Russia Looking Into the Abyss

By DAVID AIKMAN ST. PETERSBURG

The bright sun of a northern winter can still turn the palaces and churches of Peter the Great's city into a feast of visual elegance. But beneath the sparkling exterior, the mood of the city's 5 million inhabitants is as frigid as the ice piled up in the Neva River. Slowly, less dramatically than during the 900-day siege by the German Wehrmacht in World War II, St. Petersburg is experiencing real hunger.

The city's scarcities became serious six months ago, say city officials, after the neighboring, newly independent Baltic states had already lifted their own price controls. That had led to an influx of entrepreneurial food buyers from those republics who took advantage of the cheaper prices to buy up Russian goods. At the same time, food supplies to the city from collective farms diminished after Mayor Anatoli Sobchak swept to power in elections in 1990. The bureaucracy, still predominantly hard-line communists, dragged their feet on implementing changes. While other Russian cities, including Moscow, could barter their industrial products for farm produce, St. Petersburg, with 72% of its industrial output devoted to military hardware, had nothing to trade. Observed a city tourist guide bitterly: "You can't buy a chicken with a tank."

Five months ago, city officials introduced rationing, which at least enabled most people to buy staples like bread, butter, milk and, occasionally, meat. But when Russian President Boris Yeltsin freed prices on Jan. 2, most food except bread virtually disappeared from stores. On the city's once elegant Nevsky Prospekt, shoppers at a small grocery store stared bleakly at cans of Finnish sardines, lollipops and American M&M candies. With prices freed, costs soared tenfold against an average salary that stayed at 400 rubles a month: sausage now costs 100 to 200 rubles a kilo (2.2 lbs.), and even sour cream, a Russian staple, goes for 130 rubles a kilo. Said a city council member: "Our energy level is lower because we are not receiving proper nutrition."

The sense of city-wide despair is palpable even among the frowsy tourist interpreters trained to talk up the city. "This is the most humiliating time the city has ever undergone," said one. "Even during World War II it was not like this. Our country is falling apart." When would it get better? someone asked. "When people learn once more the meaning of work, we will have food again," came the answer. Others are not so sure. "The situation is extraordinarily tense," said a city council member. "The old authorities -- the communists -- realize that this may be their last chance to regain power. We are hungrier than any other big Russian city." He and other officials who support Sobchak said they fear a possible local coup attempt against the reform-minded mayor, whom hard-liners have been trying to force out for weeks. The period of greatest vulnerability for such an act, say several city officials, will be between Jan. 10 and the end of February, when food shortages are likely to be severest.

Who would actually lead such a coup does not seem clear in anybody's mind: just an inchoate, presumably reactionary and authoritarian group referred to ominously as "they." Explained a driver: "There will be bread riots, and that will lead to a coup. And when the coup takes place, that will lead to civil war." But the real specter is chaos. Many of St. Petersburg's citizens fear that social and political instability caused by shortages will bring bloodshed. "When you see their faces," said a member of the city council with a sigh, "they are very tense, but that is because our life itself is so tense."