon bring about an economic turnaround, Russians who now wait patiently in lines may demand any kind of government that will give them bread. In addition to milk, butter and meat, another vital item is in short supply these days -- and it is one that no foreigners can provide: hope for the future.

With reporting by Yuri Zarakhovich/Yaroslavl