Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | My Russia: One Reporter's View of Life After Communism, page 3

COMCON, a market research agency in Moscow, sets the dividing line between lower class and lower-middle class at a monthly income of $350 per family member in Moscow and a range of $150 to $180 in other regions. That puts 15 percent of Muscovites and 5 percent of the rest of Russia in the middle class. Russia’s sputtering economic reforms have knocked many people below the poverty line. Even in Moscow, many senior citizens who have no other source of support but state pensions subsist on as little as $1.70 a day.

For an example of a family that has made the jump up into the middle class, I look to my friends the Tabaks. If their journey along the financial ladder were a movie, it would start with a scene in their kitchen, circa 1991. At that time, Tanya, Yura, daughter Masha, and their pet daschund Yeremei, lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in a rough neighborhood of Moscow.

I first met Tanya at the church she was struggling to restore from the damage inflicted by Soviet rule, which had turned most of the building into a rusty printing press. Tanya worked there largely out of devotion to the memory of her friend, Father Aleksandr Men, a priest whose prolific writings and powerful personality inspired many and whose murder by multiple axe blows in 1990 remains unsolved. It was thought to be a dark collaborative plot of reactionary forces in the KGB and nationalist groups who despised Men for his Jewish roots. The church was turned over to his extended flock in the summer of 1991.

Tanya and her husband Yura were brooding intellectuals, poor as church mice. Yura had just quit his computer-programming job at the State Statistics Committee, which he described as so disorganized that various colleagues played chess, danced, or wrote stories on the job. He could devote much of his time to his avocation for translation, as long as he was discreet about his real love: Bible studies and Jewish-Christian relations.

Yura is of Jewish background, but like many Soviet intellectuals, and drawn by the influence of Father Men, he had become interested in the Russian Orthodox church, all the while maintaining a deep involvement in Judaism and studying Catholicism. In 1991, he decided to try making a living doing what he loved.

The Tabaks’ apartment was a ruin of peeling wallpaper and leaky plumbing redeemed by an impressive multilingual library, paintings by artist friends and gracious hospitality. In the Russian dissident intellectual tradition, we spent hours in the kitchen, which was painted a ghastly turquoise, drinking tea and talking—inevitably, about the misery that was Russia.

Tanya spoke of her friendship with Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam who died in the infamous Gulag Archipelago in 1938, doomed for unflattering poetic allusions to Stalin. His widow’s memoir, Hope Against Hope, is a powerful indictment of Stalinism and a testament to survival in unbearable circumstances.

Every time I visited, Tanya would ask, “What are you doing in this country? Why do you like it here? Why don’t you go home?” in part because she was concerned that I had yet to finish college, but mostly because life was so depressing. But for all their gloom and doom, the Tabaks never considered emigrating, although they could easily have done so.

Simple gifts of chocolate or cookies thrilled them, but their passion was books. They would ask me to bring them theological books unavailable in Russia and thank me with volumes of Russian poetry from their collection. Then, towards the mid-1990s, things started looking up. Yura had his first big commission for a translation of Charles Colson’s Kingdoms in Conflict (© 2000, Zondervan Publishing Company), which focuses on the role of the church in society.

By 2002, the Tabaks’ lives had undergone many changes. With money Yura had earned through increasingly sophisticated translations and by borrowing from friends, the family had traded up to a spacious two-bedroom apartment with a big, bright kitchen. Ironically, the 1998 financial crisis that brought down banks and devalued the ruble helped the Tabaks. Yura’s translation fees were tied to the dollar, so he didn’t lose on the devaluation and apartment prices plummeted. Tanya now works for a “New Russian”—the nickname for Russia’s nouveau riche. She oversees a group of architects who build Sopranos-style mansions and imitation chateaux for New Russians. Her boss designs even grander country estates for the super-rich.

Tanya and Yura are still believers, but not churchgoers, professing an ecumenical anti-clericalism. They are depressed by the Chechen war, but see no way out and are surprising fans of Putin. Most strikingly, they have caught the home improvement bug.

“Did you see our couch, how it opens up?” asks Tanya, showing off their bedroom. “The only thing we need in here is another television.” Yura has other projects in mind. “We need to redo the hallway and the kitchen,” he says. They can afford $70 shoes, bought a $600 television last year and pay about $130 a month for medicine for their dog. Yura says they are not “formally middle class” in the Soviet understanding of a car and dacha to go with their comfortable apartment. That’s because they chose to use the money for their daughter’s education, which has included tutors and trips abroad to the U.S., France, Norway and Poland. And Yura admits to fantasizing about even fancier housing—Moscow is full of luxury apartment blocks—and hopes that rumors of a supermarket going up in place of the downsized brick factory next door are true. His fondest daydream is of someday splitting his time between Moscow and one of the medieval European cities that he loves, although both he and Tanya have a soberer view of the West these days. They are, for example, highly critical of what they view as the Western double standard towards Russia they say they often see on issues like Chechnya.

Nonetheless, in the Tabaks’ home decorating, Ikea and the West have won hands down over the few Soviet leftovers they can’t wait to toss. Tanya recently splurged on an expensive bedroom unit for Masha, now 22, and torn between pursuing graduate studies abroad in her specialty, the works of Vladimir Nabokov, or working at Ekho Moskvy—Echo of Moscow—radio. She hangs out with Italian friends, just got a cell phone and leafed through the latest Russian-language Cosmopolitan magazine during my last visit.

It’s hard to begrudge the Tabaks their infectious, newfound consumerism. Their lives were so hard for so long and they realize how lucky they are. “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and want to pinch myself,” says Yura. “Are all these things really available to us? I’m not materialistic, but I enjoy what I have.”

Terminally Ill or On the Mend?
The Tabaks’ biggest fear is one shared by most Russians: the lack of affordable, quality medical care in a country where technically it’s still free but everyone ends up paying something. The poorest patients in provincial hospitals bring their own bed sheets. Moscow’s wealthy pay several thousand dollars to have their babies delivered in safety and style.

The entire country is in the midst of a healthcare crisis, which is having a dramatic impact on its demographics. According to the latest preliminary census figures, Russia’s population has fallen to 145 million, down from 147 million in 1989. The mortality rate has been higher than the birth rate for a decade. Men live an average of less than 59 years. The World Bank estimates HIV infection at as much as five times the official 228,000 registered cases and warns that Russia’s economy may crack under the strain of treating destitute AIDS sufferers. Vadim Pokrovsky, Russia’s top AIDS treatment specialist, said this fall that at least half a million Russians will die of AIDS before decade’s end.

Dr. Aleksei Maschan knows all about the heartbreak and promise of medical care in Russia today. He is the chief of pediatric hematology at the Russian Children’s Clinical Hospital, a sprawling complex near the southern edge of Moscow. I’ve known Dr. Maschan since 1991, when I boarded with his parents during most of my first year in Russia. During the attempted coup that year, he was one of those who defended the White House and dreamed that the fall of Communism would lead to rapid improvements in health care. “Ten years ago I thought an economic miracle would happen right away, that we’d get all the technological help we’d need from the West,” he told me when I visited his ward in November 2002. “Medicine is the easiest thing to fix.”

Next page: Gena’s salary used to be enough for family vacations to Moscow and Leningrad. Now it barely buys food and a single train ticket.

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