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                                                                                RUSSIA, Page 58

Brother, Can You Spare A Ruble?


The capitalist revolution is bringing the plagues of poverty,
homelessness and unemployment to Russians, who miss the safety
net of the old system

By ANN M. SIMMONS/MOSCOW


    Yuri Pronin sleeps on a rough plank door liberated from
a neighboring apartment and balanced atop heavy rusting water
pipes in the tiny Moscow abode that he has called home since
last December. The room has no electricity and no running water.
A dented tin bread box and several empty jars serve as his
kitchen, while a cardboard box doubles as chair and closet. The
decor is Dickensian: bare, paint-chipped walls, splintering
floorboards and windows caked with dirt. Apartments in the old
Soviet Union were none too luxurious, but this is a big step
down.

    Pronin's grim quarters are all too typical of the scores
of derelict apartment buildings peppering the capital, where he
and others live in squalor. They are members of the
fast-growing underclass, made more visible by the demise of the
Soviet Union and forced by Russia's economic revolution to live
down-and-out in Moscow. Though many of today's losers would have
difficulty surviving under any regime, the painful shift to a
market system has pushed thousands of citizens, once able to
maintain an acceptable living standard with the help of
government subsidies and benefits, below the poverty line.
Homelessness, derided by the communists as a plague of the West,
is becoming commonplace. The old Soviet guarantees of work,
housing and low fixed prices are gone, and the welfare net,
designed to catch the rare social dropout, has sprung gaping
holes.

    Some of those falling through, like Pronin, do not even
figure in official statistics. The Kaliningrad native moved to
Moscow in 1989 after a dispute with management at the factory
where he worked. He slept on the streets and at railway
stations, and lived for a while in a tent city that was pitched
outside the walls of the Kremlin for six months in 1990. "It's
so hard to live these days. I am an invalid, and I have almost
no means of survival," says Pronin, whose hollow-cheeked face
and legs twisted by an accident he refuses to discuss make him
look far older than his 47 years. "I used to be an artist and
earned quite a bit, but I became sick. Under the communists, I
could at least survive on the 30 rubles a month I got for my
disability and on money from my artwork. We didn't live well,
but we lived with peace of mind. Now life is a struggle."

    Pronin's problems are complicated by outmoded city
regulations. Since he is not a legally registered resident of
the capital, he cannot seek help through the welfare system and
thus is barred from disability benefits and treatment at city
hospitals. Moscow's few free canteens cannot feed him because
they have already filled their quota of selected recipients.
Pronin survives by collecting tin cans and bottles and cashing
them in for a few rubles to buy bread. "I don't have to have
butter," he says. "I live on bread, salt and water."

    Others who never expected to suffer must also learn to be
satisfied with the barest minimum, now that the buying power of
fixed incomes has plunged. Most of Russia's elderly believed in
communism's promises of protection and neither understand nor
accept the concept of free-market reforms. "It's not for us;
it's for young people," says Antonina Savelyev, 79. "For us old
folks, life has deteriorated." The widow of one of the Soviet
Union's first diplomats in the U.S. in 1934, Savelyev lived at
the consulate in Washington and worked in New York City for the
trade mission. In those years, she had a nanny to care for her
eldest son, and a maid to clean the family's huge four-room
flat, leaving her plenty of time to carry out a busy work and
social schedule.

    "We were happy with life," says Savelyev. "We never felt
we lacked anything, not even when we retired in the 1970s. With
both our pensions together, we could buy what we wanted. Now
that's impossible." Before this year's price hikes and the
death of Savelyev's husband last December, the couple lived
comfortably on less than 1,000 rubles a month. Now that food
prices have risen 100-fold, the widow must manage as best she
can. Three times a week, she eats for free at one of Moscow's
Salvation Army soup kitchens. For the rest of her meals, she
sits alone in a living room still adorned with Lenin
memorabilia, eating boiled macaroni with canned fish. "It's hard
because you have to chase food these days," she says, "and I
don't have the strength to stand in line anymore." Many Russian
pensioners have ended the misery by taking their own life. Even
those with a job are anxious about the future. Labor officials
predict that unemployment in all of Russia could reach 4 million
by the end of the year.


    Already there are 8,000 registered jobless in Moscow, and
the figure is expected to climb to 60,000 by winter; 250,000
more are looking for work. Though the statistics are low by
Western standards, they are unnerving for a nation whose
citizens were once sure they would have a job for life. Highly
educated women are bearing the brunt of the cuts, but other
sectors of society are suffering too: soldiers demobilized from
the former Soviet army, for example, are increasingly going on
the dole.

    Igor Melyantsev, 23, an officer in an army construction
unit formed just over a year ago to complete work on a monument
in Moscow commemorating World War II, fears he may be fired
soon, since the newly independent republics have stopped funding
the project. He recently went two months without pay, and his
family survived on bread, milk and a few canned preserves from
their emergency-stock cupboard. If Melyantsev loses his military
job, the couple could lose their home. Because Melyantsev is
straight out of a military training academy, and his present
assignment was meant to be temporary, the couple -- natives of
Crimea -- are not registered in their semiderelict Moscow
apartment. The army pays for the residence, which has no hot
water and is prone to electrical-power cuts. When this happens,
Olga Melyantsev cooks for her husband and baby on a makeshift
stone stove in the muddy, garbage-strewn yard outside. "In the
past it was prestigious to be an officer and an officer's wife,"
she says. "Now no one needs us -- not us, nor our children."

    The Melyantsevs might count themselves lucky compared to
the Zharikov family, with nine children ages two to 18, two
dogs and a cat to feed. Strapped for cash, the family has had
to accept meals and clothing from the Salvation Army. Nina
Zharikov is the only wage earner, bringing home 2,000 rubles a
month as a subway cleaner. The family also gets an equal sum in
government child support. But "every kopeck goes for food, and
there's never enough," says the 37-year-old mother. "Even though
I earned less before, we could still afford to live." The
Ministry of Social Protection estimates that a family of four
needs at least 3,000 rubles a person each month to maintain an
adequate existence.

    Zharikov's husband, Vyacheslav, 56, whose respiratory
illness forced him to take early retirement from his job as a
sanitary engineer, cannot draw a pension until he is 60. He says
the couple might even have expanded their brood if it weren't
for the soaring inflation that has come with market reforms.
"We didn't know our life would come to this, that the system
would change," he says. The huge five-room flat, for which the
family pays 162 rubles a month, is in desperate need of
renovation. Nine rickety cots, a small table and a few chairs
are the only furniture, and a mixture of human and animal odors
permeates the cracks and crevices scarring the walls and doors.
"Yes, we are suffering, but we make do," says the father. "Maybe
the government is doing the right thing; maybe things will get
better."

    That, at least, is what the new leaders in the Kremlin
have promised -- and tens of thousands of Russians who are
sliding toward the lower depths desperately want to believe
them. But government forecasts of improved living standards by
the end of the year may be far too optimistic. It will take more
than a few months for the country's unprepared populace to come
to terms with the economics of capitalism, and the government
lacks the funds needed to ease the transition. The sad fact is
that for years to come Moscow, like thriving capitals in the
West, is probably doomed to house a large share of the
destitute, the homeless and the unemployed as the painful price
for the fruits of free enterprise.