Living

By JOHN KOHAN AND YURI SHCHEKOCHIKHIN

TAMBOV: PERESTROIKA IN THE PROVINCES To see how the reforms are faring outside Moscow, a TIME correspondent and a Soviet journalist traveled together to Tambov, about 260 miles southeast of the capital. Setting down their impressions side by side, the two found far more had changed than they expected and discovered a cadre of young Gorbachevs ready to carry out reform, despite the difficulties

Through the fogged window of the Moscow-Tambov express, the early-morning sky seemed so gray and thick that the horizon blended imperceptibly into fields of snow. Children on their way to school dawdled by a railway crossing, the flaps of their fur hats sticking out like ungainly wings. A settlement of wooden farmhouses with carved filigree windows swept by, seemingly unchanged in centuries."So, you're really going to Tambov," said a Moscow friend, surprised that I would be traveling to such a provincial and undeveloped place. "There's a Russian saying: the Tambov wolf is your comrade." I remembered his sneering tone as I stared at the flat landscape from the two- bunk compartment I was sharing with Yuri Shchekochikhin, a commentator from the Soviet weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta. So, you are heading off into the wilds of Russia? See for yourself how far the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev have gone. An image came to mind of perestroika as a stalled tractor, sinking ever deeper into the rich black earth of the Tambov region. It was a common Moscow view, as if nothing new could ever come out of the provinces.

Our taxi pulled away from the Tambov train station, spraying mud and loose gravel from the potholed roadway. The landmarks were typical of a rural Russian administrative center. A tank seemed poised to topple off the memorial honoring the heroism of local citizens in the Great Fatherland War, as World War II is known. A crane loomed above the construction site of the new Communist Party headquarters, just across from an imposing statue of Lenin thrusting his arm into the future. Political posters and slogans of a type that had all but vanished from Moscow could be seen on billboards and atop apartment houses.

When I told my mother I would be traveling to the Tambov region with an American, she got very upset. "Are you crazy?" she said. "Just think of where you are taking him. There's mud everywhere. You'll get bogged down on some road. There is nothing in the stores either."

My mother's voice conveyed a fear of foreigners that had been drummed into her over the years, as if every Westerner were a cia agent. But she was also concerned about how an American would view the region where she and my father had come from. My grandparents were buried in the town of Uvarovo, 60 miles southeast of Tambov. I had spent my early childhood years there, and returned to Uvarovo every summer as a schoolboy.

I had not been back since 1982, and was eager to see how life had changed in this region on the edge of the Russian steppe. Now, looking at the streets of Tambov, I wondered what was new in this city of 300,000. They were building new houses, stadiums and schools? They had built them before. The slogans were new on the posters? Even in the past they updated them from time to time.

During lunch at the Tolna Hotel, Alexander Kuznetsov, the deputy chief of the ideology section of the Tambov Regional Communist Party Committee, assured us that "all the processes of change going on in Moscow make their way to us in Tambov, if somewhat later on." We needed to be convinced. I made clear that both of us knew enough to recognize a pokazukha, or staged event, when we saw it.

The week before our arrival in Tambov, the drivers on two trolleybus lines had gone on strike, protesting the dreadful condition of the roads Tambovskaya Pravda, the local Communist Party daily, devoted the front page to a regional party committee meeting, examining the fate of those repressed under Stalin Elections had been held for a new factory director In the town of Michurinsk, 40 miles to the northwest, an ecology rally had been organized, drawing more than 1,000 people.

We jotted down these facts in our notebooks, and many more: the founding of a local branch of the anti-Stalinist movement, Memorial, the first reported case of aids in Tambov, the first Soviet-Finnish joint construction project, rumors that racketeers were moving in on local cooperatives. Late-night television had even come to Tambov, something we Muscovites still lacked. Then there were those telling words from a worker on the regional party committee: "We decided to do away with special food packages for ourselves so that there would not be talk about us having privileges that other workers did not."

I kept going over these facts, trying to understand something that has been at the heart of unending arguments in Moscow: Had the provinces come to life, or were they still sleeping? I made a discovery that surprised me: public life was bubbling along here. They were not just putting up houses -- new people were growing up.

There was no mistaking the mustachioed figure with pipe in hand. Illuminated by a brilliant spotlight, Joseph Stalin had come to life onstage in a local theater production of Anatoli Rybakov's groundbreaking novel about Stalinist- era repression, Children of the Arbat. When Stalin stepped forward to deliver his monologue, a chilling silence enveloped the auditorium of the Lunacharsky Dramatic Theater. "It takes great cruelty to tap the great energy of a backward people," declaimed the provincial tyrant. "A dictator is great who can inspire love for himself through terror."

Public Prosecutor Vyaceslav Kuchmin told us that about 100 local instances of Stalinist illegalities had already been reviewed. Not that Kuchmin was in complete agreement with those critics in Moscow who he felt "showed only the negative sides of our history" and drew too many "unfair comparisons" with the U.S. "We are the same people as we were then," he explained. "We can't just exchange this nation for another."

We listened as six members of the "opposition," as they say in the West, argued with a representative of the regional party committee. They included journalists from Tambovskaya Pravda, a professor and a college dean.

"We have no difference of views with the party, just with certain people on the city and regional party committee."

"Why didn't you come to us?"

"You wouldn't have received us. You only know how to swing billy clubs."

We had trouble understanding what the argument was all about until members of the opposition showed us four issues of their unofficial publication, called Sodeistviye, meaning assistance. According to an editorial in the first issue, Sodeistviye presented news that was not covered by the local party newspaper, "everything that Tambov citizens talk about in lines, while catching a smoke at the factory, in college corridors and in family kitchens."

"Why didn't you publish your material in Tambovskaya Pravda?" asked party ideologist Kuznetsov.

"They won't print it."

The longer I listened, the more amazed I was that this conversation was even taking place. Could you have imagined it ten, five, even three years ago! Who would have met with them for a talk? Wouldn't it have been officials from the local kgb?

When the opposition had left, party ideologist Kuznetsov asked John a question: "Tell me, what would happen if you spent the day working for your own magazine and went to work for your competitor in the evening? What would your bosses think of that?"

John admitted that he would probably be put on warning and then fired.

"Well, these guys from Tambovskaya Pravda are insulted because the party has given them a reprimand."

I suggested that the local party paper should give Sodeistviye a chance to publish some of its material in the party's pages.

Kuznetsov shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know We're also learning how to act now in such situations."

Inefficiency is so commonplace in the Soviet Union that we were piqued by tales of a dramatic transformation under way at the Lenin Factory in Michurinsk. The plant, which makes auto parts, had gained national notoriety in 1986 after criminal investigators broke up an organized-crime ring trading in stolen merchandise. Now we heard the Lenin works had been "leased out" to kooperativshchiki.

The brave new world of self-management was evident at the new Wheel cooperative at the Lenin site. The slogans hanging from the rafters read like proverbs from Poor Richard's Almanack: HOW YOU LOOK SHOWS HOW YOU LOVE YOUR WORK and WHAT YOU SAVE TODAY WILL BE OF USE TOMORROW. No one seemed to need the prompting. Workers actually tended to their machines, instead of congregating in the aisles or staring off into space. Output had tripled, pilfering had plummeted, and alcohol abuse had declined so much that the janitor no longer found enough empty bottles to make a twice-daily trash run into town. The 130 cooperative members earned, on average, 625 rubles ($1,000) a month, about 2 1/2 times the norm for factory workers. Production had begun to meet demand.

Lunch at the Michurinsk factory proved to be one of those seemingly commonplace occurrences that actually signifies a great deal about perestroika. We did not eat in a separate executive dining room, or in a side room at a nearby restaurant reserved for the special few, but in a lunch hall where everybody ate together: factory director and lathe operator, shop floor manager and watchman.

The chief engineer did not make a point of telling us that "we eat alongside the workers" or demonstrating for us, as guests, how democratic he was. It was all perfectly natural, just like paying afterward for the meal.

This may have seemed quite normal for John, but it was evidence for me that people no longer lived here the way they used to. Stalin began the practice of giving privileges to the leadership: special foods, dachas fenced off from those belonging to ordinary mortals, apartments in the best-built houses. Brezhnev expanded these privileges. How many hunting and fishing "lodges" were built and furnished with Finnish furniture and rugs so thick you could tumble into them up to your waist! This inequality in a society declaring equality caused great indignation.

Leaving the lunchroom, I understood that the management at the Michurinsk factory could no longer afford to live differently from everyone else. And I understood why: they were leasing the factory. They now had to account for every kopeck.

Ruby pomegranates and marinated apples, fragrant herbs and honey in the comb, slabs of homemade butter and mounds of cottage cheese, pig's heads dangling from hooks and hunks of beef fresh from the chopping block. The Sunday market in Tambov was a horn of plenty. Cooperatives and private farmers here had more varieties of meats to offer than you could usually find in Moscow. The bountiful scene seemed to deny reports filtering into the Soviet capital about food shortages in the provinces. Certainly, no one was starving in this land of the good black earth.

Not everyone wanted or could afford to pay 8.3 rubles ($13) for half a pound of smoked sausage or 10 rubles ($16) for half a pound of tomatoes. But the alternative was unappetizingly scrawny chickens, larded sausage, pickled fruits and canned goods available at state-run stores at subsidized prices. Still, consumers complained about the high prices at the co-ops. They seemed to believe ample supplies of cheap food were an economic right.

During our visit to the Michurinsk Food and Vegetable Institute, the future agronomists aired a few gripes and opinions about the Soviet "food problem":

"The issue is how many years you can rent land. We need a law guaranteeing that no one will interfere."

"Peasants don't exist as a group anymore. We have forgotten how to work the land."

"We have gone far in developing the technology of cybernetics and space travel, but we don't have proper equipment to dig up potatoes."

"We produce meat here in the Tambov region, and we send it to Moscow to be made into sausage. Then we have to go to Moscow to buy sausage made from Tambov meat."

This paradox of provincial life had even inspired a riddle. What is long, green and smells of sausage?

The train from Moscow.

We drove to Uvarovo, the village of my youth that had since turned into a decent-sized city of some 50,000. I discovered that the second secretary of the city party committee was Vladimir Selyugin, an old childhood friend. When I last saw Volodya, he had been working as an agrotechnical engineer. Why had he suddenly turned up on the committee? He told me that he was tired of Uvarovo being run by transients. He had grown up here, worked here and had no intention of going anywhere else.

I also learned to my amazement that Vladimir Razhev had been elected director of the chemical factory, after being fired from the same post several years ago because of conflicts with the local leadership. "The city party committee was against his candidacy," said First Secretary Vladimir Karpov. "We had another director in mind, but the workers elected Razhev."

It was funny to watch Razhev and Karpov needle each other over dinner. I knew for certain that several years ago it would have been inconceivable that Razhev would be named director of the factory against the will of the city party committee. It would have been even more difficult to imagine that a collective of workers would have the right to elect him.

Like the boy in the Russian folktale whose magical hat allows him to see and hear everything unobserved, I sat at the dinner table and listened to Razhev and Karpov. The exchanges about ecology and the financial obligations of local factories to the surrounding community crackled. But it was not the flow of argument that impressed me so much as the fact that an American was allowed to listen. Had Soviet officials always spoken so bluntly among themselves? Or was this a reflection of plyuralizm, a borrowed word slipping awkwardly off Russian tongues.

Here was a new generation of 30- and 40-year-olds who went unnoticed in the capital: young Gorbachevs from the provinces who had survived the Brezhnev years with some of their ideals intact. They certainly bridled at being cast as backwater party bureaucrats.

"The greatest brake on perestroika is not the apparatus here," said the soft-spoken Karpov. "It comes from the people. They still do not understand that they now have the responsibility to make decisions for themselves. They want us to bring about democratization for them."

Second Secretary Vladimir Selyugin was adamant about the environment. "You come down from Moscow to tell us we have an ecological problem," he said with emotion. "Don't you think we know this ourselves? You can go back to Moscow, but we are the ones who live here. Do you think I want my child to breathe polluted air?"

Toward evening, we walked through the chemical-factory housing complex. One food store that we went into was empty. There was nothing but cans of sprats - and packages of macaroni in one food shop we visited. "The store is empty," I joked. "There are just people here."

"The factory supplies its workers with food," said Selyugin, "but, all the same, you can see our problem for yourselves." Then he nodded toward the salesgirls wearing mink hats and added, "They're doing all right, though."

He said it, not worrying what John would think of a party worker openly acknowledging the existence of a local trade mafia. He knew that in the end, he was answerable only to those living in his town. He was not going to walk away from that responsibility, nor was he afraid of it. He had no reason to hide anything. The times were different. Now you could tell the truth.

But old versions of the truth could still be found. Pushing my way past a mob of women lined up on the Tambov pedestrian mall to buy yellow tights, I had stepped into a bookshop. On display were paperbacks from a series called Imperialism: Acts, Facts and Records.

And then, the great leap forward. An equally random visit to a bookstore in an Uvarovo housing complex turned up the unexpected: two copies of George Bush's autobiography, Looking Forward, translated into Russian. The shop manager told me he had already sold 28 copies.

The following night, when we started back to Tambov, our hosts accompanied us to the outskirts of Uvarovo, where our two-car convoy pulled over so we could say one last goodbye. All was darkness, except for the expanse of snow caught in the headlights. With lightning speed, plates of foods materialized on the closed trunk of one of the cars. A bottle of vodka appeared. The occasion seemed to demand a humorous toast.

"The inspection team from Moscow has now finished its work and will be returning home, " I said. "We have seen a great deal and have talked a lot about perestroika. We promise you that we will come back to see just what you have accomplished."

A joking reminder came from the group to keep the speech short. After all, we had only one glass to pass around. The hour was getting late, and everyone wanted a chance to drink na pososhok, a toast before taking up your walking stick, as the Russians say. One for the road, however rough and long it might be.