Hardly a Power Image : Moscow--Long Lines, Shabbiness

It is almost 2 a.m., and the streets approaching Red Square are nearly empty. Two policemen, in fleece hats and greatcoats, stand with their backs to the wind. A fine granular snow has just begun to fall.

This is the best time to view the changing of the guard at Lenin’s Tomb--when the square is deserted, the tour buses gone and the empty sweep of space and the medieval architecture seem arranged as for a private showing.

Floodlights atop the GUM department store, across the square from Lenin’s Tomb, throw a bluish light over the dark cobblestones, the red marble tomb and the pink brick of the Kremlin Wall.

About two minutes before the hour, three guards emerge from a tower gate in the Kremlin Wall and begin a stiff-kneed march toward the tomb. Their rifles, bayonets glittering, are carried straight up, balanced, not touching their shoulders. With every stride, their boots smack the rubber mat that marks their path, and their free fists rise across their chests. In the light, their faces seem alarmingly pale.

Odd, Precise Movements

At the stroke of the hour, in a series of movements as odd and precise as a cuckoo clock, the new guards replace the old.

The two policemen wander away, in opposite directions. The snow swirls thickly through the spotlights and begins to coat the cobblestones.

Flying high over the Kremlin Wall, atop a shallow green dome, the brilliant red flag of the Soviet Union stands out against the black sky. Like the spectacle of the square below, it projects a dominant idea of power--power that is somehow wary and archaic, but power above all.

But the grandeur of Red Square, its sense of force, is not Moscow. On the contrary, most of Moscow seems to be falling apart, begrimed, shoddily constructed, dim, gloomy. It suggests not power but disrepair.

Crumbling Concrete

It is a city where it seems impossible to find an unwarped window glass, or concrete that doesn’t crumble, or a locally made elevator that doesn’t seem as though it were fashioned from old packing crates slapped over with cheap Formica.

One of the great surprises for a first-time visitor to Moscow is the general shabbiness of a city that is a superpower capital, for the very term superpower suggests at least some minimum standard of efficiency and maintenance.

It takes a Moscow newcomer only a day or two to realize why Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has come up with the idea of perestroika, or restructuring. The impression, not entirely metaphorical, is that if someone doesn’t restructure the place soon, it might just collapse.

Venture in the doorways of some of the old apartment buildings in central Moscow, and the general neglect is apparent. Light fixtures are broken, waste paper accumulates in the stairwells, hand railings have broken loose from crumbling stairs. Weary old women climb laboriously up five flights of steps because the elevator hasn’t worked more than six weeks out of the last year.

These are not slums, such as those encountered in the nether parts of Washington or New York or any other large Western city, but simply ordinary sections of residential Moscow. Yet the courtyards are often filled with trash, as if they had become communal dumping grounds.

There are streets no more than three blocks from the Kremlin walls that look as if they were lifted from tintype albums of Industrial-Age London that helped inspire Karl Marx with the notion that capitalism was doomed--streets sooty and overhung with sagging utility lines, half blocked by broken sheets of dirty ice, windows patched with bits of cardboard.

At the same time, all over Moscow, there is a suggestion of repair and reconstruction--signified largely by the great number of portable construction sheds and heaps of rubble nearby. Most of the jobs, however, appear unfinished, mysteriously and indefinitely interrupted, and the sites look as if no workers have shown up for weeks or months.

It takes a long time to get things done here. A Foreign Ministry official, a figure of some influence, marveled recently at the speed with which a team of German workers repainted an entire large apartment in three days.

“With Russian workers,” he said, “it would have taken six weeks.”

Moscow is a city that steadily evokes the ironies of Soviet communism, an ideology that enshrines the promise of an economy designed for the benefit of all the people, not just a few, but whose actual operation leaves the unavoidable conclusion that ordinary citizens are, in fact, the system’s last consideration.

Conditioned over 70 years to life as a sort of afterthought, the people are docile. They will stand in lines, sometimes for hours, for the most mundane of consumer products--shoes, ice cream cones, canned fruit, wallpaper--and utter no public word of complaint.

They go about their daily business on the streets carrying dowdy little cloth bags-- avoski, they are called, which translates as “just in case.” Younger Russians, perhaps more style-conscious, prefer plastic shopping bags, especially ones bearing the trademark of some Western product. But everyone carries something, “just in case” there is some find too rare to pass up at the head of one of the dozens of lines that the average Muscovite encounters in a day’s journey through the city.

Groups of tourists who glide down Kalininsky Prospekt, the main drag of Soviet consumerism, in the big tour buses on their way to Red Square usually look at the stores, set back about 30 yards from the street, and see a modern, uptown appearance. A closer look inside does not sustain the impression.

There is a gastronome --a food store--in this row of state commercial enterprises where, on one recent morning, the customers waited in a coiling line to buy two kinds of processed meat, something like the product Americans call baloney.

Out-of-Town Customers

Most of the customers had come from outside the city, where such products are not often available, riding in on trains and buses for the day’s shopping. Their hand baggage was piled in a great heap in the center of the floor, while the line slowly moved forward. A young man who had just reached the head of the line to make his purchase said he had been waiting in line for 3 hours and 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, behind the counter, two clerks worked with as much deliberation as they could muster.

The system works this way: A clerk takes the order from the customer. She weighs out the goods. She wraps the baloney--several whole sausages per customer, there being nothing else on sale. She writes down the weight and price on a slip of paper. The customer takes the slip to the cashier and waits in another line. The cashier adds up the total on an abacus, takes the money, makes change, returns the slip of paper marked “paid.” The customer returns to the baloney counter, waits in another line while the original clerk goes about her regular business wrapping and weighing baloney for other customers, until her attention is attracted by customers waving their stamped receipts.

While all this goes on, there are two, sometimes three, clerks behind the counter who are doing nothing. They stand together chatting. They chat for a long time. In fact, during 30 minutes of observation, they never stopped chatting and never did any work.

The idle clerks do not worry, for they are poorly paid and, anyway, they know they cannot be fired. This is a state enterprise. The management doesn’t care, for the quota of meat will be sold, according to the plan, and it matters not a hair on Lenin’s beard whether it is sold quickly and efficiently or sold this way, the way it always has been.

A dozen Muscovites--educated, working for the most part in white-collar jobs but all untraveled outside the Soviet Union--were interviewed randomly, and most of them welcomed Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost , or openness. At least, they said, it makes the newspapers more interesting to read. But they also seemed mildly amused at Gorbachev’s superstar status in the West. They shook their heads, almost in disbelief.

The initial stages of Gorbachev’s perestroika has brought painful adjustments, they said: Everything is more expensive these days, and there are more shortages now than before, possibly because Moscow is no longer receiving special consideration over the rest of the country.

New demands are being placed on them in their work. The demands are absorbed, lip service is paid, nothing much has changed, they said. They understand the resistance and perhaps even sympathize with it.

At best, they remain reserved and even skeptical of Gorbachev and his plans.

“This is Russia,” one of them said, “and in Russia, no one is in a hurry.”

Several expressed the view that Gorbachev was trying to do too much too quickly.

“Of course we are skeptical,” said a 50-year-old schoolteacher. “Every 20 years there is a new policy. People will go along, herded like sheep. But these people”--the woman was standing on the sidewalk on Kalininsky Prospekt, where scores of people were lined up to buy tins of crushed pineapple from a street vendor--”these people have lost their initiative. They’ve lost their dignity. They’ve had 70 years of this. They do not know anything else. They are not interested in perestroika . They want their pineapple.”

They want their vodka, too, and even that has become hard to come by, as Gorbachev has persisted in his campaign to sober up the country.

This reform, too, meets with steady, sometimes tragic, resistance. The Soviet press has reported--thanks to glasnost-- that 10,000 persons died in the Soviet Union last year as a result of alcohol poisoning--mainly the result of lethal bootleg hooch brewed in bathtubs and kitchens. It is said that at least part of the reason that vodka is in short supply in Moscow is that so much of the raw spirit is smuggled out the back door of distilleries and sold on the black market to bootleggers.

But the hours of sale have also been restricted, so that on Saturday afternoons, the crowds outside the liquor shops are rivaled only by the lines waiting in front of the shoe stores where a shipment of high quality footwear is about to be put on sale.

The clientele at the bottle shops is mostly male. They emerge from the doorway, their avoski bags clanking, and stand in small groups, inspecting the labels on the wine bottles, as if discussing the merits of the vintage. What they are doing, though, is checking the alcohol content: the higher the better.

The crackdown on alcoholism has had some effect, Muscovites say. There are fewer drunks reeling about the streets. Discipline on the job has tightened. A factory work unit can be penalized if one of its members shows up drunk--an application of the extra leverage of peer pressure.

But there is still many a lost weekend in Moscow, and the lines outside the bottle shops show no sign of disappearing. There is even a new nickname for them: “Gorbachev’s noose.”

The end of winter is not a time when Moscow has its best foot forward. The heaps of snow and ice, blackened over the long winter, hang on like determined dinosaurs, slowly melting from the bottom. In the parks, the trees are still bare, the walkways troughs of mud and slush. Although municipal workers--sweepers and shovelers--seem to abound in Moscow, little effort is made to clean up the parks, at least at this time of year, even though they seem a particular treasure to the city’s inhabitants, regardless of the season.

They are good people-watching spots. Through the daytime working hours, they belong mostly to women and children and the elderly. Strikingly, the elderly women--in their late 60s and older--far outnumber men of the same age--the legacy, it is said, of World War II’s terrible Soviet toll: a generation of dark-coated widows, in their scarfs and coarse stockings and sturdy boots, their broad peasant faces lined like the living history of 20th-Century Russia. They visit the parks and every day, without fail, light a candle at the nearest Orthodox church.

And there are readers in the parks, too, of all ages. Muscovites seem incessant readers. Solitary men on the park benches, rather than feeding pigeons or watching passers-by, sit turning their pages, oblivious to all but the novelist’s world. Baby carriages abound, and the young mothers, too, can stand for an hour in warm morning sunshine, one hand rocking the pram and the other holding an open book.

Writers, indeed, are the secular saints of Russia. In Pushkin Square, at the foot of the great poet’s statue, facing Gorky Street, are laid bouquets of flowers--50 or 60 per day is the average--and it seems notable that none of the ubiquitous statues of Lenin receive such voluntary, heartfelt homage.

Bordered on one side by the offices of Izvestia, the government newspaper, and on another by one of the leading movie theaters in town, Pushkin Square is one of central Moscow’s meeting places, rather like “under the clock” at New York’s Grand Central Station. In the hour after offices close, every space is occupied on the circle of benches surrounding Pushkin’s statue, and one can see a busier, younger Moscow.

Military uniforms are plentiful, as they are all over the city. They are mostly officers, with hats the size of banquet plates, their burden of rank a bulging leather briefcase. Young women, carrying their plastic shopping bags, wait to greet friends or dates, a few of them wearing big-shouldered coats of stylish silhouette--the kind that is rarely found in the shops but can be done up by a tailor for about three times the average monthly wage.

Footwear, though, is a bigger problem. Soviet shoes are serviceable enough but uniformly ugly, and Russians know it. On the streets, Muscovites, curious as to whether a passer-by is Soviet or foreign, glance quickly at his shoes for confirmation. All other dress may be ambiguous, but shoes are a dead giveaway, and Westerners are sometimes beseeched to sell them on the spot.

Young people, men and women, like jeans, “stone-washed” if possible. Wranglers are the current favorite, although counterfeits must often suffice. The latest style in male haircuts, calculated carelessness, seems to come naturally to Soviet barbers.

Pages of Tolstoy

But Pushkin Square’s most arresting display is not dress or style but the range of faces, faces drawn in to the capital of a country whose territory covers one-sixth of the world’s land area. There are women passing by, fine-boned, blue-eyed beauties in fur hats who seem to have stepped from a carriage out of the pages of Tolstoy. There are broad Slavic faces from the Ukraine, high Tatar cheekbones and almond eyes, faces as earthy as Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s and as dour as Stalin’s, dark-eyed Georgians, Mongolian soldiers in from the Chinese border--the full mix and panoply of 120 distinct Soviet nationalities. It is a mix that is sometimes troublesome to this country, but it is also suggestive of breadth and strength, a kind of human reflection of the silent power in the Kremlin Wall.

There is a Ferris wheel in Gorky Park. It operates even in winter, if the weather is not too bad, run by a squad of hefty women of middle age--one to sell tickets at a small folding table, one to tear the ticket in half, and two to load the passengers for a single, slow revolution. It is an old and very large Ferris wheel.

From the top, in the frosted sunlight of late afternoon, a rider can see a long way--out to the far rim of Moscow, where row upon row of giant high-rise apartments begin their circle around the city, hazy and miniature in the distance. These are homes for two-thirds of Moscow’s population.

From the top, too, it is possible to count six of the seven Socialist Gothic tower buildings inflicted on Moscow by Josef Stalin, an architect of terror whose excesses, now openly discussed here, went well beyond his crimes against the skyline. Yet his imprint, embodied in a scale and style designed to dwarf mere people, is visible at every turn, all over the city.

Even from here, Moscow is not very pretty, but the view from the Ferris wheel helps, if only temporarily, to shrink the gigantism and to remove for a minute the image of trash blowing through the park. And the women down below smile real smiles and bid the passenger a quick return visit.