Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 2 | My Russia: One Reporter's View of Life After Communism, page 4

To the untrained eye, Dr. Maschan’s ward looks modern and well equipped. Gorbachev donated $250,000 in 1992 and pressed foreign benefactors and the Russian government for $1.75 million to pay for improvements. Parents stand outside spotless, sterile German-made Steag isolettes, wearing facemasks as they comfort their babies lying inside the glass-walled units. But despite appearances, Dr. Maschan says that this place is far from being an up-to-date Western hospital: it has only one CT scanner and no microbiology laboratory, which means tests have to be farmed out. Soviet-style regulations enforced by the health ministry restrict the number of nursing staff he can hire, limiting the number of bone marrow transplants he can carry out—which is his specialty—and thus the lives he can save.

And there are more problems: medicines that didn’t exist or were impossible to obtain are now available in theory, but not always in practice, despite the dozens of pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Novartis, that have set up shop in Russia. Some medicines cost up to $250 a dose and require three doses a day. Volunteers from the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian—coincidentally Tanya Tabak’s former parish—help fill the gap, raising funds through a web site, www.deti.msk.ru, that draws donations from well-to-do Russian professionals and foreign donors.

The presence, in Russia, of foreign pharmaceutical companies has also caused many talented doctors, struggling to support families, to leave hospitals altogether in order to work for the higher-paying pharmaceuticals. Dr. Maschan, for example, makes only the equivalent of $250 U.S. a month. He put off marriage and children while his parents supported him financially through his medical training and early career. Only now, at 40, is he about to become a father, and he has finally bought a car. He splurged on taxis for years, anyway, and now public transportation has the added irritant of police patrols searching for Islamic terrorists among everyone of dark complexion—Dr. Maschan is of Armenian heritage—though they can usually be placated with a bribe to supplement their meager salaries.

Even taking into account the ongoing health care problems in Russia, Dr. Maschan will brook no discussion that “free” Soviet medical care was somehow better. “That’s a Communist lie,” he says. “I’m happy the Soviet Union collapsed. There was no medical care then. They allowed you to lie down in a hospital bed and die for free. We’re going to be spitting up this blood for a long time. Medical care has improved only because of open borders.”

Heartland on the Edge
The small city of Gai is near the Ural Mountains, just half an hour from the border of the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, now a foreign country. A bridge on the road from the airport crosses the cusp of Europe and Asia, although Gena Maltsev and his older son Stas were worried I wouldn’t see the sign because it could have been swiped by vandals to sell as scrap metal. Gai itself is a factory and mining town of 45,000 fallen on hard times; it has a Midwestern Rust Belt feel that begs for a Russian Bruce Springsteen soundtrack.

Gai’s young, conservatory-educated, jazz-loving priest, serving in a church unrecognizable for the storefront it once was, has taken up parachuting, a sport in which he’s trying to interest local youth in order to distract them from drugs and the foreign sects so feared by the Russian Orthodox Church. He’s also launched an anti-abortion campaign to help counter the population decline.

Life is hard in Gai, though food and other supplies are available, as I found out a few days after my arrival, on a walk through town with Gena’s wife Vera, a former Communist Young Pioneer leader. The weather was freezing, so every few minutes we stopped into stores along our path to try to get warm. In shop after shop we saw goods for sale ranging from French butter to German chocolate to Tampax and even Whiskas cat food. “You see,” Vera said, “we have everything in our stores, but people have no money.” Desperation, she said, has driven many people to drink.

I also noticed that, unlike Moscow, the only portrait of Putin for sale was placed forlornly among imported teakettles and food processors, aptly illustrating recent poll results revealing weak spots in Putin’s unprecedented support. The polling firm VTsIOM found, in late November 2002, that Putin’s overall approval rating was 83 percent, but only 33 percent, for example, approve of his efforts in “developing the economy and increasing the well-being of citizens.”

Gena’s income usually amounts to about 4,000 rubles a month (currently, about $125 U.S.). Stas, also at the mine, gets just 1,500 rubles. Vera quit her job at a kindergarten that had been affiliated with a failing factory and, at one point several years ago, paid her in eggs and flour. Now, she works as a hotel maid and steam bath attendant to earn extra rubles for younger son Roman, who won a government-subsidized spot at Moscow’s prestigious Steel and Alloys Institute, which offers internships in France, Germany and the U.S. in his major, metallurgical quality certification. He is his family’s hope for a better future despite a recent brush with violence in Moscow, where he was beaten up by thugs.

Gena’s salary used to be enough for family vacations to Moscow and Leningrad. Now, it barely buys food and a single train ticket to visit Roman. The Maltsevs are years from their goal of moving to neighboring Bashkortostan, Vera’s home, where apartments cost more than double that in Gai. But with all the talk of life being hard, Gena still says, “I wouldn’t go back to the way it was.” Yet he also admits to ongoing doubts about Russian democracy. “What is democracy?” he asks. “If I complain to my boss that he earns 30,000 rubles and I earn so much less, he’ll just say fine, then quit.” Gai’s bosses live in brick single-family homes in a neighborhood nicknamed Tsar’s Settlement, New Russian houses circa 1991 by Moscow standards, palaces in Gai.

Stas Maltsev has applied for a job in an Arctic region booming with oil and gold and the lure of a 20,000 ruble a month salary. It is his only hope of earning enough money for an apartment, he tells me before retiring to the living room to watch a new Sunday TV favorite: The Sopranos.

Ghosts
Ryazan is an old city near Moscow, with blocks and blocks of crumbling Soviet-era apartment buildings. I was first there in 1991, when I went to visit my grandfather’s cousin, Yuri Filippovich Lutsenko, a pale man, then in his 60s, slight of build and haunted by ghosts of a painful past.

I was stunned when he first told me his story—I still understood so little of Soviet life, then—especially as it dawned on me that he considered my late grandfather responsible, at least in part, for what had happened to him.

Yuri Filippovich was arrested when he was twenty for his involvement in an anti-Stalinist cell in Ukraine. He was inspired to join, he said, by my grandfather, who fled to Poland after the 1917 Revolution and joined an anti-Communist émigré group. My grandfather eventually made his way to the U.S., while Yuri Filippovich spent over a decade at hard labor, working in the brutal Arctic mines of Vorkuta, part of Stalin’s Gulag. (He was supposed to serve 20 years—a death sentence, really, since almost no one survived that long in such barbaric conditions—but was freed early and exiled to Siberia when Khrushchev released many Stalin-era prisoners.) He survived, in part, because of his talent for drawing. Other prisoners shared scraps of food with him in exchange for portraits he sketched of them, which they sent to loved ones.

Even now, living quietly in Ryazan, his life has not been left untouched by the consequences of political upheaval. In September 1999, after Chechen militants had invaded Dagestan (a semi-autonomous republic of the Russian Federation) in a campaign to establish an extended Islamic state, two apartment blasts in Moscow and one in southern Russia were blamed on Chechens, though this was never conclusively proved.

Next page: Though everyone seems to be trying to adapt to the new opportunities—and new dangers—in this new Russia, so much seems to be left half said and half undone.

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