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A Russian Journey For
impoverished peasants along the St. Petersburg-Moscow highway, little has
changed in the two centuries since a reformer's trek recorded their plight.
KRASNY MAI, Russia -
The little wooden houses sit dark and modest under a gray summer sky, their
shelves heavy with the cut-glass champagne flutes, vases, bowls and tumblers
that hold the inhabitants prisoner. Nearly everyone here
works for the Krasny Mai - Red May - glass factory.
They work, but most haven't been paid for five years. Instead of money, the
factory doles out cut glass every month and a loaf of bread every day. Too
poor to leave town, the people stay and work and dream of freedom, held in
bondage by their cut glass. Russians know
servitude well. The czars enslaved them for centuries, then
communism arrived to prolong their captivity. Today, despite freedom and
education, life remains a misery for many people of the villages and small
towns. They feel little different than the serfs of old, bound now by the
laws of the economy instead of the state. Two centuries ago, a
member of the gentry with a social conscience drove along the road that
passes Krasny Mai, taking notes on what he saw. He
turned his reporting into an impassioned polemic demanding social reform.
Every Russian knows his name - Aleksandr
Nikolayevich Radishchev - and his book,
"Journey from Petersburg to Moscow." The Communists proclaimed him
the first revolutionary, requiring every schoolchild to study his book. Radishchev ignored the two grand cities,
St. Petersburg and Moscow. Then, as now, they hardly reflected the true
Russian condition. In the 18th century, city noblemen traveled in fancy
carriages, ate their oysters on fine porcelain and gossiped in French. Ninety
percent of Russians were serfs, bought and sold by their masters, trying to
feed themselves by working the land at night and on Sundays. The barons of today -
the new elite enriched by grabbing up the post-Soviet spoils - travel by
Mercedes, eat their caviar on fine porcelain and gather on the French
Riviera. More than half of Russians live well below the poverty level. Even
the better-off, who live in the cities, have mostly achieved only a sort of genteel
poverty. Today, Radishchev would surely notice the people of Krasny Mai. Many of them stand, dejectedly, on the
shoulder of the highway connecting St. Petersburg and Moscow, trying to sell
their glass. "Certainly this
isn't freedom," says Zoya Ivanova,
64. "No one has any money. They can't leave. We have to keep working. If
the factory closed, there would be no hope at all." Once, they were
hero-workers who created a potent symbol of Soviet power. In 1937, they
produced the 1.5-ton red glass stars that sit atop the towers of Moscow's
Kremlin. Ivanova had a job cutting glass until
about 10 years ago, when her hands gave out. Then she worked as a cleaner in
the factory. Now, she says, the average worker earns about $17 a month - paid
in cut glass at retail value. "Life was better
once," she says. The factory could support a town of 12,000. "Now
we're going back to Radishchev's day. Who can say
we're anything but serfs?" Radishchev visited 24 settlements,
reporting on the way serfdom corrupted peasant and master, the way the system
tied landowner to government and serf to land. He spoke of harsh laws and
capricious punishment, corrupt judges, burdensome taxes and suffocating
censorship, prostitution and venereal disease. He could have written much of
his book today. His journey was as
much philosophical as physical. Though written as one trip and published in
1790, he actually worked on the book over 10 years. It reflected several
trips, including one made after 1773, when rebellious peasants swept through
eastern and southern Russia, murdering landlords and burning their estates. Radishchev, born in Moscow in 1749, grew
up on his father's country estate in central Russia and was sent to the
Petersburg court as a page. In 1766, Catherine the Great dispatched him to
Germany to study at the University of Leipzig. He returned, educated in law,
languages and the French philosophers, dreaming of liberty and equality. The reaction to his
book was immediate. Catherine accused him of fomenting revolution, sentenced Radishchev to death and ordered his book burned. Only 18
copies of the original survived in Russia. Two weeks after sentencing him,
Catherine commuted Radishchev's term to 10 years of
exile in Siberia After the empress died, Catherine's son pardoned Radishchev, and he returned home in late 1797. Appointed to a
commission to revise the legal code, he began talking once more of liberty,
equality and freedom of the press. "Didn't you have enough of
Siberia?" a colleague demanded. It was 1802. Despairing of change, Radishchev killed himself. He was 53. His book lives on, and
so do his observations. Today's traveler can easily make the 424-mile journey
in a day, but Radishchev urges otherwise: "The
slower you travel, the farther you'll get." The Departure "Having supped
with friends, I took my place in the post chaise. As was his custom, the
driver urged the horses on to the utmost, and in a few minutes I was outside
the city." Thus Radishchev describes the beginning of his trip. Today in
St. Petersburg, Nikolai Ivanovich Yarov, a 58-year-old epidemiologist at the city's
respected Pasteur Institute, finishes breakfast of tea and buckwheat porridge
and puts on a camouflage jacket, uniform of the Russian man heading toward
adventure. . Outside, his carriage awaits - a boxy and well-worn 9-year-old Zhiguli, the ubiquitous Russian car. Yarov, a retired navy doctor, has a
wife who works as a dentist, a grown daughter and a comfortable apartment on
a beautiful street. He is also poor enough on a combined pension and salary
of $122 a month that he is eager to enter service as a weekend driver. He drapes the seatbelt
across his chest, taking pains to make it look as if it is fastened while
scrupulously refusing to actually do so. We are under way,
passing the grand St. Petersburg hotels, a busy McDonald's, chic cafes, a
shoe store with a sale on Hush Puppies. Even on discount, one pair would cost
Yarov a third of his monthly salary. The elegant
city begins to segue into high, gray, deteriorating apartment buildings. They
give way to green fields lined with birch trees. Women, their heads wrapped
in kerchiefs, men wearing caps, are bringing in the hay, armed with the rakes
and pitchforks of old. The landscape persists
to Moscow, interrupted by clumps of wooden houses, high-tension wires, the
occasional rambling factory and, here and there, a city. There's even a
village named Radishchev. Yarov complains of his asthma, and
lights another cigarette. Sofiya "A few kopecks,
Master, for a drink?" Although such exactions are not legal, everybody
pays willingly to avoid vexatious travel regulations. Twenty kopecks served
me well." A driver at the post
station has confronted Radishchev with a thinly
veiled demand for a bribe so he'll be able to get horses. A kopeck is one
one-hundredth of a ruble and in those days the sum was a handsome tip. Yarov, of course, quickly becomes
acquainted with the modern equivalent when he makes the mistake of sliding
slowly through a traffic police checkpoint instead of coming to a full stop. The peeved policeman
motions sharply with his black and white baton. Negotiations ensue, resulting
in an exaction of 20 rubles. Today, that's about 75 cents. In two centuries
of bribery, inflation has visited the highway. Lyuban "Tremble,
cruel-hearted landlord! On the brow of each of your peasants I see your
condemnation written." Radishchev comes upon a serf, plowing a
field on a hot Sunday. Six days a week, the peasant works in his master's
field, though lackadaisically, Radishchev observes,
because he gets no profit or thanks. On Sundays and evenings, he works to
feed himself and six children. "If a fellow isn't lazy," he tells Radishchev, "he won't starve to death." Lyuban was nearly 300 years old when Radishchev's carriage rumbled through. This weekend, the
village of 14,200 people is celebrating its 500th anniversary. People here have jobs
now, in a furniture factory, at the hospital, in the local palace of culture.
And nights and weekends, they work furiously to feed themselves. "Life is going
on, there's progress," says Irina Ivanova, a
23- year-old maternity nurse and mother of a 10-month-old son. "But
we're obliged to work for ourselves every spare minute." Right now, the
maternity home is closed for lack of business - Russia's birthrate has been
plunging precipitously in the post- Soviet years. "Under socialism
things weren't that good either," says her cousin, Marina Rumyantseva, 30. "Now, we're hoping they'll get
better." Rumyantseva, a singer who organizes
concerts at the House of Culture, earns $25 a month and has a 10-year-old
son. Her husband, an engineer, earns $44. Wearing a stylish black suit - her
only one - Rumyantseva is all freshness, youth and
optimism. Her mother, Raisa Aleksandrova,
stands next to her, looking worn at 59, wearing mismatched jacket and dress. Aleksandrova remembers that only a few
years ago, she had to make regular trips to St. Petersburg in search of food
or clothes. Now, you can buy anything in Lyuban
from Coca-Cola to a suit made in Turkey - if only you can find the money. Outsiders have trouble
understanding how Russians can live on so little money when food and clothes
cost nearly as much as they do in the West. "We use most of our salaries
to buy food," Rumyantseva says. "We have
to plan and save to buy clothes." In small towns, rents
are modest. She and her husband pay $5.50 a month for their tiny two-room
apartment. Their building doesn't have telephones. Their utilities cost about
$3.50 a month. The town doesn't provide hot water in the summer. They can't
dream of owning a car. After expenses, they have $60 a month for food and
clothes. They stay alive
because, like most Russians, they have been allotted a piece of land 60 feet
by 60 feet. On this earth, they grow most of their food, with some to spare. "People here are
very good," Ivanova says, "only
poor." Out on the highway, a
bright yellow house catches the traveler's eye. Though houses in the
countryside are often decorated with fretwork, this one is covered with
fussy, intricate designs, and it's in perfect repair. Yevgenia Petrova,
71, and her grandson, Misha, 13, stand in the
adjoining potato field, picking off the Colorado beetles that voraciously eat
the leaves. Petrova's husband died 10 years ago,
and now she lives with her son, Anatoly, 48. The two men built the house 23
years ago, culling the wood from a nearby forest after a storm. Anatoly, who graduated
from Radishchev High School, once worked in the
local wood factory but saved his money and four years ago
rented a small general store. Today he has three, allowing his family to live
far better than most, with a car, frequent trips to St. Petersburg and a
television antenna that pulls in numerous channels. "He can do
anything," his mother says proudly. "He's very industrious. He can
do construction work, welding and electrical work. And he doesn't
drink." Anatoly's sobriety is
unusual in the countryside, where many generations have endured long winters
and bleak lives locked in the embrace of vodka. "Drunk in the morning,
free all day," Russians cheerfully say to this day. Life has never been
easy here. The Germans took Petrova prisoner during
World War II and used her as a slave laborer. Everyone nearly starved in the
post-war years. Perhaps the future
will be kinder to her grandson, a grinning tow- head blessed with an
industrious and lucky father. Misha is captive only
to American cartoons dubbed into Russian and Titan Wrestling tuned in by the
tall antenna on the house. His fingers are
blue-black from picking berries. And his T-shirt proclaims his world view:
"California Sun," it says. Chudovo "Hope, which
follows man in his extremity, now gave us strength, and we encouraged one
another as much as we could." At the Chudovo post station, a friend tells Radishchev
about being part of a group caught on a lake in a storm. Their boat is nearly
shipwrecked, but when one of the party makes land
and tries to get help, the local authorities refuse to act - their commander
is asleep. The men urge each other on, and they miraculously escape death
despite the indifference of the officials - a metaphor for an uncaring
czarist government. More than 200 years
later, Yevgenia Grebyenova,
68, and Yevgenia Nosova,
72, sit on a bench at the side of their narrow street in Chudovo,
contemplating their own indifferent officials. "We worked all
our lives," says Grebyenova, "and we
don't even have a decent pension." Grebyenova wears a white kerchief, tied
peasant-style around her head. It's a warm evening, but she wears a sweater
over her faded dress. She remembers going to work on a farm at age 7, after
the secret police came for her father and took him away at the height of the
Stalinist round-ups, when anyone could be guilty of anything. She remembers,
some years later, hiding from the Germans. At age 55, she retired
from her job of 23 years in the local plate- glass factory down the street.
Now the factory makes glass insulation. A German company owns it. Grebyenova doesn't mind, despite the war. "Maybe if ours
owned it, it would be much worse," she laughs. "We have shares and
they pay us dividends - 60 rubles a year." That works out to $2.33. Her
pension is $32 a month. Her son visits to help with the potatoes planted
around her house and to cut the wood. "I don't have
anything to look forward to," says her friend Nosova,
who is wearing her dead husband's suit jacket. "My health won't be
getting any better." The future lies at the
other end of the street, where Cadbury has built a chocolate factory.
"The newspaper says they pay good taxes," Grebyenova
reports. "Now our pensions arrive on time. There used to be long
delays." The street sign nailed
to the side of her house comes in Russian and English: Bournville
Lane, reminiscent of an English village. "The signs are
very beautiful," Grebyenova says, "and
you can see them from a distance. They don't fade, either." The road winds back to
the highway, past traditional wooden houses and the five-story, crumbling
apartments built in the Khrushchev years of the late 1950s and early '60s. A
few stores are now painted in Cadbury purple. On the highway, a
vision of the future appears, mirage-like: a gas station with a convenience
store. Diet Coke, Lays potato chips or microwaved hot dog, anyone? A sparkling little pre-fab building offers clean-as-a-whistle pay toilets. A new
motel advertises a sauna. Can this be Russia, where the most reliable
roadside toilet is a hidden spot behind a bush? Novgorod "The ancient
saying, `Who can stand against God and Great Novgorod?' may serve as proof of
its power. Trade was the cause of its rise. Internal discord and a rapacious
neighbor brought about its fall." Radishchev meditates on the rise and fall
of Novgorod, which dates to the year 859 and became the center of a powerful
religious and political empire. Novgorod was ruled democratically, and it had
close trade ties to the West. This section of Radishchev's journey infuriated Catherine the Great more
than any other. Radishchev describes the
destruction of the city in 1471 by Ivan the Terrible, who came from rival
Moscow. He laments that might prevails over right. And he has some nasty
words for Ivan and the despotic system he created - for Catherine and the
other czars to inherit. Today, Moscow is as
jealous of power as ever. And, after all these centuries, says Mayor Aleksandr V. Korsunov, Novgorod
still harbors dreams of trade and close ties with the West. "The spirit of
our ancestors has been preserved," the mayor says firmly. In the last year,
Novgorod has done the impossible by creating attractive conditions for
investors in a country notorious for keeping foreign businessmen at bay with
smothering bureaucracy and rapacious corruption. Here, the city and
district have passed laws forgiving all local taxes until a businessman
recoups his investment. Big-time bribery and extortion have been suppressed. "If we have problems,"
says Andrei Komov, director of a German company
called Sommer Novtruck,
"we call the mayor or his deputy, and they solve it. They set up a
department to support business. If we need help finding supplies, they help
us do it. I haven't heard of this happening anywhere else in Russia." The company builds
tractor-trailer bodies and containers, and business has been improving.
"Now is a good time to come here," Komov
says. "Wait, and it will be too late." Valdai "This town is
famous for the amorous inclinations of its inhabitants, especially of its
unmarried women. Who has not been to Valdai, who does not know the Valdai
painted wenches? The bold and shameless Valdai girls stop every traveler and
try to kindle his passion in order to exploit his generosity at the cost of
their chastity." Today, says Police
Major Yevgeny Naskov,
there is little such shameless behavior among Valdai's
young women. Residents of this town of 32,000 would recognize them, and it
would be too embarrassing. The painted wenches who stand on the highway near
Valdai trying to kindle the passion of passers-by come from the neighboring Tverskaya district, he says. Driving along the St.
Petersburg-Moscow highway in the evening, it seems as if there are
prostitutes scattered along the entire 424 miles. Close to Moscow, young
women stand in groups of half a dozen, lining up and preening while drivers,
making their choice, shine their headlights along the row. But not Valdai girls,
at least not in Valdai. "I should say Radishchev was very lucky to find them here," Major Naskov says. Torzhok "Let anyone print
anything that enters his head. If anyone finds himself insulted in print, let
him get his redress at law. I will close with this: the censorship of what is
printed belongs properly to society, which gives the author a laurel wreath
or uses his sheets for wrapping paper." Radishchev comes upon a young man heading
to St. Petersburg to ask permission for a printing press and discusses at
great length the harm that censorship has imposed on the country. There is no censorship
today, declares Oleg I. Vishnyakov, editor of the Torzhok paper, Vestnik. The
only thing is, the paper gets money from the local administration, and when
the mayor or governor wants to place an article in the paper, of course the
editor acquiesces. He does so, he says,
even though the articles usually aren't true. "We know that in
reality things are quite different than the way they are describing
them," he says. The paper never criticizes the mayor or governor, though
Vishnyakov says he can get by with a few complaints
about education or social services. Recently, the paper
went after the hospital because of its long lines and fees for services that
are supposed to be free. The administration ignored the article. "We never got any
answers," Vishnyakov says. "There is no
one who can oblige them to respond." Radishchev, who looked to America as an
example, would be disappointed. He wrote: "The State of
Delaware, in its Declaration of Rights, says: `That the liberty of the press
ought to be inviolably preserved.' The State of Maryland uses the same
language." Mednoe "Twice every
week, the whole Russian Empire is notified that N.N. or B.B. is unable or
unwilling to pay what he has borrowed or taken or what is demanded of
him." So Radishchev
begins his description of an estate auction, serfs and farmland up for sale
because of bankruptcy. Such failures were common at the time, when dissolute
owners lost their holdings to gambling debts or poor management. Today, poor management
of latter-day estates - big state farms - is as common as ever. Only today,
when the 12,000-acre farm that once supported Mednoe
fails, no one bothers to bid. "They tried to
declare the farm bankrupt," says Aleksandr Semyonov, walking along the roadside on his way to cut
hay, "but no one would buy it. We're all working,
we just don't get anything for it. Maybe if someone buys us, we'll have
something." Tver "Superficial
luster may grow dim, but true beauty will never fade. ... Shakespeare ...
will be read until the human race is destroyed." Radishchev's mind turns to the state of
Russian poetry and literature, which he determines to be in decline, and he
complains that writing about themes such as liberty is prohibited. He laments
the limits on the Russian intellectual. Alla Monakova,
22, has just graduated with a degree in literature from Tver
University. She's selling books in the city's main department store - it pays
better than writing or teaching. And Shakespeare, she says, is very much in
demand, especially "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet." The great Russians -
Tolstoy, Chekhov and others - are also sought after, even though many
intellectuals worry about the cheap romances that sell so well and shoddy,
second-rate American movies that fill up the airwaves. But such cultural
concerns hardly dominate daily conversation. The quality of life does. "Serfdom is gone,
but in other ways we are going back 200 years," Monakova
says. "You see the same poor, haunted people. People are of no value.
They are sad, living one day at a time, thinking about how to eat
today." Gorodnya "A levy of
recruits was the cause of the sobs and tears of the people crowded together
there." Radishchev watches the village's serfs
sobbing as sons and husbands are sent off to the army, fulfilling military
service for their masters. When she talks about
her only child, Sasha, being taken by the army at the end of May, Nadezhda Yevdokimova also
starts sobbing. "I would give
anything to keep him beside me," she says, reproaching herself for being
too poor to pay the bribes that would have protected him. Yevdokimova, 41, lives on the third floor
of a shabby five-story building in the village of Gorodnya.
Her apartment looks old but clean; outside, the stairwell stinks of urine and
cabbage. She is terrified that
after six months of basic training, her 18- year-old Sasha will be sent to
the war in Chechnya. She feels as betrayed and helpless as the peasants
wailing in this village 200 years ago. "It costs one
thousand bucksov to keep him here," she says,
putting the American expression "bucks" into proper grammatical
form by adding "ov" at the end. "To
earn $1,000, I'd have to work more than three years without eating or buying
anything." As a saleswoman in a
store, she earns $25 a month, but hasn't been paid the last three months. Her
husband works at the local chicken enterprise as a tractor mechanic, earning
$18 a month. Last month, he was only paid $9. "It's exactly the
same as in Radishchev's time," Yevdokimova says. "We are tied here just like serfs.
Maybe there are those who are masters of their fate, but I don't know any of
them." Klin "I walked up to
him and placed a ruble in the beggar's trembling hand." The beggars so common
in Radishchev's day disappeared in the Soviet era.
Now they are back, the young, the old, the sick, out on the streets looking
for money. Pull into the modern
post station - a McDonald's appears as Moscow nears -and two small boys run
up asking for money before you have time to order a Big Mac and chocolate
shake. A beggar stands
outside the Church of All Mourners nearby - today it's rare to find a working
church without attendant beggars. Aleksandr Yegorov, 50, says people who go to church are kind and
give a beggar money. "The Communists
spoiled the country morally and in other ways," Yegorov
says. "Now it's the same as 200 years ago. That's not good, either. But
I think when the children grow up, things will improve." Chyornaya Gryaz "Here I saw
another fine example of a nobleman's arbitrary power over the peasants. A wedding
was taking place. But instead of a joyous procession, one could see only
grief and despondency." Then, a landlord was
forcing two peasants to marry. Not so today, no, not at all. Sasha, 22, and
Tatyana Lovygin, 21, are all smiles and champagne
toasts on their wedding day. After waiting for an
hour in a line of brides, grooms and guests that stretches down a corridor
and out to the parking lot, they are about to enter the Wedding Palace in Zelenograd (Green City), a town that was built next to Chyornaya Gryaz (Black Dirt) in
1958 as the new administrative center. The Wedding Palace
consists of a few plain offices in the back of a squat, five-story yellow
brick building, also home to the prosecutor and a sports school. Sasha wears
a light gray suit, Tatyana a long white wedding gown. She carries pink roses. As they enter a spare,
wood-paneled office room, a string quartet starts Lohengrin's
wedding march. A registrar waits behind her simple wooden desk. A
philodendron decorates the room. "Your mutual consent
gives me the right to register your marriage," the official announces.
"I declare you husband and wife." After kisses and
photographs, they are dispatched across the hall, to watch their ceremony on
instant video replay. Then, Sasha swoops up
Tatyana and carries her down the crumbling cement steps. They stand about in
the parking lot, drinking champagne out of plastic cups in front of a
borrowed Audi, which is adorned with two golden rings and a spray of flowers. "They'll be happy
together," says a friend Sasha Zharov, who
graduated with them from the Electronics Institute. The cost and scarcity of
apartments require them to live with her mother, but they've already bought
their own sofa bed. A guest offers
champagne to a visitor, who declines because she's driving. "I'm driving,
too," the bearer of champagne announces, "and I'm drinking." Zharov laughs. "Russia has
changed," he says, "but the people are still the same." |