GLASNOST AND PERESTROIKA FUEL SOVIETS’ IMPATIENCE – AND DREAMS

By GLENN NELSON

June 10, 1990

Publication: THE SEATTLE TIMES

Page: A1

Word Count: 4015

MOSCOW – As Valery Karklit spins the frequency dial, the speaker on his ham-radio set issues a symphony of voices. Synthesized via air waves over great distances, they take on an eerie, Disney-character quality. They lash in tongues alien to Karklit’s native Russian.

Karklit finally speaks back to them.

“This is Uniform-America-Three-Delta-Echo-America,” he says, reciting his call letters into a microphone, “requesting Q-S-O (contact).”

For most of 25 years, America has been answering such requests for contact from a city called Zagorsk, nestled in the so-called “Golden Ring” around Moscow. The more America answers, the more intrigued Karklit becomes, and the more he calls. Nearly every morning, when conditions are best for radio contact with the United States, the ritual is repeated.

Valery Karklit is dialing for his dreams.

“I have a special thing in my mind,” he explains. “I want to go to America.”

Specifically, Karklit wants to visit Seattle, which has provided his most plentiful stream of ham-radio contacts and visitors over the years. His wife, Helen, and their friends, Igor and Helen Dokuchaev and Alexander and Tatyana Vasilkov, share this desire.

Desperately.

The three couples spend considerable time discussing a prospective first visit to the West. Yet, when the conversation threatens to reach a feverish pitch, Karklit will interject a tempering thought.

“This is just our dream,” he says in a near-flawless English forged by years of government work and ham-radio contact with the West. “Sometimes we don’t even want to think about it because it may not come true. But we continue to hope so hard.”

The hopes of those such as the Karklits and their friends flowered in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev instituted glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction) for the communist country slowly suffocating on a socialist economy.

Five years later, the Soviet Union appears to be choking on perestroika. And glasnost makes it possible for previously stifled Soviets to show open disdain of Gorbachev and his government over their mounting economic hardships.

To a first-time visitor conditioned to thinking of the Soviet Union as military superpower, the picture Moscow presents is a shocking one. The country’s capital and largest city can be a dark, bleak place. Many of its buildings are old and crumbling, its shops empty of desirable goods, its people marked by grim faces and thinned patience, and its cars slaloming along pothole-riddled roads.

Yet, as bad as things appear there, Moscow actually is better off than the rest of the country.

There is great uncertainty today about the course Gorbachev has plotted for the Soviet Union. The road to change has so far proved halting and circuitous. At once, it seems to lead everywhere, and nowhere. To enlightenment, and to bewilderment. To consumers starved for goods. And people consumed by the need for change.

Some, like the Karklits, are banking the road leads to America. Most Soviets are unsure of its destination. The only certainty is that the journey will be a rocky one.

Cheap subway, costly cars

More than any party planner or government bureaucrat, contradiction rules the Soviet economy. Some things are unbelievably cheap. Others are impossible to find at any price. Workers complain about low pay. Yet many literally have more money than they are able to spend.

The average Soviet worker earns 250 rubles a month, about $400 at the commercial exchange rate of $1.60 per ruble. He or she can ride anywhere on the Moscow subway system, the most extensive in the world, for five kopeks (100 kopeks per ruble). On the other hand, a car costs 10,000 rubles, more than three years’ salary, and requires waiting as long as five years, sometimes even longer.

State-subsidized rent for modest, one-bedroom apartments ranges from 25 to 50 rubles a month, but waiting lists for such accommodations are long. State subsidies put such items as meat and milk at below-market prices, but just try to find some. Some commodities, such as sugar, are rationed.

Consumer goods are even more scarce, available only to the well- connected or extremely lucky. Typically, a limited number of items such as televisions are periodically made available to the entire work force of a given factory. The rights to buy such items are determined by lottery.

Faced with an increasingly worthless ruble and savings-account interest rates that are far outstripped by inflation, some people squirrel away hard currency whenever and however they can get it. Hard currency is any legal tender, such as dollars, easily convertible on the international market. The ruble is not convertible.

One Soviet who does considerable business with Westerners has clients mail payments in dollars to a bank account in the U.S. As work requires travel to the West, this person can withdraw the money outside the Soviet Union and make purchases for personal use or to barter for other goods and services.

As bad as the Soviet economy appears, as poor as Soviets seem, people do have money. “I have collected a lot of money over the years,” explains Valery Karklit, “because there is nothing to buy.” The abundance of forced savings is evident by the surprising number of Soviets who have managed to pay for dachas, or countryside getaway villas.

It is also apparent in the increasing willingness to shop the black market, in defiance of the law and out of desperation for higher-quality Western goods. Workmanship of Soviet goods is notoriously poor. Soviets, for example, ritualistically unplug their appliances before leaving home; short-circuiting state-made televisions are the country’s major cause of house fires.

The questionable availability of even the most basic goods is such a pervasive fact of life that some Soviets suggest the name of the country be changed to Mozhet Bweets (maybe). The daily message they receive, as one put it: “Maybe there will be hot water in our pipes tomorrow, maybe not. Maybe there will be meat in the stores tomorrow, maybe not. Maybe there will be soap available tomorrow, maybe not.”

The only thing one can be sure about tomorrow in the Soviet Union is that it’s coming.

The `shadow economy’

Glasnost has not utterly transformed the Soviet Union into a land of whiners. Many Soviets take matters into their own hands, with a survivalist ingenuity that seems almost capitalistic.

The extreme shortages have spawned what the Soviets call their “shadow economy.” The black market, whose estimated worth approaches $160 billion, is just part of it. Widespread bartering is an even larger part.

Blat, Russian for the ability to beat the system by exchanging one favor for another, once was the exclusive province of privileged Communist Party and KGB officials. Now it has become a way of life. Shopkeepers might sell goods na lyevo (under the table, but literally, “on the left”) for inflated prices, or for a favor down the road. A writer can obtain books, and may swap them for typewriter ribbons he cannot get but a clerk in a stationery store can. Officials can help circumvent the cumbersome bureaucracy for housing, travel and other privileges.

Most everyone seems to be able to generate some source of goods or influence that can be exchanged for another.

“Our friendships are somewhat different than yours,” Valery Karklit explains. “In America, you will make a friend because you genuinely like that person. Here, a lot of our friendships are more for business. They are based more on what that person can get for you.

“The government has its mafias. These are our small mafias.”

“Mafia” carries sinister notions of the criminal underworld in the United States. The word, as Karklit uses it, represents the web of influence and connections developed among people for self-preservation. From the Karklits, Dokuchaevs and Vasilkovs stretch tentacles that touch nearly every aspect of society. They use their combined resources in the daily Soviet endeavor of “beat the system.”

The Karklits have obviously flourished in the game. Compared with most, their three-room apartment is bright and modern. A television sits atop a well-stocked refrigerator, which sits next to a power stabilizer in the kitchen. A lacquer cabinet, pregnant with family treasures, stretches the length of the living room, which also holds another color television, stereo outfit, VCR and personal computer.

Valery Karklit works as the chief computer engineer for the Agricultural Engineering Department in Zagorsk. His wife, Helen, works as an economist, also at the Agricultural Engineering Department, where the two met before marrying five years ago. The Karklits’ DINK (double income, no kids) status does not completely explain their heightened living standards, however.

The Karklits are different because Valery travels comfortably in the circles of power in Zagorsk. His Western connections carry great influence. Many Western friends made through ham-radio contact were invited to Zagorsk. Once there, they were introduced to Soviet friends, who sold or bartered goods for hard currency or Western comforts, or sowed the seeds for joint business ventures.

One friend helped Karklit purchase his West German color television. Another, his stereo. The VCR was a gift from yet another, as was the personal computer.

Igor and Helen Dokuchaev have been recent benefactors of Karklit’s Western connections. Both are artists, creators of intricate Matryoshka (nesting) dolls. The Dokuchaevs’ dolls, marked by their whimsical viewpoint on Soviet life, can take as long as a month to make. And the Dokuchaevs can fetch a better price from Westerners than domestic consumers.

Like the Karklits, the Dokuchaevs enjoy a higher-than-normal standard of living. Their apartment is slightly larger, but also houses a work area and quarters for their 4-year-old daughter, Nastya. Their income from Matryoshka dolls is supplemented by Helen’s salary from the All-Union Toys Research Institute in Zagorsk.

The Toys Research Institute, one of the many uniquely Soviet “make-work” institutions, judges whether the country’s playthings are ideologically proper.

Whenever the Karklits or Dokuchaevs cannot acquire a scarce luxury, or even necessity, they usually turn to Alexander Vasilkov, the Zolotaya Rybka (Golden Fish). Vasilkov’s nickname stems from a fable about a luckless fisherman who one day hooks a golden fish. In exchange for tossing him back to the sea, the golden fish offers the fisherman three wishes.

Vasilkov, it seems, used one of his three for an almost endless supply of additional wishes. He has made a healthy living by restoring churches that dot the Zagorsk region. His wife, Tatyana, is a chief dispatcher at a government agency that provides social services for the elderly. Vasilkov has parlayed his business connections and relative wealth into a kind of personal agency that provides services for the common folk. The more favors he provides, the more he collects in return, thus increasing his blat.

Of the three families, the Vasilkovs are the most well-appointed. They own a car. Their apartment is a bit more spacious, their color television a little bigger and their furniture a little nicer. Their ample master bedroom opens to a balcony with a sweeping view. Beside their bed is a refrigerator jammed with high-quality sturgeon. The refrigerator in their kitchen is stocked with precious black caviar, obtained from a connection on the Caspian Sea.

Vasilkov’s influence is conspicuous in Zagorsk’s crowded department stores, where he advances to the front of long lines with nary a complaint. If a purchase is made, a clerk inevitably emerges to insure Vasilkov’s acquisition is of the best available quality. This is a rare occurrence in Soviet society, but Vasilkov knows the clerks, and probably has performed some favor for them along the way.

“Service,” he chuckles. “You have to have connections to get any.”

Or do it yourself. A considerable chunk of a Soviet’s five-day, 40-hour workweek, for example, is spent shopping and standing in line for necessities, at smoke breaks and gossip sessions, and tending to personal episodes.

The Soviet bureaucracy’s top-down structure, plus strict adherence to communist orthodoxy, has done much to stifle initiative.

People daring to demonstrate enterprise commonly are shouted down as “individualists.” The chronic shortage of consumer goods has further reduced workers’ incentives to meet production-bonus levels.

“The state pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work,” is a justification voiced several times daily to a visitor to the Soviet Union.

One morning in Zagorsk provides a chance encounter with workers from the Agricultural Engineering Department. They are standing in a long line outside a jewelry store. Karklit explains, matter of factly, “I guess they didn’t feel like working today, and are standing in line to buy gold.”

Not that the alternatives are compelling. This day, the heating system has failed in many Zagorsk factories, leaving workers idle and huddled in jackets waiting for water to boil for hot tea.

Karklit is called upon to repair a couple telephones at the social-services agency.

Karklit himself begins the day trying to fire up an unwieldy and antiquated computer. After the machine coughs and spits wildly, Karklit gives up. His crew will have to enter the region’s milk-production figures onto ledgers by hand. This is not an uncommon sequence of events in this office.

Among the prized possessions of the Agricultural Department are the economists’ two state-made personal computers. They are more advanced than Karklit’s but still rudimentary compared with those widely used in the West. In an adjoining office, one crew’s supply of electronic adding machines lie dormant in desk drawers. The workers, who review area farmers’ yearly production plans, prefer their massive wooden abacuses.

“These are faster than a machine,” explains one worker, demonstrating her dexterity. “These are our Russian computers.”

As wedded to the past as it is leery of the future, the Soviet Union stagnates. And this cultural, economic and political inertia prompts a gamut of responses from the citizenry.

Dissidence and dissonance

On May Day, the clouds have won the day’s meteorological battle, rendering the skies over Moscow as grim and foreboding as society itself. At a pavilion across Lenin Prospekt from the entrance to Gorky Park, the rain comes and goes, but the people stay.

Speaker after speaker takes the podium to rail at the government’s indiscretions. The recent killing of demonstrators in Tbilisi, the Georgian S.S.R. capital. Corruption in the Kremlin.

Cover-up at Chernobyl. Understated casualty figures from Afghanistan.

The blockade of Lithuania. Do-nothing politicians.

At each charge, people shake their fists and scream, “Pozor!” – Russian, for shame. The elderly and middle-aged, men and women, powerful as well as powerless – these, for the most part, are the faces of protest in the Soviet Union. This is in sharp contrast to the student-led dissidence that has come to characterize opposition movements in most corners of the globe.

“We are the ones who stand in line every day,” explains Vladislav Volkonskaya, a Moscow shopkeeper. “We are the ones who have endured the hardships and keep the memories of the way things have been all these years. We are the ones who have listened to the unfulfilled promises. It’s only right that we are the ones who have to take action.”

For those whose memories of pre-glasnost days remain so vivid, it is extraordinary that Soviets can even think of taking action, much less actually take it. But Gorbachev’s policy of openness has been a veritable opening of Pandora’s box. Opinions – good, bad and indifferent – spew forth almost incessantly.

“Before, it was more complicated,” says Gennady Shevchenko, a carpenter. “Five years ago, we would have run away from (Western reporters). Now, we are happy to tell you our opinions. We’ve always had opinions, but nobody ever asked us for them before. Now we are free to answer.”

The cries of “Pozor!” are not unanimous.

For every Soviet wishing to leap headlong into radical reform, there seems to be another reluctant to leave the comfort zone of authoritarianism. This also is a country so fractionalized by ethnicity, divergent loyalties and perspective that it lacks consensus on its ailments, as well as prescriptions.

Such variance is much in evidence during the government-sponsored May Day demonstration in Moscow.

As wave after wave of humanity spills from Red Square onto Razin Street, Ivan Vlasov marches alone, defiantly hoisting a sign that reads, “Communists have ruined the People.” When the retired engineer stops to speak to a Western journalist, a crowd swells and starts to shout him down.

“Sadly, this is not a holiday for me,” Vlasov manages to say above the din. “I’m not celebrating because we lack political and economic freedom. This is the only country in the world that is like a prison. The only thing I’m happy about is that my parents left me good health as my heritage.”

Vladimir Smveinikov, who has retired from his post on a licensing review committee, takes exception.

“This man is showing false slogans,” he says, angrily shaking a finger at Vlasov. “He doesn’t show the interests of our working people. He is mixing up communism with the people who purport to be its leaders. . . . Our destiny is within the socialist construct.”

After a few more animated exchanges, the debaters move on, leaving in their wake a couple of Muscovite engineers strolling blithely, their hands intertwined. For these two, and many others like them, the May Day demonstration is a far less contentious affair.

“We’re happy because we’re hoping for big changes,” Svetlana Baranov explains. “It’s time for it. We’re not happy because things are moving too slowly. But we understand all processes in life take time.

“Most of all, we’re happy it’s spring. We’re happy because the gray skies will soon be lit by the sun of perestroika.”

The lighter side – at home

The weak, still-uncertain sun of perestroika and glasnost has not yet nurtured a complete transformation of Soviet behavior.

In public, Soviets remain reluctant to reveal their true nature. They still take care to avoid standing out for fear of appearing individualistic. Even hushed conversations on a subway car can court a wagging finger of admonition from society’s care-taking babushkas (Soviet “grandmothers”). Outside their homes, Soviets are decidedly stoic, often on the brink of appearing glum.

They brighten where they always have brightened. Inside their homes, before tables often blanketed with bottles of vodka and cola, and plates of palm-sized bread slices, cheeses and dollops of red and black caviar, if available. Sometimes there are radishes and the odd sprig of parsley. There also may be soups, usually beet-based, and main courses, generally chicken or fish, with scoops of fried potatoes on the side.

At such feasts, with friends and family, and perhaps prompted by a shot or two of vodka, the Soviet shows his gregarious side. For decades, these have been the circumstances in which a closed society opened up against those who suffocated it.

Old habits die hard.

Once the foundation of a pre-glasnost, underground-information system, word of mouth now is how people learn of new goods arriving at a local shop. The system, refined over generations, is remarkably effective, as evidenced by the crowds already massed where delivery trucks pull in.

Generally, Soviets know something about current events, albeit not everything. They are aware, for example, of independence movements in the Baltic States. Yet, when a Lithuanian recently set himself on fire in protest of Soviet sanctions, the state-run newscast reported the event that evening with the single statement, “A Lithuanian tried to commit suicide at Red Square today.” State-run television did not broadcast the May Day demonstrations in Red Square.

There also remains the legacy of decades during which the state hid huge chunks of Soviet history from its citizenry. As Karklit tells his American visitors: “You probably know more about our history than we do. I’m afraid it will take some time before we know the truth about our past.”

The Karklits, Dokuchaevs and Vasilkovs are not highly politicized people, however. Their kitchen and dinner-table debates concern not how they will overthrow the government but how they will circumvent it. Their grand scheme involves calling in chits, using their foreign and domestic connections to fashion joint ventures with the West.

Valery Karklit will soon leave his Agricultural Engineering post to take one with Unisport, an independent travel organization.

With Karklit’s help, Unisport hopes to challenge state-run Intourist for hegemony in the growing Soviet tourism industry.

Karklit and Alexander Vasilkov know the manager of Zagorsk’s only hotel. They will count on that connection to secure rooms for tourists. They will use other allegiances for restaurant tables and travel arrangements within the U.S.S.R. Through Karklit’s Western connections, they hope to arrange tourist exchanges with the U.S.

As part of the enterprise, it is hoped Vasilkov can sell his precious sturgeon and caviar. Igor and Helen Dokuchaev could find a larger market for their artwork. Some money is to be made by accommodating tourists in homes. Eventually, others will be cut into the venture, increasing the trio’s blat and consolidating their hold on tourism in the Zagorsk region.

Valery and Helen Karklit have traveled more than most Soviets. Their trips to Western Europe have provided only a taste of what they expect to one day find in the United States. Valery, at least, does not just hope his looming career in tourism will improve his station in life. He prays it will slake his thirst for things and people American.

Flipping through the Karklits’ photo albums reveals this fascination, born out of conversations with tinny voices over a ham radio. There are pictures of Helen in an aisle of a Western European record store. Helen in an electronics store. Helen in front of a fruit and vegetable bin.

One aspect of Western culture the Karklits especially enjoy is rock ‘n’ roll music, now firmly established in the Soviet Union.

Rock cassette tapes, once a black-market staple, are sold openly, and rock videos are shown on state-run television. The Karklits, like many Soviet rock enthusiasts, are at an age when many Westerners begin to outgrow the music.

“You have to remember that while you were enjoying such music in the ’60s and ’70s,” Valery Karklit explains, “we were asleep.”

The Karklits’ infatuation with the United States clearly has infected their friends, the Dokuchaevs and Vasilkovs.

Tatyana Vasilkov enthusiastically accepts a gift of a Seattle picture book one day. En route to a dacha belonging to Igor Dokuchaev’s parents, she immediately peruses the book. She shows only passing interest in photographs of the Space Needle, Mount Rainier and Puget Sound. But she gasps and stares at a photo of Interstate 5, virtually empty and glittering at sunset.

“This is in Seattle?” she asks.

“How beautiful,” Tatyana adds, continuing to study the photograph. “So clean. Look at the roads here – so many holes. I hope I can see your American roads for myself some day.”

In the Soviet Union, the roads to a communist utopia are being paved over with perestroika. For many Soviets, glasnost has revealed a new destination, one resembling, in many ways, the United States, with its smooth highways, Marlboros, blue jeans and dollars.

But what is the best route there? So many bends and obstacles remain to be navigated.

Some already have embarked on the journey. Some, like the Karklits, Dokuchaevs and Vasilkovs, are just farther along the road than others.