Journey to a New Russia

By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service

MOKSHAN, Russia

Tatyana Shalimova's high heels sink into the mud as she rounds the corner to her brother's house. To her left, four chickens feast in a large open garbage bin. Ahead, her brother's wife stands alone in the kitchen, a gigantic pot of slops simmering on the stove to feed their pig, Masha. Inside the house, there is no toilet, no hot water and no telephone.

Pulling on her Ray-Bans, Tatyana shakes her head as she considers the gap separating her life in Moscow from her brother Misha's here in the "workers' settlement" of Mokshan. "I can't stay here for more than a few days at a time," she says. Then comes a question, the question: "Why don't the people here change their lives?" Her unspoken rebuke hangs in the air: "I did."

Ten years after a failed coup by hard-line Communists in August 1991 set in motion the collapse of the Soviet Union, sister and brother live in different post-Soviet realities, one reflecting the promise of an unfinished capitalist revolution, the other trapped in isolation, neglect and the unforgiving legacy of the past.

Tatyana's is the world of Moscow's emerging, tenuous middle class, a whirl of Paris vacations and after-work aerobics classes, supermarkets and traffic jams, rising expectations and perpetual insecurity. Misha's Mokshan, 440 miles to the southeast, is a place of narrow horizons, rusting factories and Communist-era bosses, where money is more concept than reality, and the summer harvest of cabbage and potatoes supplies food for the long winter.

"All the positive changes that happened in my life are the consequences of the new system," she says.

"Things are harder now," he says. "There's not enough jobs and not enough money."

All of Russia's 146 million people have their own stories of change in this decade of dislocation. Tatyana's is about a dream of Western freedoms and prosperity that took her far from the Russia where her family still lives.

It is also a story of Russia's great struggle to re-imagine its future. After 10 years, it is no longer enough for Tatyana and Russians like her to eat at McDonald's and buy package tours to Turkey. They want to take out mortgages. They crave long-term assurances and an end to the turmoil that bonds the country's history and their own.

"I am very cautious," Tatyana says. "I can expect something bad to happen at any minute here."

At 34, she is part of Russia's transitional generation, the last to have received a fully Soviet education and the first to have worked mostly in the free market. She grew up with Soviet stagnation in the 1970s, came of age during the reforms of President Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s and became an adult amid the democratic chaos and capitalist excesses of President Boris Yeltsin's 1990s.

After leaving Mokshan in 1984 for Moscow's prestigious foreign language university, she graduated in 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell. She remembers devouring once-forbidden novels about Stalinism's horrors, then trooping dutifully to mandatory classes on Marxism and Leninism. Today, her salary comes from a U.S. government-funded project to assist reform of Russia's judiciary.

Ten years ago, she had never been outside the country. Now she is fluent in world capitals -- most recently Paris and London -- and a connoisseur of beaches from Spain to Egypt. When the Soviet Union collapsed, she lived in a crowded communal apartment with four roommates, one grimy kitchen and no shower. Today she rents a tiny studio of her own.

"I am between the two worlds," she says, sitting up late on the overnight train to Mokshan. "I remember life in the village so well, but as some separate life. You get used to good things very easily, but still you don't forget. I passed all this way so recently. I know what it is to save money just to buy a pair of new boots."

While the gulf between Moscow and Mokshan has always existed, it is wider today. It is the difference between the $1,500 a month Tatyana considers "normal" for herself and her Moscow friends and the $70 monthly salary of her brother; between the French cognac she has learned to prefer and the home-brewed vodka he keeps in his cupboard.

On the short walk one recent afternoon from Misha's house to the now-polluted river where they swam as kids, he described the berry-picking season just ended and the mushroom-hunting soon to begin. In September, he hopes to buy a cow.

Tatyana, meanwhile, was looking back at his crooked wooden outhouse. "I can't imagine living in such conditions," she said. "I can't believe this is where I came from."

'Something Is Going On'

Ten years ago this week, Tatyana was a counselor at a Young Pioneer camp, still asleep before starting another day training future Communists, when her friend Lyudmila Daragan pounded insistently on the cabin window.

"Wake up, wake up," she hissed. "Something is going on in Moscow." For days, the last-gasp coup to topple Gorbachev and his reforms had been fought off by democrats surrounding the Russian parliament building, but the campers had been unaware of the turmoil until Lyudmila hitched a ride back into town.

"Still," recalls Tatyana, "we didn't realize what was really happening." After the failed coup, and until the official end of the Soviet Union on Dec. 25, 1991, "there was joy and enthusiasm, but we didn't know even then that freedom was really happening. We thought of it as a revolution, but we didn't know how long it would last or how real it was."

The revolution found Tatyana working an hour outside Moscow as a translator at a secret defense factory that had paid her salary while she was at the summer camp, a final Soviet perk. Determined to stay near the city, she had persuaded the party to post her to nearby Sergeiv Posad, known as Zagorsk during the Soviet era. Once, the KGB came calling, demanding that she tell of anyone receiving personal letters from overseas.

But the system was already collapsing, and she and her friends spent their days hunting for food in Sergeiv Posad's empty stores. She went home to Mokshan often for supplies; her mother stuffed her suitcase full of potatoes and even hand-wrapped fresh eggs in newspaper.

By late 1992, as Russians watched the economy blow apart, she quit the factory and moved back to Moscow -- even without the propiska, or residence permit, still technically required to live there. First, she worked for an Indian firm importing everything from tea to toothpaste, then for a British company, then for American Express.

In 1995, she switched to a U.S-funded consulting firm advising Russia on land privatization. And in 1998, she moved to the Russian-American Judicial Partnership, where she is executive assistant to the director. "I like to change jobs every few years," she said. "It's something we weren't free to do before."

On the whole, hers is a story of rising expectations; "the appetite grows while eating," she says to describe how even her dreams have changed.

But in today's Russia, only Moscow can feed those new hungers. The city is a bursting-at-the-seams hub of 9 million people, with more foreign investment and average salaries five times higher than elsewhere in the country. It is also a hard place, where dark-skinned outsiders are beaten on subway cars and no one comes to help, as Tatyana witnessed a month ago. And a place where good men who are not gangster capitalists or stay-at-home drunks are hard to find, as her girlfriends attest.

For Tatyana, living there has meant leaving behind not only Mokshan, but also many friends like her camp pal Lyudmila, an engineer by training who paints wooden matrioshka dolls for tourists and lives in the communal apartment in Sergeiv Posad that Tatyana shared 10 years ago.

"There's such a discrepancy between people living in the capital and anywhere else in Russia," Tatyana says. "I would never complain about how I'm going through life."

Reinvention in Moscow

After changing out of her neon yellow leotard and electric blue shorts, Tatyana sips freshly squeezed pear juice at the sports bar as she waits for the rest of her aerobics class to join her for a post-workout drink, their Sunday ritual.

Club All Plus is one of Tatyana's favorite places in Moscow. Her friends here, like her, are from somewhere else and busy reinventing themselves in the city. They talk about diets and whether it's safe to date men they meet online. All are familiar with the misunderstandings that come from having families who live in the other Russia.

"They think we are all spoiled living here," says Svetlana Elkina, a chemical engineer who is their aerobics teacher. Tanya Pchelnikova, a teacher turned banker, says, "If they heard the amount of our salaries, they would be shocked and surprised. They don't know how much it costs to live here."

Like Tatyana, these women live modestly by Western standards. Tatyana's salary may be significantly higher than the Moscow middle-class average of $500 a month, but she owns nothing of real value except a TV and a home computer. She has no credit card and no bank account. Her rent is $150 a month. If she buys an apartment -- she says she needs about $25,000 -- she plans to supplement her savings with loans from friends.

Like many young Muscovites, she says she believes that money is something to be spent right away. "I was always thinking, if I want something, I want to experience it now. I want to spend what I have now and not look back in old age and realize I went nowhere, met no one, had no new experiences."

Foreign travel remains the one big-ticket item. She and her friends are eager jet-setters, their passport stamps freedom's most visible trophy.

Tatyana first left the country in 1995 for a vacation in Spain. The moment she landed, she was "overwhelmed. I wish I had that feeling again -- that feeling happens only once in your life. After that, you get used to it." Since then, she has fallen in love in Tunisia and in Egypt, and gone skiing in Slovakia and scuba diving in the Mediterranean.

At the sports bar, her class trades tips on how to get passports renewed by Russia's unfriendly bureaucracy. Eventually, a debate breaks out over whether Russians are surly in public. It is put to rest when one woman says, "How can you smile on the Metro when you only earn $100 a month? We earn more, and we smile."

But how long will that smile last? "In this country, something happens and you never know where it will lead to," Tatyana says.

Heads nod, and soon the conversation breaks up. Two friends are late for an appointment to get their legs waxed.

Little in Common

Tatyana's father is standing in the kitchen in Mokshan, bragging about his potatoes again.

"I am proud that these are my own potatoes. That we have them through our own labor," says Gennady, an engineer at the phone company who counts on his garden, not his paycheck, to supply their food for the winter.

"I don't agree," Tatyana interrupts. "I've offered to buy them three sacks of potatoes, which is enough for the whole winter."

"Why do you need to do this work?" she asks her father. "It's not good for you at your age."

"No, no, no," he sputters. "It's our work. We are proud of it."

For Tatyana, every visit to her parents' apartment on Engels Street is a series of confrontations between their Russia and hers. Although she is close to her mother, Valentina, their everyday lives have little in common, from the way they spend their time to the food they eat. ("I like something low-fat, not fried," she says on the train; within hours, her mother is frying fish and potatoes.)

>From Moscow, it takes 12 hours and 45 minutes by train to reach the regional center of Penza; Mokshan is another 45 minutes by rickety taxi. The cab is the last car Tatyana will ride in while she is here; no one in her family has ever owned a car. For her, travel in Mokshan is exclusively on foot, down muddy, rutted lanes, dodging stray dogs.

A town of about 11,600 founded in the 17th century, Mokshan retains its Soviet feel. Average wages are among the lowest in a poor country: $35 a month. Her father's family has lived nearby for generations; her mother came here in the 1960s after studying to be a pharmacist in Moscow. Brother Misha is five years younger than Tatyana; an army veteran, he works as a repairman at the phone company and supports his wife, Irina, and year-old son, Danil.

Born in 1939, Valentina grew up poor after the "Great Patriotic War" -- World War II -- that claimed millions, including her father. Her abiding memories are of starving as a child. Sitting now at the kitchen table, pushing her daughter to eat more, smiling at the jug of fresh milk on her counter, she says "the biggest change of this 10 years" is the reliable food supply.

"I always used to tell Tanya when she was little -- 'Eat up, just in case.'"

There are two inevitable subjects Tatyana dreads most when she returns to Mokshan: men and money.

"They believe that a good husband is somebody who can put a nail in the wall, hang a picture and do some repairs," Tatyana says. "I tell them, I can do it pretty well myself, and even better than a man."

"I tell her that a husband would be support," her mother says.

For this trip home, Tatyana has filled her suitcase with small gifts -- a bottle of Escada perfume for her mother, educational puzzles and a jean jacket for Misha's son. But her parents are reluctant to take Tatyana's money. So she leaves some cash for emergencies and brings them presents from her trips -- incongruous souvenirs like the London tray in the kitchen, with its red double-decker buses and regal Beefeaters, and the gray Calvin Klein T-shirt her father puts on after work.

"My mom says, 'Please don't give much to us. Please spend it on yourself. Save for an apartment because you need a home of your own,' " Tatyana says.

When her father retires in November, their household income will fall to $70 a month. But Valentina says they are lucky. "It's a lot for Mokshan," she says.

Old Fears Live On

The black-and-white photos from Tatyana's high school could be 100 years old: somber, unsmiling girls in frilly white aprons and uncomfortable black woolen dresses, sitting behind wooden desks. They were taken in 1984.

Out of her class of 30 or so, Tatyana is the only one to have made it to Moscow. Her high school boyfriend buys food in Penza and resells it in Mokshan. They broke up, she says, during her first year in the city. "He didn't like all these things -- foreigners, foreign languages. 'It's anti-Russian,' he said."

Such thinking still echoes in Mokshan. Economic problems are easier to talk about, but the town lives with old fears as well, habits of totalitarianism that influence Russia's tenuous new democracy.

While Tatyana says she feels free to say what she thinks, her parents and their friends are wary of talking to a foreigner, citing fear of retribution from today's KGB, the renamed Federal Security Service, or FSB.

One woman proudly tells a reporter that she was never afraid in Soviet times. "My whole life, I always said what I thought. I never thought that something was forbidden," she says. The next day, she begs Tatyana's mother to make sure she is not included in this article, saying she could be fired. Another man, asked to describe life in Mokshan, replies that he cannot answer because "the FSB wouldn't like that."

Later, back in the city, Tatyana struggles to make sense of these encounters. "Moscow is speaking one language about democracy," she says, "but everybody in the provinces, they are speaking another language, an older one."

Earlier, Tatyana had talked about her objections to anyone connected with the old state-security apparatus, including Russian president and ex-spy Vladimir Putin. "I don't accept any former KGB leaders, including Putin," she said. "People had no real choice; they were offered Putin and they accepted him."

But hers is a minority view in Russia, where Putin is popular. Most people, in both Moscow and Mokshan, see in him a chance to restore the order that has been missing during the post-Soviet decade.

"My mom used to say, 'You are in Moscow, you can look for the truth and find it. But here we don't have many choices,' " Tatyana says. "There are no jobs in Mokshan, and if you lose yours you will not find another one. The boss there rules like a king. These people say they are not Communists anymore, but they still have this mentality."

This is a fear that Tatyana has left behind.

"I am not very much afraid. If I were to lose my job, I am sure I could be a teacher. I can be a nurse. I can wash the floor," she says. "In Moscow, you have so many choices. You can control your life."