Decade of hardship steals Russians' joy

By Kathy Lally, Sun Foreign Staff
 

MOSCOW - Ten years ago today, the Soviet army was marching on Moscow, Mikhail S. Gorbachev was a prisoner of a right-wing putsch, and Boris N. Yeltsin rose magnificently to his life's greatest challenge, jumping atop a tank and rallying the nation around him in pursuit of democracy.

That day, eight hard-line leaders of the KGB, the military and the Communist Party had pushed Gorbachev aside in an attempt to take power and preserve the disintegrating Soviet Union. They failed.

Sergei Yevdokimov was one of the heroes of Aug. 19. He was a 36-year-old officer of the elite Tamanskaya tank division, ordered to lead his battalion to Moscow to back the coup with guns. He pointed his tanks at the Russian White House - the parliament - with Yeltsin holed up inside.

By evening, Yevdokimov was persuaded that the coup was illegal. He went over to Yeltsin's side. At 10 p.m., in a moment so dramatic it still captures the imagination and memory of anyone who saw it, he ordered his tanks to shift their guns outward to defend Yeltsin and the White House.

Thousands of deliriously happy Russians cheered Yevdokimov and his men as glorious saviors. Instead of holding the Soviet Union together, the putschists had precipitated its collapse. By the end of the year, it had broken into 15 independent republics.

Ten years later, Tatyana Tychkova remembers that Monday as the happiest day of her life. She knew little about the coup while it was taking place. She was 23 years old and in the hospital, giving birth to her only son, Yevgeny. She was filled with joy and unbridled hope, feelings that have steadily diminished since that day.

So many had rushed to the barricades, prepared to die to defend the small freedoms won under Gorbachev. But many, many more were like Tychkova, an ordinary person, working in a factory, waiting patiently for the spare comforts the Soviet system afforded.

Tychkova had kept her part of the Soviet bargain - work, don't complain, and in return expect the everlasting security of cheap bread and someday a better apartment.

All of that vanished, suddenly and unexpectedly. In the 10 years since, a tiny minority of Russians have become fabulously wealthy while many, many others have become miserably impoverished. About 50 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. The beginnings of a middle class were largely destroyed by the financial collapse of 1998 and have only recently begun to reappear. And one part of the country, Chechnya, has been nearly obliterated in a bitter war that has no end in sight.

Empty opportunities

Sergei Yevdokimov and Tatyana Tychkova's experiences are utterly typical of what the average Russian has endured since 1991. Their lives have changed completely, they will tell you, but they still don't know whether it's for the better or worse.

The big gains of the past 10 years - freedom of speech, opportunities to travel abroad freely and virtually unlimited choices of consumer goods and food products - have meant little to them.

Neither of them has the money to travel or take advantage of the new televisions and imported foods that line the shelves of the now numerous and smartly outfitted shops here. And freedom of speech? They can say whatever they like, but no one listens. In the old days, free speech was a dream of the intelligentsia, not of military men like Yevdokimov or workers like Tychkova.

"I remember it all as if it were yesterday," says Yevdokimov, who lived in a settlement near Tamanskaya headquarters, 30 miles southwest of Moscow. "It started at 1 a.m. when a courier came to my house and woke me, saying an alarm had been raised."

Yevdokimov, then a major in charge of battalion headquarters, got dressed, then walked three miles to the base. The courier had walked the same three miles to rouse him.

"How was I supposed to get there?" says Yevdokimov, who had no access to a car, vehicles being in chronically short supply. "It was the middle of the night. The buses weren't running."

When he arrived, nothing much was going on. It wasn't clear what the alert meant. Probably, he thought, it was for a practice maneuver. He and his fellow officers talked and smoked, then slept.

"At 4 a.m. I heard the sound of boots and running feet. A soldier ran in and announced a higher level of alarm, a full alert. The other officers went out to the tanks. I went to my office to take charge of documents. Then I went to where the tanks and APCs [armored personnel carriers] were gathered, and we sat there waiting for orders," he says.

At 7 a.m., the officers ate a good breakfast. The men did not.

Just before 8 a.m., Yevdokimov and his 40-tank battalion were told to head for Moscow. Neither officers nor men knew exactly what was happening. Yevdokimov was told to position a company of 10 tanks at a bridge next to the Russian White House. He had a truck loaded with 40 shells for each tank and 2,000 bullets for every machine gun.

Threats and requests

By late morning, citizens began to converge on the White House, tearing up benches and scavenging any materials they could to build barricades to protect the officials of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic inside. Yevdokimov could hear voices on loudspeakers, reading decrees and statements from Russia's President Yeltsin.

"More and more people gathered around us," he says. "There were threats, requests, women saying, 'Sons, don't roll over us with tanks.' Some young soldiers had never been to Moscow before, and here we were in the middle of this crowd. I tried to explain to them a soldier has nothing to do with such events. He only carries out orders.

"I was nervous. I was afraid of a provocation, and then fighting could have started. If the command was given to use force, what would I do?"

At 1 p.m., Yevdokimov heard from the crowd that an emergency committee had been formed and Gorbachev had been dismissed. His doubts mounted. Was it legal, he wondered, for some self-appointed committee to dismiss the president of the Soviet Union?

Yevdokimov was a card-carrying Communist, a requirement for any high-level job. But by this time, Gorbachev's policy of glasnost - of openness - had provided the kind of information and public discussion that was making Yevdokimov doubt the party.

"There was a feeling that something was wrong with it," he says. "I felt more trust in the new power, in Yeltsin. The new power did not yet have any black spots."

In the afternoon, a fledgling businessman climbed atop Yevdokimov's tank. The two - the civilian and the short, wiry officer with bright blue eyes - talked about the coup and the Communist Party on and off for four hours. Gradually, Yevdokimov was persuaded that he could perform a valuable service for the people of Russia if he somehow assisted the defenders of the White House.

"I'm ready to listen if you bring someone from the White House to talk to me," Yevdokimov told his new friend.

'What was I risking?'

"He went off to the White House, and I thought about what would happen to me. What was I risking? Would I be dismissed? Would they bring criminal charges against me? I was willing to accept responsibility for myself, but what about my family? What would happen to them? The history of our country makes you ask that."

A member of the Russian parliament appeared and told Yevdokimov that Yeltsin had invited him to the White House to talk.

"It was frightening," he says. "I gave the radio to a junior officer and went to the White House." He never did talk to Yeltsin, but met with Russia's vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, and a uniformed army general. They smoked and talked, with the two senior men simply assuming Yevdokimov would join them.

"They asked about where the tanks were from, the mood in the army, what ammunition we had. Then they asked my view of events, my assessments, my conclusions. I explained everything the way I explained it to you," he says.

"They asked, 'Are you going to help us?' I said, 'I will."'

'Don't be afraid'

It was close to 9 p.m. They discussed what to do with the tanks. Yevdokimov said it was impossible to move the tanks with so many people around them. "People in the crowd would think I was going to attack," he says. "I knew they wouldn't believe me. Someone would get hurt."

They asked if the soldiers had eaten. Yevdokimov said they'd had nothing since the previous night. The White House officials promised to find food and dispatched members of parliament out into the crowd to explain that the tanks had joined the defenders. The tanks slowly turned around.

"The people covered us with flags and flowers," he says. "They brought us food."

He did not inform his superiors of what he was doing. None of them had contacted him all afternoon, and had not even replied earlier in the day when he tried to reach them by radio.

The next day the regimental commander arrived outside the White House and ordered Yevdokimov into his car. "He turned to me and without irony or sarcasm said, 'Don't be afraid; we're not going to arrest you.'

"'Don't worry,' I told him. 'I stopped being afraid yesterday."'

Yevdokimov wrote a detailed explanation of his actions. His superiors told him to return to his men. He was not to tell them where he had been.

"At this point," he says, "I realized the turning point had come."

The next day, Aug. 21, the tanks were ordered back to the base. The coup was over, the plotters arrested. Gorbachev returned to Moscow.

Back in the barracks, Yevdokimov was treated with derision. His superiors chafed at their subordinate's moment of fame and decision. They thought they should get credit for helping to foil the coup. Yevdokimov soon understood he no longer had a future with the Tamanskaya division.

He asked for a transfer and in January 1992, was assigned to a center in Moscow overseeing the processing of new draftees. Over the years, he was frequently chided and described as someone who didn't follow orders.

In September last year, he retired. He receives a pension of $67 a month. Now he's commercial manager of a company that recycles paper and scrap metal, but he hasn't been paid in two months and plans to quit this week.

If the Soviet Union had held together, he believes, he would be better off financially today. Providing for the army once was a national priority. Today, it is not.

Now, at 46, he, his wife and two daughters, ages 21 and 14, have little. They share a three-room apartment. They have a small car, which an auto manufacturer gave him 10 years ago in gratitude for his heroism. His wife earns $200 a month as a manager at a furniture store.

He does not regret his part in bringing down the U.S.S.R.

"From an economic point of view," he says, "life would have been much easier if I hadn't done it. But money isn't everything."

Many people blame the defenders of the White House and democrats for destroying the military, plunging everyone into destitution and ruining a great superpower. Yevdokimov disagrees.

"It's not true," he says. "It's the same old Communist officials and nomenklatura who have gotten power and privatized everything for themselves."

He and his country have lost a great deal in the past 10 years, he says, and everything is upside-down now.

"Then things were cheap, but you could only buy something through connections," Yevdokimov says. "Now there is everything, but we can't afford it."

The worst moment of the past decade, he says, was when Yeltsin called out the Tamanskaya tanks to threaten the rebellious Russian Parliament in October 1993. The tanks fired on the White House that time, and the events left many liberals deeply disappointed in the prospects for democracy.

The spectacle of tanks blasting away at Vice President Rutskoi and members of Parliament destroyed something precious for many of the ordinary folk who rose up in 1991 and defied the past. Then, they were persuaded for the first time in their lives that their actions could make a difference. October 1993 told them otherwise. Their hopes for a better, kinder and wiser country - for a country they could call normal - were gone.

Yevdokimov, however, refuses to judge Yeltsin harshly.

"He was brought up in Communist times, and he was a person of that time," he says. "Maybe the sins of the Communist past prevented him from making progress. Maybe we expected too much."

Foiling of coup questioned

Tatyana Tychkova spent Aug. 19 in labor at Maternity Hospital No. 6 near the Belarus Train Station in central Moscow. Her son Yevgeny - known as Zhenya - was born at 10 p.m., a pivotal time in Russian history. Sergei Yevdokimov was turning his tanks around at that moment.

Tychkova, who was 23, knew little of what was happening outside. Her husband and other relatives had gathered outside the hospital, for neither women in labor nor new mothers are allowed visitors. The well-wishers on the street sent in notes, and hints of a coup had spread during the day.

"We knew something was going on," Tychkova says, "but it was not the main problem of the day."

She was kept in the hospital for a week. During those days, she would send her husband notes, telling him what to buy. She wanted watermelon when she got home, and ice cream.

Today, Tychkova finds it difficult to sort out the good and bad of the past 10 years. Everything is colored by one debilitating, all-consuming condition. She, husband Sergei and their son have lived all those years in one room of a communal apartment. They share a kitchen and bathroom with two other families.

It is miserable, and they can't escape it.

"Maybe if the coup had succeeded," says Tychkova, "our lives might have been better."

At age 18, Tychkova went to work at the Freedom Factory, where she screws caps onto tubes of toothpaste and bottles of shampoo, then puts them in packages. She has been there ever since. She has lived in the same apartment since February 1991. The factory owns the 16-floor building and in 1993 agreed to put Tychkova and her husband on a waiting list for a larger apartment.

But since then the factory managers have built only one building. Administrators moved into it. Workers like Tychkova and her best friend, Valentina Seryogina, have been waiting ever since. Ten years ago, they would have been assured of a larger apartment eventually. Now they are not.

'Now we've lost hope'

The two women - Tychkova, solemn with short light-brown hair, Seryogina red-haired and vivacious - have known each other since they entered technical school at age 15. They work at the Freedom Factory, just down the street from their apartment building. Seryogina, a single mother, lives in one room of another communal apartment with her son, 14, and daughter, 6.

Each woman makes about $345 a month as long as they keep up their work quotas.

"A team of seven women has to put tops on 17,500 bottles of shampoo in 13 hours to earn that much money," Seryogina says.

The factory used to have two shifts working five days a week but a few years ago the bosses decided they could save on electricity by having one long shift every day. Now, the women work from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. for two days, then have two days off. They get a total break of an hour during the day.

As the two women talk, they remember the hardships of life 10 years ago. They had rationing coupons to buy sugar, oil and cigarettes. To get milk you had to rise at dawn and stand in line for hours.

They had money, but couldn't spend it. Tychkova remembers how she and her husband couldn't find a refrigerator for sale when they married, even though they had enough money to buy one.

"Despite the difficulties then, we had hope that we could improve our living conditions," she says. "Now we've lost hope."

Unable to save enough to buy an apartment - a three-room Moscow apartment costs about $90,000 - both women stay at their factory jobs, just in case.

"We cannot leave," Tychkova says, "because we're waiting for an apartment. If we quit, the last hope would be lost."

Tychkova's husband earns slightly less than $350 a month working in road construction. Their apartment is about 10 by 14 feet. The room has a fold-out couch where the parents sleep and a fold-out chair for their son. They have a television, a writing table and a large cupboard that has shelves for books and dishes and small closets for their clothes.

It's a small, suffocating space.

The worst years, Tychkova remembers, were when Zhenya was an infant. One neighbor had a 6-month-old child, and soon the other family had a baby. Everyone washed their diapers in the bathtub.

"There was no space to dry anything," she says. "We had to hang a line in the kitchen. Of course there were conflicts. A child would always be sleeping, and another would be crying and someone was always being woken up."

Feeling increasingly tired

Each family has a stove in the kitchen, but there is only one table and they have to take turns eating. When everyone is getting up in the morning, rushing off to work and school, whoever gets there first uses the table or the bathroom. The potential for conflict is endless and inevitable.

"You can never like your neighbors," Tychkova says, "but you can never afford to fight with them."

They have learned to live with the small space, but they have not stopped loathing it.

Zhenya, now 10, spends the summers with his grandparents in the countryside, where he can roam outdoors. When he returns home, he adapts immediately.

"He's spent most of his life in a small space," his mother says. "When he returns, he understands what life is like."

Seryogina says the worst part of the past 10 years has been the war in Chechnya. She has been troubled by reports of Russian forces massacring civilians, of the destruction and misery wrought there. But it is difficult for her to dwell for long beyond the daily drudgery of her life.

"I talk about it, I think about, and then I forget about it," she says. "I can't take all those events too much to heart."

Of course, Tychkova and Seryogina say, many things have changed. Once prices were freed in 1992, the lines for food stopped forming. They could buy anything - if only they had the money. And here they sit, in the McDonald's next to their building, drinking strawberry milkshakes and eating french fries.

They are good friends, and when they are together they talk and find reason to laugh. But when they look ahead, they have trouble imagining life will get much better. They don't see how anything they can do will change their world.

"We feel tired," Tychkova says, "more and more tired. It accumulates with the years."