Soviet Union: Bread, Cigarettes and Reform

By JOHN KOHAN/PERM

An excited murmur ripples along the ragged line of shoppers, snaking away from the tiny tobacco shop on Lenin Street. It is 10 a.m. on an overcast day in the provincial city of Perm. Many in the crowd, pressed against the closed plate-glass doors, have been waiting more than four hours just for this moment. A flatbed truck pulls up with a precious cargo of cigarettes. As two men begin unloading, the impatient shoppers surge forward. There is a resounding whack. A young policeman, standing in the truck, hits his billy club against the wooden side panel in warning. "He probably would like to bash a few heads," mutters a middle-aged woman watching resignedly from the sidewalk. "What torture they put us through!"

Although supplies are erratic, cigarettes and bread are practically the only major staples not rationed these days in this industrial center of 1.1 million, situated 700 miles northeast of Moscow on the Trans-Siberian railway line through the Ural Mountains. Salt, sugar, butter, eggs, macaroni and even matches must be bought with ration coupons -- assuming, of course, that state- run stores have the items. At harvest time, a shortage of sugar caused a near panic; without it, fruits and berries from family garden plots could not be made into preserves for the coming winter. In Perm, as elsewhere in provincial Russia, food and tobacco rate higher on the day's agenda than revolution. Young couples continue to lay wedding bouquets at the Lenin monument instead of daubing it with anticommunist slogans.

And yet the revolution has unquestionably come to town. When local officials met on the second day of the attempted coup to decide their response, some 5,000 demonstrators gathered outside in support of Boris Yeltsin. The timely show of "people power" helped tip the balance, and now the Russian tricolor flutters proudly atop the closed offices of the Perm regional soviet and the city council. Two empty plywood panels are all that identify the former Communist Party headquarters. But if Russian democrats hope to consolidate the victory they won over hard-liners at the barricades of Moscow, they will have to do more than hoist flags and close down provincial outposts of the Communist Party apparat. They must begin filling empty store shelves, building more apartment blocks, cleaning up pollution and saving military factories from turning into rust-belt relics -- in effect, they must correct the economic and industrial carnage of seven decades of Communist rule before the people's patience runs out.

Perm's reformers worry, however, that local governments, still dominated by communist apparatchiks, may yet stifle the revolution in the provinces. The only thing that distinguishes the Perm regional soviet from Moscow's discredited national parliament, they joke, is that in Perm there are no electronic voting machines. Radical reformers, in fact, want Yeltsin to expand presidential control over regional executive bodies and appoint his own administrative representative in Perm to see that reforms are carried out. Contends local political columnist Vladimir Vinichenko: "We must use some authoritarian methods to ensure the victory of democracy."

A key issue for reformers is the future of the local industry. More than 75% of the region's output is defense related, but nowadays local factories actively seek Western investors. Small firms like Permavia, a semiprivate stock company designing aircraft engines, show it is possible to spin off commercial ventures from traditional defense plants. But the prospects look bleak for salvaging "heavy metal" armaments manufacturers like Perm's Lenin works, once a key supplier of artillery to Iraq's Saddam Hussein. There is a real danger that social discontent among defense-industry employees, an elite among Soviet workers, will be used to foment opposition to the Yeltsin reforms.

No one can replenish the market or revitalize aging industries overnight, but the reformers can expand existing pockets of progress. A new Perm commodity exchange, employing 500 "brokers," is already taking over from the state-controlled distribution system, bringing together traders in chemicals, wood products and construction materials for regular auctions. Andrei Kuzyayev, the 26-year-old economic whiz kid who runs the exchange, says the present period of transition to a free economy reminds him of sand sifting through an hourglass. The time will soon come, he argues, when the narrow neck will have to be widened.

He has a point. The success of the Russian revolution in Perm -- and elsewhere -- will ultimately depend on dismantling state controls, not substituting new ones for old ones. As Grigori Volchek, a local economic analyst, succinctly puts it, "People believe that Yeltsin can solve the food problem, build more housing and modernize factories. All Yeltsin can do is give us our freedom. We must do the rest ourselves."