Brother, Can You Spare a Ruble?

By ANN M. SIMMONS MOSCOW

Yuri Pronin sleeps on a rough plank door liberated from a neighboring apartment and balanced atop heavy rusting water pipes in the tiny Moscow abode that he has called home since last December. The room has no electricity and no running water. A dented tin bread box and several empty jars serve as his kitchen, while a cardboard box doubles as chair and closet. The decor is Dickensian: bare, paint-chipped walls, splintering floorboards and windows caked with dirt. Apartments in the old Soviet Union were none too luxurious, but this is a big step down.

Pronin's grim quarters are all too typical of the scores of derelict apartment buildings peppering the capital, where he and others live in squalor. They are members of the fast-growing underclass, made more visible by the demise of the Soviet Union and forced by Russia's economic revolution to live down-and-out in Moscow. Though many of today's losers would have difficulty surviving under any regime, the painful shift to a market system has pushed thousands of citizens, once able to maintain an acceptable living standard with the help of government subsidies and benefits, below the poverty line. Homelessness, derided by the communists as a plague of the West, is becoming commonplace. The old Soviet guarantees of work, housing and low fixed prices are gone, and the welfare net, designed to catch the rare social dropout, has sprung gaping holes.

Some of those falling through, like Pronin, do not even figure in official statistics. The Kaliningrad native moved to Moscow in 1989 after a dispute with management at the factory where he worked. He slept on the streets and at railway stations, and lived for a while in a tent city that was pitched outside the walls of the Kremlin for six months in 1990. "It's so hard to live these days. I am an invalid, and I have almost no means of survival," says Pronin, whose hollow-cheeked face and legs twisted by an accident he refuses to discuss make him look far older than his 47 years. "I used to be an artist and earned quite a bit, but I became sick. Under the communists, I could at least survive on the 30 rubles a month I got for my disability and on money from my artwork. We didn't live well, but we lived with peace of mind. Now life is a struggle."

Pronin's problems are complicated by outmoded city regulations. Since he is not a legally registered resident of the capital, he cannot seek help through the welfare system and thus is barred from disability benefits and treatment at city hospitals. Moscow's few free canteens cannot feed him because they have already filled their quota of selected recipients. Pronin survives by collecting tin cans and bottles and cashing them in for a few rubles to buy bread. "I don't have to have butter," he says. "I live on bread, salt and water."

Others who never expected to suffer must also learn to be satisfied with the barest minimum, now that the buying power of fixed incomes has plunged. Most of Russia's elderly believed in communism's promises of protection and neither understand nor accept the concept of free-market reforms. "It's not for us; it's for young people," says Antonina Savelyev, 79. "For us old folks, life has deteriorated." The widow of one of the Soviet Union's first diplomats in the U.S. in 1934, Savelyev lived at the consulate in Washington and worked in New York City for the trade mission. In those years, she had a nanny to care for her eldest son, and a maid to clean the family's huge four-room flat, leaving her plenty of time to carry out a busy work and social schedule.

"We were happy with life," says Savelyev. "We never felt we lacked anything, not even when we retired in the 1970s. With both our pensions together, we could buy what we wanted. Now that's impossible." Before this year's price hikes and the death of Savelyev's husband last December, the couple lived comfortably on less than 1,000 rubles a month. Now that food prices have risen 100-fold, the widow must manage as best she can. Three times a week, she eats for free at one of Moscow's Salvation Army soup kitchens. For the rest of her meals, she sits alone in a living room still adorned with Lenin memorabilia, eating boiled macaroni with canned fish. "It's hard because you have to chase food these days," she says, "and I don't have the strength to stand in line anymore." Many Russian pensioners have ended the misery by taking their own life. Even those with a job are anxious about the future. Labor officials predict that unemployment in all of Russia could reach 4 million by the end of the year.

Already there are 8,000 registered jobless in Moscow, and the figure is expected to climb to 60,000 by winter; 250,000 more are looking for work. Though the statistics are low by Western standards, they are unnerving for a nation whose citizens were once sure they would have a job for life. Highly educated women are bearing the brunt of the cuts, but other sectors of society are suffering too: soldiers demobilized from the former Soviet army, for example, are increasingly going on the dole.

Igor Melyantsev, 23, an officer in an army construction unit formed just over a year ago to complete work on a monument in Moscow commemorating World War II, fears he may be fired soon, since the newly independent republics have stopped funding the project. He recently went two months without pay, and his family survived on bread, milk and a few canned preserves from their emergency-stock cupboard. If Melyantsev loses his military job, the couple could lose their home. Because Melyantsev is straight out of a military training academy, and his present assignment was meant to be temporary, the couple -- natives of Crimea -- are not registered in their semiderelict Moscow apartment. The army pays for the residence, which has no hot water and is prone to electrical-power cuts. When this happens, Olga Melyantsev cooks for her husband and baby on a makeshift stone stove in the muddy, garbage-strewn yard outside. "In the past it was prestigious to be an officer and an officer's wife," she says. "Now no one needs us -- not us, nor our children."

The Melyantsevs might count themselves lucky compared to the Zharikov family, with nine children ages two to 18, two dogs and a cat to feed. Strapped for cash, the family has had to accept meals and clothing from the Salvation Army. Nina Zharikov is the only wage earner, bringing home 2,000 rubles a month as a subway cleaner. The family also gets an equal sum in government child support. But "every kopeck goes for food, and there's never enough," says the 37-year-old mother. "Even though I earned less before, we could still afford to live." The Ministry of Social Protection estimates that a family of four needs at least 3,000 rubles a person each month to maintain an adequate existence.

Zharikov's husband, Vyacheslav, 56, whose respiratory illness forced him to take early retirement from his job as a sanitary engineer, cannot draw a pension until he is 60. He says the couple might even have expanded their brood if it weren't for the soaring inflation that has come with market reforms. "We didn't know our life would come to this, that the system would change," he says. The huge five-room flat, for which the family pays 162 rubles a month, is in desperate need of renovation. Nine rickety cots, a small table and a few chairs are the only furniture, and a mixture of human and animal odors permeates the cracks and crevices scarring the walls and doors. "Yes, we are suffering, but we make do," says the father. "Maybe the government is doing the right thing; maybe things will get better."

That, at least, is what the new leaders in the Kremlin have promised -- and tens of thousands of Russians who are sliding toward the lower depths desperately want to believe them. But government forecasts of improved living standards by the end of the year may be far too optimistic. It will take more than a few months for the country's unprepared populace to come to terms with the economics of capitalism, and the government lacks the funds needed to ease the transition. The sad fact is that for years to come Moscow, like thriving capitals in the West, is probably doomed to house a large share of the destitute, the homeless and the unemployed as the painful price for the fruits of free enterprise.