IN THE THROES OF NATION-WIDE TRANSITION

Parliamentary elections are due in December, followed by presidential elections next June. In Moscow it feels like the end of an era.

[...] But the main problem is still the economic and social situation.

The effects of an ill-considered process of market reform are felt most dramatically in the countryside.

This report comes from Izmalkovo (the author’s own ancestral village) in the region of Lipetsk, a few hundred kilometres southeast of Moscow.

A combination of late frosts, heatwaves and a mass invasion of locusts means that this year’s harvest is likely to be even worse than predicted.

But food aid from overseas should not be needed : the idea had been mainly to help Western governments keep their farmers happy by offloading their surpluses, and set up in competition with locally-grown produce.

Apart from a few pockets in the frozen north, what the Russian consumer lacks is money, not produce.

The current collapse of Russian agriculture is explained primarily by disorganisation and the social crisis affecting the countryside.

Villages are not just the end of the line, they are also the prime point of friction between the old system and the new.

And the villagers are finding themselves crushed between the two.

On the same day every year a group of relatives, friends and neighbours gathers for a commemorative service in memory of Aunt Nastia.

But this year the mood is sombre. The table is as well laid as on other occasions, but this year it excites more envy than admiration.

As a mother serves her son, she says pointedly : "Eat, these folks are rich".

And a short while before someone had ventured : "I see we’re among capitalists here".

The old sense of uranovka, the perverse sense of equality even in the midst of poverty, has resurfaced with the crisis, and you can easily understand how the grandparents of the people in this village had accepted the fact of the kulaks (whether real or imagined) being "put in their place".

There is nothing capitalist about the Dimitrov family. If they have been a success by local reckoning, it is because the head of the family, Dima, is not a drinking man.

This was the quality which 20 years ago made him the most sought-after bachelor in the neighbourhood.

Suddenly, at the age of 25 —late by country standards— he went and married Galia, a woman from a "poor" family in the village down the road.

A baby arrived shortly after, giving the gossips a field day : they thought Dima had been a fool and this little upstart, pregnant by God knows whom, had bewitched him.

However, the sturdy presence of baby Marina (3.2 kilos) and some pointed remarks from her grandma eventually put a stop to the tittle-tattle.

The three of them continued living in this "village with no future". They resisted offers of housing in Izmalkvo, the administrative centre for the district, even though it was only 6 kilometres away.

Aunt Nastia would not leave her animals, and the couple did not want to leave her on her own.

Today Galia still works in the district post office, for a pitiful salary of 250 roubles a month. Dima, having trained as a driver and mechanic, is able to work part-time for the former kolkhoz, although he does not always get paid.

This enables both of them to keep their social entitlements up to date, and also gives Dima the use of the kolkhoz lorry.

All his energy is spent on a small plot of land, which gives them some financial independence as the region is known for the fertility of its black soil.

Over the years he has slowly put the finishing touches to the brick house that he started with his mother in 1972. They could then move out of the thatched wooden isba with its beaten earth floor, which now serves as a chicken shed, in the middle of a huge meadow with a scattering of out-buildings —hutches, cowsheds and other sorts of sheds— and agricultural machinery kept going with second-hand parts.

Dima is a prototype of the kind of private farmer that the technocrats, Russian and Western alike, dream of creating.

He loves nature and says he is not afraid of hard work as long as the authorities "don’t land me with a new lot of bureaucrats telling me what to do".

His main gripe is about the ideologues of privatisation who took over from the ideologues of collectivisation, and who know as little about the countryside as their predecessors.

Breaking with Lenin’s land reforms

There is a historic split in the Russian view of their countryside.

In more romantic moments they idealise the peasantry and community life in the village —the quintessence of Russian-ness. They wax eloquent about the way that nature, priroda, calls to people’s souls.

The rest of the time they talk about the village as a glubinka, a dump, populated with drunkards and layabouts getting fat on state money and living on the backs of Russia’s citizens, forcing them to pay high prices for their food.

This characteristic prejudice of the Brezhnev era has taken a new turn : the eternal drunkards and layabouts are now additionally characterised as stick-in-the-muds standing in the way of reform.

From the abolition of serfdom in 1861 to the Stolypin reforms in 1906, and then the collectivisation of the 1930s, agrarian reform in Russia has always been initiated in times of economic difficulties, but the reasons have always been political.

Yeltsin’s reforms are no exception : their aim since 1992 has been to solicit Western backing for the Russian economy, erode rural support for the communists, and break with Lenin’s land reforms.

Without consulting the people affected, they sought to create a nation of small farmers out of the ruins of the kolkhozes and sovkhozes. These were broken up into smaller economically non-viable units, but without additional supporting measures.

The October 1993 decree that made it legal to sell land handed out at the time of this scaling- down had no more effect than the subsequent 1996 decree, which created "32 million landowners" at the stroke of a pen.

The land-sale legislation was welcomed by townsfolk who had hopes of getting rich by selling their vegetable plots for the building of dachas.

Country people, on the other hand, knew that they had no money to be able to buy, and were resistant to the idea of becoming paid labourers —"serfs", as they put it— on land that had been bought by speculators or, even worse, foreign investors.

Even the possibility of passing on land as an inheritance was seen not as an incentive, but as a way of tying their children to the soil and reducing young people’s chances of social advancement in the countryside.

Since then a "land code" has been shuttling to and fro between presidential vetoes and parliamentary counter-vetoes, with regular diversions to the Constitutional Court.

On this issue the Duma seems to be in tune with the majority of the Russian people : in their historical heritage, apart from in Siberia, the independent farmer has been the exception and community farming the rule.

Most Russians oppose the idea of selling land as a "vulgar commodity".

Even reformers such as Anatoli Chubais, former minister of economy, in charge of privatisation, admit that it would be ridiculous to rule out all state aid for agriculture.

This, however, is the kind of opinion that he felt able to offer at the Sixth Farmers’ Congress (held on 1 March 1995), but not in Washington.

Everyone seems to agree that "land needs to have an owner" —but not about who that owner should be.

The first auctions of farm land on 5 March 1998 earned Dmitri Ayatskov, the governor of Saratov, a place in the mythology of reform, as had happened earlier in Nizhni-Novgorod.

But they took place in the absence of farmers.

The most sought-after plots consisted of less than a hectare, were located in towns, and were bought to build parking lots, petrol stations, private houses and a shopping centre.

According to Ayatskov there were American businessmen ready to invest $1.5 billion in the region.

Given what has happened with privatisation in industry and the energy sector, the fear is that agriculture will be the next victim of the reformers’ zeal : it may be consciously destroyed in order to open the way for foreign produce and large multinational agribusiness corporations.

But the Russian government chose to ignore the overall picture, handing out aid to individual problem areas but not modifying its projects for radical reform.

It even dismissed the idea of medium-term solutions, common in capitalist countries, such as long-term leases provided by regional authorities.

Nothing is done to encourage people like Dima, whose simple dream is to be able to farm the 24 hectares registered in his family’s name (eight hectares a person, plus his mother’s eight hectares which they were able to inherit).

Since he has no credit, and is at the mercy of the tax authorities if he sells something, and liable to a fine if he holds off and waits for better days, he has decided to leave his hectares to the kolkhoz. This, like thousands of others, has been transformed into a cooperative, with a juridical identity and authorised to make use of the infrastructures of the former collective farm.

The rent is paid in kind.

This year it was a 30-kilo sack of sugar, which arrived just in time for the jam-making season.

This is preferable to bankruptcy, which was the fate of some of the private farms created in the region in the late 1980s.

Others tried their luck in 1995-96, when it was possible to buy seed and fertilisers from the kolkhozes at knock-down prices.

But nobody wanted to buy their produce and having done the rounds of all the wholesalers they were forced to sell at a loss.

No guarantee for jobs or wages

The effect of all this was to wipe out the generation that could have produced the political and trade-union elite so badly needed in rural regions.

Since the ending of the communist quota system the countryside has been represented in parliament by members of the old local nomenklaturas or by a new generation of town-dwelling agro-technocrats.

It is significant that the president of the first peasant party, set up in 1991, was Yuri Chernichenko, a journalist from the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta.

There is nobody to speak directly for the millions of families whose jobs and social infrastructures sank with the demise of the collective farms, and for whom a private farm is a matter not of choice but of harsh necessity if they want to feed their families.

The bankruptcy of the small farmer does not guarantee success for the bigger units.

Danil Ivanovich knows what he is talking about when he complains of "Moscow’s endless caprices".

From 1979, the date he was elected director of his kolkhoz, he had led the life of a notable.

In addition to a comfortable salary and a chauffeured car, his job guaranteed him unlimited access to the kolkhoz canteen to feed his family, and to various storehouses for the rest (equipment for his house, seed for his vegetable plot and feedstuffs for his animals).

The 1986 law legalising family farms did not strike anyone as a revolution, since all the villagers already had such farms in all but name.

The women, whose double working day included looking after the family plot and the livestock, led a revolt. They threatened their husbands with divorce if they had anything to do with a venture that they called organised slavery.

The law of March 1988 which gave increased management power to the kolkhoz assemblies reinforced Danil’s power. From now on the success of the farm would increasingly depend on the personality of its president.

He was re-elected without difficulty.

But the electoral machine began to seize up in 1990 when the heavy hand of politics descended on the countryside.

In Moscow, the radicals were accusing Mikhail Gorbachev of trying to reform agriculture without first legalising private property and breaking the hold of the regional bureaucracies, which had always been more involved in the management of farms than they had been in that of industry.

In 1992 Boris Yeltsin’s "de-kolkhozisation" led to large numbers of collective farms being merged. With some deft footwork Danil managed to get himself re-elected as president of one of the new units.

With no fixed budget and with raw materials far from guaranteed, he had to play it by ear in a sector not known for its tolerance of improvisation.

As a structure, the farm had become shapeless, and the workers, who had become "shareholders" or "cooperators", had little idea what this actually meant - except that from now on neither their jobs nor their wages would be guaranteed.

He had no freedom in terms of management and marketing : all he could do was some creative accounting in order to keep part of the farm’s activities going and pay the wages. Cows were bartered for tiles, and milk for petrol, while livestock, feed stocks and machinery were gradually run down.

The 1986 law legalising the marketing of 30% of planned production and all surpluses made no sense in this cereal- and beet-growing region.

Even if they could have sold the produce on the urban markets, they could not have found lorries to transport it or people to sell it, and they would have been unable to resist the racketeers who invaded the rural regions in the wake of the new law.

"In those days we weren’t poor"

Danil never lost sight of his family’s interests, but he also ran his farm like a good father, aware of his responsibilities to the collective.

His post took on a new importance in 1993, when the abolition of local councils deprived the villages of any semblance of public authority : there was no-one to arbitrate in disputes or guarantee the payment of pensions.

From now on, the directors of kolkhozes were the only people able to secure, if not production, at least a kind of normality for rural communities.

Danil finally lost out in the elections of 1996.

Yeltsin’s team had gone round signing up anyone who could be considered a "community leader" in Russia, to persuade his followers to vote for "the right man".

Like the others, Danil had to explain to audiences who knew better that the reforms had improved their lives and that a return to the past would be disastrous - even though he did not believe a word of it and could not mention Yeltsin’s name.

Subsidies were hurriedly sent to pay back-wages, but were barely enough to cover what was owed.

The villagers voted massively for the communists, either out of conviction or cussedness.

They saw ballot boxes being tampered with right under the noses of the police, but did not blame them. After all, the police, too, had families to feed, and their jobs were at the mercy of the authorities.

In order to redeem themselves in the eyes of Moscow, the regional "democrats" in Lipetsk decided to shake up the local nomenklatura which, in their view, had paved the way for the communist victory.

Elections were held for new kolkhoz directors and this time Danil was defeated.

For two years he has vegÉtated, waiting for retirement and his pension of 388.08 roubles a month. This comes via a certificate he shows you with irony, which declares that he has twice been a Hero of Labour.

His only joy is that his eldest daughter made a good marriage - to a businessman.

When she returns home from Voronezh, dressed like a top-class model, wearing (real) jewels and driving a metallic-grey Volvo, he has his moment of revenge : the official who orchestrated his sacking can boast of no such thing.

The official’s own little treasure, his grand-daughter, carefully nurtured as an only child thanks to an IUD imported from Germany, had been kept well away from the locals.

It was bad enough that his mother, born of the lesser nomenklatura (her father was a trade union leader and her mother a head mistress), had married the son of a truck driver.

There was no question of letting anything like that happen with the grand-daughter.

While she waited for the time to come to go to university in Lipetsk —and the prospects of a decent husband— the grandparents even bought her a video in the hope it would stop her running into bad company at the local community centre.

No such luck.

The girl met a young electrician with neither family nor prospects.

They had to marry her —once they had found him a white collar job.

Now they just hope she will not have too many children.

For Shura, such concerns about status are a joke. She has just sold her last pig because she cannot afford to pay for its feed.

Nowadays the discussions of the late 1980s, when the family would sit around talking about what car to buy, seem unreal.

In 1991 the first rouble crisis swallowed up most of their savings and put an end to car discussions.

In 1998 the second rouble crisis ate up what was left.

Since they didn’t trust the private banks, they had put their last remaining savings into the state savings bank.

In August 1998 accounts were frozen and when they finally managed to retrieve their money, it was losing value by the hour.

Until last spring her husband used to turn up every day at work, just in case.

By this means, although there was actually no work, he kept his right to social entitlements and a modicum of dignity.

They were also guaranteed access to supplies of seed, fodder, flour and other inputs which have always been the sine qua non of family farming.

Now, however, Vitia has joined the group of ex-kolkhoz workers and local sausage factory workers who wander from house to house, drunk even in the middle of the day.

Like the miners, the "kolkhozians" were a crucial part of Soviet mythology. Workers were seen as soldiers and their work as a way of defending their country.

When harvest time came, tractor drivers and truck drivers would be fired with a quasi-religious fever and say things like "This is the bread for the coming year we are harvesting."

Needless to say, the enthusiasm was short-lived and everybody can remember the bureaucratic absurdities of it all. But at least, as Vitia says, "in those days we counted for something".

His nostalgia for the Brezhnev era is, as often happens, a nostalgia for the days of his youth. He did all the usual things : building his house in 1975, on land and with materials given by the local authority, buying his first consumer goods — a television, fridge and furniture.

In 1999, like so many other rural families, he is living on the money earned by his wife.

Women used to have a monopoly of relatively unskilled jobs in agriculture and the tertiary sector.

This sector has been less affected by the crisis, and still pays regularly.

But competition is intense, and last October Shura was asked to stand down from her job in accounting to make way for a younger woman who had proper qualifications.

She could have got an equivalent vocational certificate with her 20 years’ experience in the job, but it would have cost almost two months’ wages at a time when every rouble counted.

In the end, a former colleague took pity on her and offered her a three-year contract so she could work out the remaining time before her pension, though on a lower salary.

When she talks about her life, it is in the past tense, in that very Russian way of remembering only the good times.

Like her friends she spends her evenings on her own in front of the TV, overdosing on South American soaps.

If she happens on a programme talking about politics she switches channels.

She voted for the communists because "in those days we weren’t poor," but she says she won’t be voting again.

On evenings when nostalgia creeps up on her, she talks about a gentle cultivated man whom she once met during a stay at one of those rest homes which were the stuff of romance for millions of Soviet citizens.

They lost touch in the end, because even the mail is indiscreet in a village where everyone knows everything and the post lady has an eagle eye.

We are a long way from the 1980s when she had imagined a rosy future for her children.

In order to keep a young and educated population in the countryside, Gorbachev had embarked on a programme of investment in the rural regions.

The results were spectacular here (a new hospital, refurbishment of the maternity hospital and the community centre, and nice new Ikarus buses from Hungary to replace the area’s old broken-down fleet).

For the young of the 1980s these were improvements equivalent to what tarmac roads and the installation of gas had been for their parents in Brezhnev’s day, and to their grandparents’ right to a pension under Khrushchev.

When they came back from military service, young men were welcomed into the kolkhozes and small local businesses with open arms.

Girls were no longer so eager to flee the country life, even if you live in gumboots all year round.

Enough for a kilo of sweets

Shura’s eldest son Yura, aged 25, has done the lot : a mechanic’s diploma, military service, a job at the end of it, a motorbike and, after taking some time out (a new concept here), marriage and a baby.

But in 1999, if he stays in the village, it is mainly because he has no choice.

Life is even harder in town, and jobs are short-lived and hard to come by. If you need proof, look at the victims of economic reforms who are flooding back to the villages —pensioners coming to join a brother or sister so as to survive by pooling their pensions and growing their own food ; couples in which both partners have lost their jobs ; "forced migrants" from Crimea and Kazakhstan, etc.

Already Yura is coming out with the familiar Russian refrain : "things will get better soon."

It is true that the situation has improved since the economic collapse of 1992-95.

Services that were suspended then are available again.

The fields may still be overrun with thistles and the forest encroaching on the grasslands, but at least a new kolkhoz has re-started milk production.

The old community doctor never returned to his post, and the only replacement that could be found was an Azeri GP reckoned rather too free with the scalpel, but at least there are supplies of medicines.

On Thursdays the markets are stocked with all the produce that used to be quite unobtainable — even if now nobody can afford to buy the stuff.

One day, Yura says, he will start a farm, and together with his cousin he will set up a small canning plant.

Meanwhile he is earning enough to be able to buy his little brother a kilo of sweets once in a while —at 50 roubles a time— the equivalent of a week’s pension.