REMAKING THE REVOLUTION : ‘Major Voyage,’ Gorbachev Says; ‘Only Words,’ Sasha Says

From Estonia on the Baltic to Vladivostok on the Pacific Coast, Mikhail S. Gorbachev has carried his call for perestroika --his word for revitalizing Soviet society--to a skeptical public with the fervor of a born-again evangelist.

“The main thing we need now is work, work work,” he told a crowd in Khabarovsk.

In Estonia, where he mingled with people on the streets of Paide, the Soviet leader reached out for a maritime metaphor: “Imagine our whole country as a large ship setting out on a very major voyage, having to face storms and so on. Everything must be in order on the bridge, and the crew--the whole country--must work hard.”

Not everyone, however, has felt the call yet. Down in the engine room of the Soviet economy, life goes on with few changes yet in evidence.

“When the workers at our place hear words like perestroika-- restructuring--they just sit and laugh,” a blue-collar worker named Sasha said with a smile and a dismissive shrug. “It is only words.”

Sasha, an all-purpose repairman in a Moscow hospital, is a conscientious worker. Unlike many of his compatriots, he does not drink on the job. He puts in extra hours when urgent repairs are needed, even though he knows he may never be paid overtime.

All the Old Problems Remain

Yet nearly three years after Gorbachev began talking about the need for radical reform in the economy, all the problems that existed in Sasha’s workplace before still exist. The same suffocating bureaucracy, the shortages of spare parts and skilled labor, the same cynicism and shabbiness still suffuse his hospital. Their persistence inspires little confidence that perestroika is more than just another empty promise.

“Our hospital,” Sasha said, “is a small mirror of the whole economy. The doctors are going crazy. Nothing works in the hospital, no parts are available and, even if there were, there is no money to hire anyone who can do this sort of work.”

Many of the hospital’s faucets leak. But when Sasha was ordered to fix them recently, it turned out that the central warehouse for plumbing supplies for the city of Moscow, a metropolis of almost 9 million people, was out of washers. It was also out of faucets.

“I ask myself, how could this be?” Sasha said. “I can go to my neighborhood store and buy the washers I need, so how could the central warehouse not have them?”

The lack of spare parts is only one source of frustration. Another, as in many Soviet workplaces, is the practice managers have of piling on added duties without commensurate pay, something trade unions in the West are quick to resist.

As Sasha figures it, he does three separate jobs at the hospital--as general repairman, as an untrained specialist handling dangerous metal cylinders of pressurized oxygen and other gases, and as repair supervisor. But he earns only one and a half salaries, which together equal the average national wage of 190 rubles a month.

He took on his third job recently when the hospital needed someone to supervise major repairs.

“Instead of hiring another man and paying him a full salary,” he said, “they took me and paid me only 30% of what I had coming. They call it rasshireniye professii-- broadening the profession. The slogan now for managers is ‘Economize the wage fund,’ and the one who saves on wages is called a successful manager.”

By this standard, the hospital director is a clear success. Under a nationwide system of calculating wages introduced last year--the only element of Gorbachev’s economic reform that has penetrated Sasha’s workplace so far--Sasha’s wages were cut by 5%.

He is not alone in this predicament. According to the manager of a state food shop in central Moscow, similar wage cuts have trimmed 5% to 10% from the pay envelopes of the staff in many Moscow retail stores.

In recent weeks, the manager said, workers in at least two food stores in the city’s October District went on one-day strikes, and the staff of the country’s biggest children’s store--Detski Mir, which, as it happens, looks out on the headquarters of the KGB, the security police--closed the store for one day to protest wage reductions.

“People in the stores are cursing Gorbachev for this,” she said.

In the hospital where Sasha works, one of the biggest problems, in his view, is a feature of Soviet society Gorbachev calls “departmentalism”--the narrow concern that bureaucratic agencies display for their own interests, to the exclusion of the general good.

Sasha, for instance, works at his hospital but, strictly speaking, not for it. His employer is a separate state agency that provides technical help to medical facilities.

“The chief of our hospital considers that we do a very bad job, and he has to sign documents for everything we do, or we don’t get paid,” Sasha said. “But we don’t work for for him, and our bosses say some of these repair jobs aren’t our responsibility. So there are these constant arguments, constant confrontations over whether we’ll get paid.”

One of the major aims of Gorbachev’s reforms is to curb the power of the government’s central planners, whose inflexible directives from on high are blamed for much of the economy’s waste and irrationality.

What the planners did to the hospital’s windows, however, suggests that they have not tuned in yet to what Gorbachev calls the “new thinking.” Because someone’s five-year plan demanded it, a crew from a state construction enterprise showed up last summer armed with air hammers, tore out all the window frames on two floors of the hospital and put in new windows, even though everyone agreed there was nothing wrong with the old ones.

“The old windows were perfectly good,” Sasha said. “At least we could get them open. The new ones are much worse. The frames are raw, unpainted wood. They’ve swollen shut and we can’t wrench them open.”

To make matters worse, there was a shortage of window putty in Moscow last summer, so only a few small nails are holding the big sheets of glass in place, and not very securely.

“We’ve lost 10 so far,” Sasha said. “They just pop out and crash to the ground.”

But the construction agency that installed the windows has no time or money in its plan to fix them, and in any case considers its job completed.

“They say their responsibility has ended,” Sasha said. “They got paid and that’s that. No one has the authority to tell them they did a terrible job and order them to come back.”

Responsibility for fixing the windows, in fact, has fallen unhappily on Vitya, the hospital’s new carpenter. Vitya is furious at all the extra work, for which there is no extra pay.

‘So Drunk He Was Almost Dead’

“Where would this money come from?” Sasha said, again shrugging. “I saw Vitya last week at payday. He was just fuming. And so drunk he was almost dead.”

Sasha’s hospital reflects Soviet society in one other way, in the special privileges for the elite that coexist uneasily with general deprivation.

Several rooms are set aside for use by patients of the so-called Fourth Department, the secretive arm of the Ministry of Health that provides superior, Western-style medical care for the nomenklatura, the upper echelons of the state and party bureaucracy.

Unlike ordinary patients, the families of Fourth Department patients do not have to bribe nurses to change the sheets or doctors to supply scarce, imported antibiotics. Nor do they have to bring meals to their loved ones in the hospital.

“What really drives me crazy,” Sasha said, “is the special food supply set aside for these rooms. There are fresh fruits, vegetables, meats that you can’t even buy in Moscow these days.”

With great discretion, the hospital staff put this food on a special trolley and cover it with a cloth when they wheel it through the corridors so the other patients won’t see it.

“These Fourth Department patients bother me very much,” Sasha said, “and I wonder, so where is perestroika? Sometimes the doctors come running to me shouting, ‘Sasha, Sasha, quick--a patient of the Fourth Department needs oxygen!’

“I say to them, ‘So? This person needs oxygen more than other people?’ I do not hurry.”