View From a Cab

By JAMES CARNEY MOSCOW

A standard Moscow taxicab sifts through traffic along the city's Boulevard Ring road on a mild, hazy winter's afternoon. The windows are coated with a viscous film of mud and grit, residue of city snow turned to slush. Wipers, old and misshapen, scrape slowly across the windshield, clearing just enough space for the driver to spot a stout old man waving his hand from the curb. He pulls over. A few words are spoken, an agreement reached. The man and his wife, both wearing dingy overcoats, fur hats and rubber boots, clamber in.

"We buried my sister today," the old man sighs from the backseat. "She was a veteran of the war." The driver, Artyom Dobrovolsky, glances at the rearview mirror and nods. He has a talker. As he dodges the ubiquitous potholes and noses ahead of less intrepid drivers, Artyom settles into conversation. Like most Moscow taksisty, he doubles as paid listener and anonymous confessor. He is a collector of stories from passengers of all kinds, a street chronicler of life in a fractured society.

"My sister's comrade, who lost an arm at the front, gave the eulogy," the man continues as Artyom starts up Prospekt Mira, a broad avenue leading away from downtown. "She reminisced about fighting to save the Soviet motherland. She sounded so old-fashioned; people stared at her like she was a dinosaur. But she couldn't help herself. She still believes."

"What about you?" Artyom asks. "Do you still believe?" The man's laugh is short, like a hiccup, revealing two gold-capped teeth. "I don't know what to believe anymore. Sometimes I think I should grab all the money I have, buy a pistol and take it to the Kremlin."

"Who would you shoot? Yeltsin?" Artyom probes. There is a pause, then another sigh. "I don't know. They're all guilty."

For the ride, the old man pays 300 rubles, worth about 50 cents at the latest exchange rate but a stiff 10% of the average pensioner's monthly income. Ordinarily, Artyom would have refused anything less than 600. "Sometimes I give them a break," he concedes.

For the past five years, Artyom, 29, has witnessed his country's whirlwind transformation from behind a steering wheel. He has watched younger clients supplant older ones, businessmen replace communists, big-time hoods succeed small-time hustlers. He has gone from working for the state to owning his own cab, a pioneer in privatization. He has seen his taxi meter rendered obsolete by the base law of supply and demand that allows drivers to name their price for every trip. Once fearful of foreigners, he has learned to seek them out, knowing, like all cabbies, that most foreigners will pay more. Through it all, he has listened. "Some talk about politics or the economic crisis," Artyom says. "Others get intimate. Sometimes I get yelled at. And sometimes, more often now, passengers can be dangerous."

Artyom points to the by-product of a negotiation gone bad, a gnarled red scar just above his left eye. Late one night last November, two young men flagged him down. They didn't like his asking price. After an exchange of * insults, the three spilled out brawling onto the sidewalk. At 6 ft. 3 in. and 211 lbs., Artyom wasn't worried. But he never saw the knife, never felt the blow and never realized he had been stabbed until the blood had flowed down his shirt sleeve.

The assailants bolted, but not before slashing three of Artyom's tires, leaving him stranded at 2 in the morning. Six hours passed before he had the wound stitched up. "I had to fix the tires first," he explains. "I couldn't abandon my car. It's my livelihood."

Looking for customers, Artyom cruises the city's main streets: past the hard-currency shops with their shiny Western signs; past the gargantuan figure of Lenin still looming above October Square; past the posh, newly renovated hotels, where single rooms start at $300 a night; past the countless sidewalk kiosks that peddle everything from cherry brandy to bikini underwear; past a heap of rubble and a ghost of a building, where glimpses of sky peek through the windows of a grand old facade; past Pushkin Square, where the poet's statue is dwarfed by a flashing neon Coca-Cola sign. He slows down to observe the trendy youths outside McDonald's. Brash teenagers shout, "Order! Order!" seeking commissions to stand in line for someone else, while beggars with tin cups, squatting on pieces of muddy cardboard, display swaddled infants and severed limbs.

Old truths (egalitarianism, collectivism, the police state) collide with and give ground to new ones (inequality, individualism, relative lawlessness). The collisions reverberate in the psyche of a taxi driver. "This country reminds me of a huge market, where everyone sells and everyone is for sale," Artyom says. "I understand the reforms are for the better, and I understand that everyone has a right to buy and sell. But the sight itself is repulsive. I see babushkis ((old women)) lined up on the street, peddling jars of mayonnaise, and I feel pity and anger and shame all at once."

At the spot commemorating Russia's fight to save Moscow from Napoleon, a hand beckons. It belongs to a young woman, perhaps 22. She is going to the center, near Red Square. Artyom asks for 500 rubles; they settle quickly at 400. She sits quietly, her eyes wandering the street. But Artyom draws her in with a remark about inflation. As a topic of conversation, inflation, which hit 2,200% in 1992, is like the weather -- except that prices change more often.

Soon the young woman and Artyom are swapping memories about how life used to , be in Moscow: how pedestrians would point at foreign cars like they were flying saucers; how a piece of chewing gum for a child was a treasure; and how, as she says, "if you weren't a Komsomolyets ((a member of the communist youth organization)), you weren't a person, you didn't exist."

Despite everything, they both agree things are better now. "It's simple," she concludes. "If you're willing to work hard, you'll have money and you can buy what you want." A new Russian truth shared, passed along with 400 rubles from the backseat to the front.

Other encounters come to mind. There was the lonely woman who took Artyom home and fed him soup in return for conversation. And the man from Kazakhstan, a former party functionary, who boasted about his new BMW and waved a thick stack of 5,000-ruble notes, as if to prove that this communist had a knack for capitalist enterprise. And there was the prostitute who offered to pay Artyom with her body. "I thought about it," he confesses.

Artyom's hands are stained from time spent changing tires and tinkering with car engines. On some nights, at home in his two-room apartment, while his wife and young son sleep, he scrubs his hands clean, sits at the kitchen table and writes. He is a compulsive autodidact, a proletarian committed to becoming, as he puts it, a "man of culture." After high school, he studied in a few vocational institutes, then served two years in the army in then Soviet Turkmenistan. Occasionally he went on missions into Afghanistan to evacuate wounded. "The worst time of my life," he says.

Artyom has just completed his first short novel, about a tormented young Russian obsessed with death and honor. He hopes to have it published. Over tea, his wife Katya says she hates it. "It's like a textbook for young fascists," she chides. Artyom raises his eyebrows in mock surprise, then laughs.

It is inevitable that the young, the children of perestroika and Boris Yeltsin's revolution, will decide Russia's future. The notion reassures. But Russia's youth are also being shaped by the instability and sense of fear that grip a nation trying to shake off its past. At Lubyanka Square, in the shadow of the former KGB headquarters, Artyom picks up a young man dressed in loose, faded jeans and an American baseball jacket. He is Russian, a waiter in a Moscow hotel, and a talker.

As Artyom adopts his passenger's obscenity-laden street jargon, the conversation develops into a diatribe against non-Russians who, the youth ! claims, degrade the city. Held out for special scorn are the dark-skinned races of the Caucasus region. "They're all criminals, mafiosi," comes the blithe assertion. Artyom nods. "They're not cultured."

Westerners do not escape the young man's bitterness. They flaunt their wealth, he complains, and plunder the country. "For Westerners, coming to Russia is like going to the zoo to see how the animals live," Artyom says later. "They stare and laugh and shake their heads in disgust. Some Russians resent it."

Three years ago, Artyom referred only half in jest to the Soviets lining up at the U.S. embassy for visas as "enemies of the people." Now the West lures him. He is working hard, driving long hours to save money for the trip. He wants to "test himself" for a few years abroad and then return home. "This country is dying," he says, "but it will come back to life. It has a future."

Artyom is standing beside the taxi, smoking a cigarette. "I am Russian," he declares, swinging his arm out in an arc that encompasses Moscow. "This is what I know." Then he flicks his cigarette to the ground, folds himself into the driver's seat and heads off to find another passenger, and another conversation.