Soviet Reforms--Citizens Find Few Tangible Gains

“Change, change, everything is changing,” Lena Novikov complains, “but my life isn’t changing, at least not yet and not for the better. . . .

“The lines are still as long, the shop shelves are still as bare, our apartment is still as cramped and this job of mine is still as dull as it was before all this perestroika began.”

Novikov, 36, a low-level government administrator in Moscow, belongs to the vast majority of Soviet citizens who strongly support the goals of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reforms, the perestroika of which she spoke, but who wonder when they will see in their own lives all the changes that the dynamic Soviet leader has promised.

“In our press, on television, in our theaters and cinemas, we can see changes that were inconceivable four or five years ago,” Novikov said as she waited in a slow-moving line to buy vegetables last week, “but when we look at our own lives we wonder whether anything has truly changed--and can ever change.”

The hopes that Gorbachev raised in his first three years in power are still present, and his goals of a new revolution and a national resurgence continue to grip the Soviet people in a way that little else has for decades. But, paradoxically, the unfulfilled expectations of many are also bringing pessimism now and reinforcing the already substantial apathy and cynicism that can be deadly for so ambitious a program.

“We are with Gorbachev all the way, but what are we going to get and when are we going to get it?” asked Maya Kuznetsov, 40, an engineer from a provincial center south of Moscow. “We need the encouragement of results.”

The disappointment of ordinary people is evident not only in casual discussions among friends but in political meetings, in letters to Soviet newspapers and in opinion surveys, and their lack of enthusiasm could itself endanger the reforms.

Need for Breakthrough

“If we do not achieve something tangible, felt by everyone, in the next year or two, the fate of perestroika can come under threat,” Nikolai Shmelev, a leading Soviet economist, said. “We urgently need to make a breakthrough here.”

The focus of such supporters is now on a special Communist Party conference that Gorbachev has called beginning Tuesday to broaden and accelerate his sweeping political, economic and social reforms.

Gorbachev, they believe, must generate enough political momentum with the conference to arouse the enthusiasm of a nation that is as skeptical as it is hopeful and in this way overcome the conservative opposition to his reforms.

They are hoping that he will articulate a new vision of what the Soviet Union could be and how it will get there, filling the vacuum left by the failures of the past and recovering the determination that people here had in the early days of the Bolshevik Revolution under V. I. Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state.

Action After Rhetoric

But they also want the party conference, an extraordinary political event meant to galvanize the country, to map out a concrete strategy to attain those goals so that action follows the rhetoric.

“Gorbachev must show us that perestroika is different from all the other campaigns we have been through that have left us no better off than we were before,” Oleg Smirnov, 35, an electrician and foreman of a maintenance and repair team, said as friends nodded in agreement.

“We are all for him, and we want to believe that perestroika will solve our problems . . . . But, when you have been through what we have over the past 50, 60 years, then you don’t want to invest your hopes and energies in another loser.”

The magnitude of the problem is evident in recent surveys of public opinion here: Half to two-thirds of those questioned regularly say that nothing has changed in their lives over the last three years and that they doubt that perestroika will improve anything.

More Talk Than Movement?

“The number of pessimists has obviously grown somewhat,” two researchers from Volgograd reported this month, comparing surveys done around the country this year and in 1987. “They feel that people are talking more than they are acting.”

Although 87% declared themselves fully in favor of perestroika in this year’s survey, only 52% said that things had actually improved in the last year, down from 68% who saw improvements the year before.

“We think this is because our society has entered the second stage of perestroika , when practical steps have to be taken,” Felix Rudinsky and Vladimir Mazayev wrote. “As a result, some real problems have emerged; resistance from the conservative-minded has increased while certain rank-and-file workers fear many of the innovations and fail to understand them.”

About half of the 939 Muscovites surveyed by the Soviet Institute of Sociological Research for the New York Times-CBS News poll last month also said they had seen no tangible benefits from perestroika so far. Fewer than 40% said they believed their families’ standard of living would improve in the next five years, and 18% even predicted that things would get worse.

Other opinion surveys, a tool increasingly used by the Soviet leadership in an effort to democratize the country, have made clear what people’s priorities are: More and better housing; increased supplies of meat, vegetables and fruit; more fashionable clothing; more consumer goods of all sorts; improved education and medical care.

Serious Shortages Noted

The government’s report on production for the first quarter of the year, noting serious shortages of meat, dairy products, clothing, shoes and even potatoes, shows why people are disappointed in the results of the economic reforms.

The opinion surveys also have shown people’s fears of what perestroika may cost them in higher prices, reduced subsidies, lost jobs and tougher working conditions.

A divorced mother of two, for example, complained to the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda this month that price reforms, an essential element of the economic restructuring although they have been postponed, would force her and many other families into poverty.

“Even today’s prices are practically beyond reach,” she said, “and they devalue not just the ruble but the honest, hard work that I am doing at my job.”

And as fast as the cooperative movement has grown--letting people establish small partnerships and companies to run restaurants, operate taxis, do construction and home repairs and manufacture clothing, among other things--so have complaints that they are making too much money by working hard, concentrating on quality and convenience and then charging what the market will bear.

“We seem to expect that perestroika should bring us a better life but without cost to us,” said Sasha Polyakov, 42, who works with Novikov in a government transportation office. “We want change, but without additional effort or discomfort or risk on our part. That, of course, is a political and economic impossibility.”

Fair-Weather Backers

There are many “yes, but” supporters of perestroika-- people who support Gorbachev’s broad reforms but who want to ensure they are not hurt by them, that they do not lose what little they have managed to wrest from the present system.

So there are those who object to the campaign against alcoholism, to the drive to enforce labor discipline, to the layoffs of surplus workers at many enterprises, to the reduction of subsidies for food sold in company canteens and to the higher prices that have come with cooperative enterprises.

The objections have led to political demonstrations in some places and strikes in others in recent months.

“Of course, people measure change in terms of their own lives, and, of course, they are not satisfied with the results of the past three years,” Yegor Yakovlev, editor of the avant-garde weekly newspaper Moscow News and a delegate to the conference, said last week. “I am not satisfied either.

“But this is not primarily a struggle to put more food in the shops or to produce more shoes. It’s a struggle, first of all, to change our political and economic system so that it responds to all the people’s needs. . . . When we do that, the better life will come.”

To Oleg Smirnov and his neighbors in southwest Moscow, however, this sounds like just more politics, Soviet-style, and they are disdainful.

Will It Work?

“The guys at the top now were the ones who were on the outside before, seeing the problems and thinking of ways they could do it better,” Sergei Kiselev, 33, a quality-control inspector, remarked during a lively nightlong debate over the reforms. “What they say sounds good, but who knows whether it will work, and who knows how many guys are sitting around watching and thinking about what they will do if they get to the top.

“Every politician has to have a program, and perestroika is Gorbachev’s. If it works, he stays, and we win; if it fails, he goes, and we lose.”

There is appreciation, however, of the changes in the country’s political atmosphere, a new openness and democracy that make discussions such as this not only possible but daily events.

“Of course, there is a difference between Brezhnev and Gorbachev, between those times and now,” Natasha Balov, 28, a baker, said, referring to the late Leonid I. Brezhnev, the party leader from 1964 to 1982.

“First of all, we feel much, much freer; we can think as we like and we can say what we think. That is a very important change, especially for our intelligentsia, but also for working-class people like ourselves.

“We are recovering our dignity as people. Our socialism was so, so, well, so repressive that the individual counted for nothing, and this turned daily life into something primitive and horrible. . . . And this is changing--slowly, but still changing. For that we thank Gorbachev.”

‘A Social Revolution’

But cynicism is widespread, and it worries those supporting Gorbachev’s reforms.

“ Perestroika cannot really be implemented from above, but only by the people,” Tatyana Zaslavskaya, a prominent Soviet sociologist and a key Gorbachev adviser, said earlier this month. “We are working toward a social revolution, and the politicization of the people is not yet sufficient, their consciousness not raised enough for the radical transformation of our political, economic and social system that we want.”

People are disappointed, Zaslavskaya said, because the reforms so far were “based on a number of compromises,” because of conservative opposition and the intractable character of the problems that Gorbachev inherited.

“We have a national housing crisis that will take a crash, all-out effort to resolve by the year 2000,” Fyodor Burlatsky, a political scientist and another member of the informal think tank around Gorbachev, said. “We have shortages of consumer goods that, even if we built dozens of new factories, will take years and years to satisfy. We have a huge backlog of social needs--schools, hospitals, veterans’ homes, recreational facilities--that we should also tackle very urgently.

“No wonder, then, that people are impatient for results, but it is equally clear that paying these debts will not only require time but fundamental changes in our political and economic system so that it can begin to satisfy the people’s needs.”

Mobilizing Support

Burlatsky, Zaslavskaya, Shmelev and others in Gorbachev’s brain trust see the party conference not only mapping out the country’s political and economic strategy and forcing aside those wanting to slow the reforms, but mobilizing the popular support they see as vital to the success of perestroika.

“This is the turning point for perestroika, “ Zaslavskaya said. “Words need to be matched by deeds, and we need to take radical measures to ensure real, fundamental change. The people are waiting for results. There is no going back to the old ways, but radical--I repeat, radical--measures must be taken now to ensure we achieve our goals.”

Shmelev has suggested a number of economic measures, extraordinary by Soviet standards, to accelerate change and build the political momentum of perestroika.

To overcome public cynicism about the reforms, he said, the Kremlin might sell some of its large gold reserves and use the money to import Western consumer goods. It should also consider borrowing money abroad, both to import consumer goods and to build plants to produce them here. To raise capital, both here and abroad, it could sell shares to finance new enterprises and expand or modernize old ones. And to persuade farmers to produce more food, he said, the state should promote family farming again by giving back on long-term leases the land it collectivized more than 50 years ago.

“The development of perestroika will have a number of stages, and the highest will be a revolutionary transformation,” Zaslavskaya said. “But we will have to fight and struggle to see the changes become radical and revolutionary, and this will be a long and difficult struggle. The people are beginning to realize this, and that accounts for a lot of their hesitation.”