TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041089/04108900.017

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 18KB | 366 lines

                                                                                LIVING, Page 86

TAMBOV: PERESTROIKA IN THE PROVINCES


To see how the reforms are faring outside Moscow, a TIME
correspondent and a Soviet journalist traveled together to
Tambov, about 260 miles southeast of the capital. Setting down
their impressions side by side, the two found far more had
changed than they expected and discovered a cadre of young
Gorbachevs ready to carry out reform, despite the difficulties

By JOHN KOHAN AND YURI SHCHEKOCHIKHIN


    Through the fogged window of the Moscow-Tambov express, the
early-morning sky seemed so gray and thick that the horizon
blended imperceptibly into fields of snow. Children on their way
to school dawdled by a railway crossing, the flaps of their fur
hats sticking out like ungainly wings. A settlement of wooden
farmhouses with carved filigree windows swept by, seemingly
unchanged in centuries."So, you're really going to Tambov," said
a Moscow friend, surprised that I would be traveling to such a
provincial and undeveloped place. "There's a Russian saying: the
Tambov wolf is your comrade." I remembered his sneering tone as
I stared at the flat landscape from the two-bunk compartment I
was sharing with Yuri Shchekochikhin, a commentator from the
Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta. So, you are heading off into
the wilds of Russia? See for yourself how far the reforms of
Mikhail Gorbachev have gone. An image came to mind of
perestroika as a stalled tractor, sinking ever deeper into the
rich black earth of the Tambov region. It was a common Moscow
view, as if nothing new could ever come out of the provinces.

    Our taxi pulled away from the Tambov train station,
spraying mud and loose gravel from the potholed roadway. The
landmarks were typical of a rural Russian administrative center.
A tank seemed poised to topple off the memorial honoring the
heroism of local citizens in the Great Fatherland War, as World
War II is known. A crane loomed above the construction site of
the new Communist Party headquarters, just across from an
imposing statue of Lenin thrusting his arm into the future.
Political posters and slogans of a type that had all but
vanished from Moscow could be seen on billboards and atop
apartment houses.

    When I told my mother I would be traveling to the Tambov
region with an American, she got very upset. "Are you crazy?"
she said. "Just think of where you are taking him. There's mud
everywhere. You'll get bogged down on some road. There is
nothing in the stores either."

    My mother's voice conveyed a fear of foreigners that had
been drummed into her over the years, as if every Westerner were
a cia agent. But she was also concerned about how an American
would view the region where she and my father had come from. My
grandparents were buried in the town of Uvarovo, 60 miles
southeast of Tambov. I had spent my early childhood years there,
and returned to Uvarovo every summer as a schoolboy.

    I had not been back since 1982, and was eager to see how
life had changed in this region on the edge of the Russian
steppe. Now, looking at the streets of Tambov, I wondered what
was new in this city of 300,000. They were building new houses,
stadiums and schools? They had built them before. The slogans
were new on the posters? Even in the past they updated them from
time to time.

    During lunch at the Tolna Hotel, Alexander Kuznetsov, the
deputy chief of the ideology section of the Tambov Regional
Communist Party Committee, assured us that "all the processes
of change going on in Moscow make their way to us in Tambov, if
somewhat later on." We needed to be convinced. I made clear
that both of us knew enough to recognize a pokazukha, or staged
event, when we saw it.

    The week before our arrival in Tambov, the drivers on two
trolleybus lines had gone on strike, protesting the dreadful
condition of the roads Tambovskaya Pravda, the local Communist
Party daily, devoted the front page to a regional party
committee meeting, examining the fate of those repressed under
Stalin Elections had been held for a new factory director In the
town of Michurinsk, 40 miles to the northwest, an ecology rally
had been organized, drawing more than 1,000 people.

  We jotted down these facts in our notebooks, and many more:
the founding of a local branch of the anti-Stalinist movement,
Memorial, the first reported case of aids in Tambov, the first
Soviet-Finnish joint construction project, rumors that
racketeers were moving in on local cooperatives. Late-night
television had even come to Tambov, something we Muscovites
still lacked. Then there were those telling words from a worker
on the regional party committee: "We decided to do away with
special food packages for ourselves so that there would not be
talk about us having privileges that other workers did not."

    I kept going over these facts, trying to understand
something that has been at the heart of unending arguments in
Moscow: Had the provinces come to life, or were they still
sleeping? I made a discovery that surprised me: public life was
bubbling along here. They were not just putting up houses -- new
people were growing up.


    There was no mistaking the mustachioed figure with pipe in
hand. Illuminated by a brilliant spotlight, Joseph Stalin had
come to life onstage in a local theater production of Anatoli
Rybakov's groundbreaking novel about Stalinist-era repression,
Children of the Arbat. When Stalin stepped forward to deliver
his monologue, a chilling silence enveloped the auditorium of
the Lunacharsky Dramatic Theater. "It takes great cruelty to tap
the great energy of a backward people," declaimed the provincial
tyrant. "A dictator is great who can inspire love for himself
through terror."

    Public Prosecutor Vyaceslav Kuchmin told us that about 100
local instances of Stalinist illegalities had already been
reviewed. Not that Kuchmin was in complete agreement with those
critics in Moscow who he felt "showed only the negative sides
of our history" and drew too many "unfair comparisons" with the
U.S. "We are the same people as we were then," he explained. "We
can't just exchange this nation for another."

    We listened as six members of the "opposition," as they say
in the West, argued with a representative of the regional party
committee. They included journalists from Tambovskaya Pravda,
a professor and a college dean. "We have no difference of views
with the party, just with certain people on the city and
regional party committee." "Why didn't you come to us?" "You
wouldn't have received us. You only know how to swing billy
clubs."

    We had trouble understanding what the argument was all
about until members of the opposition showed us four issues of
their unofficial publication, called Sodeistviye, meaning
assistance. According to an editorial in the first issue,
Sodeistviye presented news that was not covered by the local
party newspaper, "everything that Tambov citizens talk about in
lines, while catching a smoke at the factory, in college
corridors and in family kitchens."

    "Why didn't you publish your material in Tambovskaya
Pravda?" asked party ideologist Kuznetsov.

    "They won't print it."

    The longer I listened, the more amazed I was that this
conversation was even taking place. Could you have imagined it
ten, five, even three years ago! Who would have met with them
for a talk? Wouldn't it have been officials from the local KGB?

    When the opposition had left, party ideologist Kuznetsov
asked John a question: "Tell me, what would happen if you spent
the day working for your own magazine and went to work for your
competitor in the evening? What would your bosses think of
that?"

    John admitted that he would probably be put on warning and
then fired.

    "Well, these guys from Tambovskaya Pravda are insulted
because the party has given them a reprimand."

    I suggested that the local party paper should give
Sodeistviye a chance to publish some of its material in the
party's pages.

    Kuznetsov shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know We're also
learning how to act now in such situations."

    Inefficiency is so commonplace in the Soviet Union that we
were piqued by tales of a dramatic transformation under way at
the Lenin Factory in Michurinsk. The plant, which makes auto
parts, had gained national notoriety in 1986 after criminal
investigators broke up an organized-crime ring trading in stolen
merchandise. Now we heard the Lenin works had been "leased out"
to kooperativshchiki.

    The brave new world of self-management was evident at the
new Wheel cooperative at the Lenin site. The slogans hanging
from the rafters read like proverbs from Poor Richard's
Almanack: HOW YOU LOOK SHOWS HOW YOU LOVE YOUR WORK and WHAT YOU
SAVE TODAY WILL BE OF USE TOMORROW. No one seemed to need the
prompting. Workers actually tended to their machines, instead
of congregating in the aisles or staring off into space. Output
had tripled, pilfering had plummeted, and alcohol abuse had
declined so much that the janitor no longer found enough empty
bottles to make a twice-daily trash run into town. The 130
cooperative members earned, on average, 625 rubles ($1,000) a
month, about 2 1/2 times the norm for factory workers.
Production had begun to meet demand.

    Lunch at the Michurinsk factory proved to be one of those
seemingly commonplace occurrences that actually signifies a
great deal about perestroika. We did not eat in a separate
executive dining room, or in a side room at a nearby restaurant
reserved for the special few, but in a lunch hall where
everybody ate together: factory director and lathe operator,
shop floor manager and watchman.

    The chief engineer did not make a point of telling us that
"we eat alongside the workers" or demonstrating for us, as
guests, how democratic he was. It was all perfectly natural,
just like paying afterward for the meal.

    This may have seemed quite normal for John, but it was
evidence for me that people no longer lived here the way they
used to. Stalin began the practice of giving privileges to the
leadership: special foods, dachas fenced off from those
belonging to ordinary mortals, apartments in the best-built
houses. Brezhnev expanded these privileges. How many hunting and
fishing "lodges" were built and furnished with Finnish furniture
and rugs so thick you could tumble into them up to your waist!
This inequality in a society declaring equality caused great
indignation.

    Leaving the lunchroom, I understood that the management at
the Michurinsk factory could no longer afford to live
differently from everyone else. And I understood why: they were
leasing the factory. They now had to account for every kopeck.

    Ruby pomegranates and marinated apples, fragrant herbs and
honey in the comb, slabs of homemade butter and mounds of
cottage cheese, pig's heads dangling from hooks and hunks of
beef fresh from the chopping block. The Sunday market in Tambov
was a horn of plenty. Cooperatives and private farmers here had
more varieties of meats to offer than you could usually find in
Moscow. The bountiful scene seemed to deny reports filtering
into the Soviet capital about food shortages in the provinces.
Certainly, no one was starving in this land of the good black
earth.

    Not everyone wanted or could afford to pay 8.3 rubles ($13)
for half a pound of smoked sausage or 10 rubles ($16) for half
a pound of tomatoes. But the alternative was unappetizingly
scrawny chickens, larded sausage, pickled fruits and canned
goods available at state-run stores at subsidized prices. Still,
consumers complained about the high prices at the co-ops. They
seemed to believe ample supplies of cheap food were an economic
right.

    During our visit to the Michurinsk Food and Vegetable
Institute, the future agronomists aired a few gripes and
opinions about the Soviet "food problem":

    "The issue is how many years you can rent land. We need a
law guaranteeing that no one will interfere."

    "Peasants don't exist as a group anymore. We have forgotten
how to work the land."

    "We have gone far in developing the technology of
cybernetics and space travel, but we don't have proper equipment
to dig up potatoes."

    "We produce meat here in the Tambov region, and we send it
to Moscow to be made into sausage. Then we have to go to Moscow
to buy sausage made from Tambov meat."

    This paradox of provincial life had even inspired a riddle.
What is long, green and smells of sausage?

    The train from Moscow.

    We drove to Uvarovo, the village of my youth that had since
turned into a decent-sized city of some 50,000. I discovered
that the second secretary of the city party committee was
Vladimir Selyugin, an old childhood friend. When I last saw
Volodya, he had been working as an agrotechnical engineer. Why
had he suddenly turned up on the committee? He told me that he
was tired of Uvarovo being run by transients. He had grown up
here, worked here and had no intention of going anywhere else.

    I also learned to my amazement that Vladimir Razhev had
been elected director of the chemical factory, after being fired
from the same post several years ago because of conflicts with
the local leadership. "The city party committee was against his
candidacy," said First Secretary Vladimir Karpov. "We had
another director in mind, but the workers elected Razhev."

    It was funny to watch Razhev and Karpov needle each other
over dinner. I knew for certain that several years ago it would
have been inconceivable that Razhev would be named director of
the factory against the will of the city party committee. It
would have been even more difficult to imagine that a collective
of workers would have the right to elect him.

    Like the boy in the Russian folktale whose magical hat
allows him to see and hear everything unobserved, I sat at the
dinner table and listened to Razhev and Karpov. The exchanges
about ecology and the financial obligations of local factories
to the surrounding community crackled. But it was not the flow
of argument that impressed me so much as the fact that an
American was allowed to listen. Had Soviet officials always
spoken so bluntly among themselves? Or was this a reflection of
plyuralizm, a borrowed word slipping awkwardly off Russian
tongues.

    Here was a new generation of 30- and 40-year-olds who went
unnoticed in the capital: young Gorbachevs from the provinces
who had survived the Brezhnev years with some of their ideals
intact. They certainly bridled at being cast as backwater party
bureaucrats.

    "The greatest brake on perestroika is not the apparatus
here," said the soft-spoken Karpov. "It comes from the people.
They still do not understand that they now have the
responsibility to make decisions for themselves. They want us
to bring about democratization for them."

    Second Secretary Vladimir Selyugin was adamant about the
environment. "You come down from Moscow to tell us we have an
ecological problem," he said with emotion. "Don't you think we
know this ourselves? You can go back to Moscow, but we are the
ones who live here. Do you think I want my child to breathe
polluted air?"

    Toward evening, we walked through the chemical-factory
housing complex. One food store that we went into was empty.
There was nothing but cans of sprats and packages of macaroni
in one food shop we visited. "The store is empty," I joked.
"There are just people here."

    "The factory supplies its workers with food," said
Selyugin, "but, all the same, you can see our problem for
yourselves." Then he nodded toward the salesgirls wearing mink
hats and added, "They're doing all right, though."

    He said it, not worrying what John would think of a party
worker openly acknowledging the existence of a local trade
mafia. He knew that in the end, he was answerable only to those
living in his town. He was not going to walk away from that
responsibility, nor was he afraid of it. He had no reason to
hide anything. The times were different. Now you could tell the
truth.

    But old versions of the truth could still be found. Pushing
my way past a mob of women lined up on the Tambov pedestrian
mall to buy yellow tights, I had stepped into a bookshop. On
display were paperbacks from a series called Imperialism: Acts,
Facts and Records.

    And then, the great leap forward. An equally random visit
to a bookstore in an Uvarovo housing complex turned up the
unexpected: two copies of George Bush's autobiography, Looking
Forward, translated into Russian. The shop manager told me he
had already sold 28 copies. The following night, when we started
back to Tambov, our hosts accompanied us to the outskirts of
Uvarovo, where our two-car convoy pulled over so we could say
one last goodbye. All was darkness, except for the expanse of
snow caught in the headlights. With lightning speed, plates of
foods materialized on the closed trunk of one of the cars. A
bottle of vodka appeared. The occasion seemed to demand a
humorous toast.

    "The inspection team from Moscow has now finished its work
and will be returning home, " I said. "We have seen a great deal
and have talked a lot about perestroika. We promise you that we
will come back to see just what you have accomplished."

    A joking reminder came from the group to keep the speech
short. After all, we had only one glass to pass around. The hour
was getting late, and everyone wanted a chance to drink na
pososhok, a toast before taking up your walking stick, as the
Russians say. One for the road, however rough and long it might
be.