HERMES

MOSCOW—These days, being away
from here for three months feels like that
many years. The political landscape of the
Moscow I return to seems wildly different
from the one I left just last March.

Downtown, Moscow’s new mayor, Gav-
ril Popov, is already looking rather weary.
One of the most passionate advocates of
Polish-style “shock therapy” for the Soviet
economy, he took office last April ona wave
of rhetoric about tuming Moscow into a
“free-enterprise showcase.” Wags quickly
branded the project “capitalism in one city,”

- but the mood turned more sober when Popov
wamed the city council that they were going
to have to set aside millions of rubles for the
construction of soup kitchens while the mar-
ket economy took hold.

Now Popov sits in his office and muses
to reporters about the inadvisability of fol-
lowing the Polish route after all, and has
even joined the pop-
ular chorus against
price increases. Pow-
er may not corrupt, .
but it certainly seems
to interrupt.

Over in the Krem-
lin, a whole new in-
stitution — the Rus-
sian Congress of
Peoples’ Deputies —
has just wrapped up POPOV
its founding session. Boris Yeltsin, precar-
iously at the helm, is still very much a rebel
in search ofa cause and aconstituency to call
his own. Yeltsin gained his undeniable pop-
ularity — some would say notoriety —
through his bulldog-like opposition to bur-
eaucratic privileges in general and Yegor
Ligachev in particular.

During this year’s Russian elections, he
also played his personal rivalry with Mikhail
Gorbachev to the hilt. All of this strikes an
emotional chord with many Soviets who are
deeply suspicious of all traditional authority
and look eagerly for saviours.

However, it does not substitute for pro-
gram, which a politician in Yeltsin’s position
should be expected to have provided by now.
Yet he too has tumed extremely cautious,
backing away from his earlier talk of imme-
diate transition to a market economy and
lambasting Gorbachev’s own rather modest
price reform plan. On other issues he has
twirled more dramatically: during a visit to
Tokyo last January, Yeltsin declared to his
delighted hosts that the Kurile Islands ought
to be unconditionally returned to Japan.

Now that he’s president, he claims the
islands are an integral part of Russia. Things
like that make you wonder about the guy. So
too his curious fence-sitting in the midst of
current CPSU inner-party upheavals.

Though Yeltsin is a self-declared “radi-
cal,” he has given little comfort to his erst-
while allies in the Democratic Platform, and
shows every indication of waiting to see
which wind blows strongest out of the 28th
CPSU Congress.

Nevertheless, the challenges of office
may also be affecting Boris Yeltsin. As the
Russian congress ended, he spoke movingly
to the deputies of cooperation and concilia-
tion. “Life forces us to make compromises,”
he said. “Crisis and deadlock can be over-
come if we listen to each other. Despite all
of the variety of positions, we all have some-
thing in common, — the interests of the
peoples of Russia.”

Sitting in Canada these past months,
gathering my news of the USSR primarily
through evening television and the news-
papers, I have developed a much keener
appreciation of how perspective can be dis-
torted by 30-second sound bytes and glib
turns of phrase.

One problem is that most journalists (in-
cluding me) are by nature ambulance-chas-

6 * Pacific Tribune, July 9, 1990

| Fred Weir

FROM MOSCOW

GORBACHEV, YELTSIN AT RUSSIAN CPSU CONGRESS.

ers. News of crisis and disaster is sexy;
stability, continuity and process is not.

I was thinking about this as I watched
scenes of “panic buying” in Moscow on
Canadian TV just after Gorbachev’s price
reform plan was announced by the Supreme
Soviet in late May. Today, now that I’m back
wandering around the streets of Moscow, I
find the shops, if anything, better stocked
than they were last March and no particular
anxiety in the line-ups. Oh heck, strike that,
that’s not news.

My colleague Carl Bloice tells me he
went out in his neighborhood at the height
of the reported frenzy, and was disappointed
to find no evidence of panic buying at all.
Undoubtedly there was a run on grain pro-
ducts in some places when the price hikes
were announced, just as there was on
matches and salt last summer when rumours
wrongly forecast a shortage of those things.
(One woman in Byelorussia accumulated
almost a ton of salt in her cupboard, her floor
collapsed and a neighbor’s cat was en-
tombed in the stuff.)

Such problems are certainly symptoma-
tic of prevailing uncertainty and an inade-
quate, sickly market mechanism, but it is
beyond me how one American commentator
could conclude that “something like food
riots” took place in Moscow in May.

Here too we ought to take note of the
standard Muscovite refrain that the shops
are “empty, empty, empty,” as well as many

much more strongly-worded things. West-
em journalists are hardly inventing these
quotes, but the credulity with which they
report them is uniquely their own. I live out
of those same shops and understand that
Soviets, like most of us, are apt to express
their frustrations in dramatic, categorical,
often very exaggerated terms. I know what
they mean, I feel the same way, but it never
occurs to me to take everything they say
literally.

So I ask myself: why, during my recent
speaking tour, did I have to spend so much
time explaining to Canadians that, no,
people in the Soviet Union are not starving?
The distribution system is a mess, variety is
non-existent, shopping is hell, but at the end
of the day everybody has had three meals
with enough calories and nutrition to hold
them together quite amply.

I’m not apologizing for anything here,
you see, but I have travelled in the third
world, observed firsthand something of the
hunger and poverty that afflicts over half of
humanity on a daily basis, and I do suggest
that when a well-dressed, chubby Muscovite
starts nattering about deprivation the jour-
nalist ought to at least remind his/her aud-
ience that all things are relative.

Or perhaps to reflect a little more deeply
on the obvious contradiction between those
two standard cliches of Soviet life— long
queues and empty shop-shelves. Would peo-
ple really line up for nothing? There is a

Russian saying that renders this mystery into
its proper form: “To, shto ne videsh
v’magazinyakh, videsh na stolye.” Roughly
translated, it means: ““What you don’t see in
the shops, you’ll find on the kitchen table.”
Still, there is no doubt about it — Soviets
today are fed up with the old system, with its
charades and stupidities, and yearn for
something better. This is the whole point of
current Soviet politics, the ferment, the ex-
perimentalism, the adventurism.

Here, too, I have been faintly vexed by
the slowness of the Western media to grasp
that this is not all going inexorably in a
capitalistic direction. Perhaps some imagin-
ations simply go blank at the thought of
non-capitalist reform, or maybe they’ ve had
their ears too closely glued to a few oracles
of the Moscow intelligentsia, whose cult-
like fascination with the magic of the mar-
ketplace is as flattering to Western egos as it
is deceptive about the attitudes of the Soviet

. Majority.

Light didn’t even dawn on May Day.
Sitting in Toronto, I must have pored over a
dozen descriptions of the few thousand pro-
testers who tagged along at the end of Mos-
cow’s “official” May Day parade, waving
Lithuanian flags, holding portraits of Czar
Nicholas, booing and jeering at Gorbachev.

However, I had to phone Carl Bloice in
Moscow to get the whole, shocking story of
Soviet May Day. It seems that the first half-
a-million marchers through Red Square that
day were the trade unions of Moscow, and
they carried slogans that might well have
been calculated to give heart failure to Gorb-
achev’s current set of economic advisers.
The banners read: “No to unemployment,”
“No,to price rises,” “No to private property,”
and so on.

The realization is at last creeping into the
Western media that Soviet workers may not
be thirsting for free enterprise after all, in
fact might have no wish whatsoever to ex-
change the diktat of bureaucrats for that of
capitalist bosses or to give up title to what
they view as their historically-won collec-
tive property.

However, the penny may never actually
drop. I suspect that all phenomena under this
heading will be confidently reported as the
“traditional conservatism” of the Soviet
masses asserting itself. The news that Soviet
workers are beginning to think thoughts
which are far more radical and subversive to
the world order than anything a few Reagan-
esque intellectuals in Moscow can dream up
is likely to get stuck in the pipeline.

Deputies of the Supreme Soviet might be
usefully consulted on this score. Last month
they voted to hoist Gorbachev’s price reform
plan, and ordered the government to come
back with a better package in September —
one that protects the living standards of
working people and improves conditions for
the poor.

Compare this with the recent GST dec-
ision in the Canadian parliament. Unlike our
Tory MPs, who still operate by a thoroughly
Stalinist form of democratic centralism (that
is, vote the party line or get the hell out),
Soviet deputies expressly voted with the
mood and interests of their constituents.

Make no mistake about it. This is not just
about the price of bread in Moscow. Actual-
ly, most people seem to agree that is ridic-
ulously low and should probably have to go
up. Their anger is much more fundamental:
Soviets are fed up with having economic
schemes foisted on them, with terms set
from above. They don’t want to be manipu-
lated anymore. They want full disclosure,
they want their basic interests to be the first
priority, and they want to be an essential part
of the decision-making process. They are
finished with paying the price of other peo-
ple’s greed, hubris or stupidity. This could
tur out to be quite a revolution, couldn’t it?