Then and Now

By STANLEY W. CLOUD

Seen again from the air, Moscow is unchanged. The city squats as always on the steppes like an ungainly old hulk, beached and abandoned, its Stalin-era spires so many masts thrusting into the gloom, and the nearest sea hundreds of miles away. Fair warning, neo-Napoleons! Even with glasnost, perestroika and the Pepsi Revolution, Moscow the impregnable lives on, isolated and forbidding, a dour reminder of what it means to be Russian.

On the ground it is much the same at first. Behind the hard eyes of a young passport officer lurk the ghosts of his country's history: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Lenin, Stalin and all those they once ruled, the entire tragic parade of persecutors and persecuted. And when the officer finally grunts his assent and one is readmitted to the Soviet sanctum, one still imagines great steel doors clanging shut.

Almost 20 years earlier, at the start of the Brezhnev era of economic stagnation and recurring rounds of repression, I was assigned to TIME's Moscow bureau. I took up residence with my family in an apartment block reserved for foreigners and set out to cover what was, despite the depressing realities of Soviet life, a fascinating story. Then, on a May morning in 1970, I received a phone call from an official in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. "Your work here is finished," he said. There were no accusations, no explanations, just "Your work here is finished," and a departure deadline.

Now I was back for the first time.

Despite the chrome and modern conveniences of Sheremyetovo International Airport, the old city quickly pulls you into her familiar, exhausting, yet not altogether unpleasant embrace: the slush and mud of the broad avenues; the air that smells of bad cigarettes, carbon monoxide and disinfectant; the monotony of dun-colored buildings; the occasional startling glimpse of a golden-domed church or pastel-walled czarist mansion; the dark masses hurrying by or huddling in their inevitable queues to buy what little is in the stores. Much more than merely familiar, Moscow today seems as immutable, as depressingly eternal as ever.

Soon enough, though, signs of change emerge. Traffic is much heavier, and if Pepsi has not exactly replaced vodka as the national beverage, it is widely available. Cooperative restaurants enjoy a fairly brisk business, at least among those who can afford the prices (lunches and dinners often go for $20 to $30 a person, without drinks or wine). Major hotels offer Western joint- venture seekers many distinctly unsocialist hard-currency attractions -- slot machines, for one -- while out on the sidewalks, better-dressed young people hurry by, oblivious to the stiff-knuckled old women sweeping the streets with birch-branch brooms.

And all the red banners and posters that once festooned the avenues and office buildings have vanished, along with their exhortations for workers to fulfill the latest Five-Year Plan and their dreary pronouncements that the socialist road is the road to peace. If the boilerplate is not missed, the color is.

But change has its price, though. Gaping cracks have opened in the wall of social "order" that once comforted the Russian psyche and justified Soviet ideology. Organized crime is so active that Mafia has become commonplace in Russian patois. The homeless are more obvious too, including provincials who have traveled to Moscow to buy or trade for food and must spend the night huddled in drafty railway stations. Elsewhere, gaudy hookers and teenage toughs prowl pedestrian tunnels, and beggars -- old women, mostly -- hold out quavering hands for kopecks. Black marketeers hustle even in Red Square, and on a green fence near city hall someone has neatly painted, in English, SEX! and ROCK!

Evidently Mikhail Gorbachev is willing to tolerate capitalist-style "contradictions" in his attempt to fuel economic reform with a dose of democracy. In any case, the heavy Soviet lid has been lifted, and the voices from inside the box -- above all, the voices of ever resilient Russian intellectualism -- are being heard in ways and forums unimaginable 20 years ago. If the democratic experiment has so far failed to improve the economy, it has radically altered the arts and the mass media.

In 1970 I spent much of my last full day in Moscow at the apartment of an "unofficial" -- i.e., banned -- artist, the late Vasily Sitnikov. A true eccentric who built kayaks by hand in the vain hope of exporting them to the West, Sitnikov scorned "socialist realism" in his art. His most serious paintings alternated between a touching optimism and a profound morbidity. During our afternoon together, we discussed the plight of Soviet artists, and I left with two paintings hidden under my jacket (in case KGB watchers were about). On my return to Moscow this year, I saw a fully sanctioned exhibition of "unofficial" art not unlike Sitnikov's and felt deep sadness that he had not lived long enough to see it.

Sharp memories of the brutal past were jogged as well by a new play, Four Interrogations, the story of an old woman unfairly charged under Stalin as an "enemy of the people." Before the curtain rises, the audience sits in darkness while voices screech Stalinist slogans over a loudspeaker. Then an imposing photo of Stalin is projected onto a black curtain. Finally, a spotlight sweeps over the audience, stopping now and then to hold first one person, then another and another in its sudden white glare.

Still, glasnost, seen from the queues instead of from the theater seats, must appear as little more than a pretty plaything for the rich. Up to 30% of Moscow's 9 million citizens live in communal flats. If there is any choice at all in the stores, crowded with shoppers whom shortages have made ruble-rich, it is between the shoddy output of state enterprises and the higher quality -- and prices -- offered by co-ops. "There is more freedom now, but life is harder," a Russian friend said. Reality is a daily grind: commuting from cramped flats to unsatisfying work, sending children to decrepit schools, trudging from shop to dismal shop in hopes of finding even basics like laundry soap.

Valeri Saikin, chairman of Moscow's executive committee and, in effect, the city's mayor, knows all about the curve of declining Soviet expectations. "Moscow is a very large city," he said. With a refreshing lack of ideology, he added, "But it's difficult to solve all the problems by administrative methods alone. We need more initiative by individuals and local groups. Many American cities have fewer problems because private firms help. Here, all responsibility is with the city government. We should have a more balanced system."

Saikin would like to see Moscow produce more of what it consumes. He does not, however, concede that mismanagement and corruption are to blame for economic failures. Chronic shortages, for example, are the fault of the 2.5 million migrant shoppers who flock daily to threadbare Moscow, which to them is a cornucopia. Said His Honor, whistling in the arctic wind: "We would have enough food in Moscow today, and no lines, if we weren't exporting so much to other areas." Let carping journalists and the grumbling public be patient. "Our shortcomings have been exposed," said a glasnost-weary Saikin. But patience is in short supply: Saikin lost his bid last week to join the Congress of People's Deputies.

If Saikin is dubious about glasnost, he is not alone. Many political and social conservatives, not all of them neo-Stalinists, are appalled by Gorbachev's program. Among the critics is Stefan Krasovitsky, a member of the Christian society Rus (the ancient name for Russia), who sees the new openness as "a program of absolute obscenity, youth-depraving, child-seducing pornography through the state-owned means of mass information."

However that may be, Soviet artists and writers who once relied on official decrees to guide them now must look to what Vitali Ignatienko, the energetic editor of New Times magazine, calls his "internal censor." Better internal censors than official ones, of course; and better the uncertainties of self- regulation than awakening one day to find that glasnost was only an Oz-like Technicolor dream. Should glasnost end, said Vitali Korotich, editor of Ogonyok magazine, "I will be destroyed, and we will be left a hungry, stupid, terrible country with a big army -- a very dangerous country."

As I was leaving Moscow, Korotich's apocalyptic vision was still on my mind. And, standing before another snarly passport officer at the airport, I found myself wondering if 20 years from now this young man, or one like him, will have taken control -- in the name of order and the purity of Lenin's revolution.