Summit City Is Economic and Societal Basket Case

“Moscow: how violently the name plucks at any Russian heart!”

--Alexander S. Pushkin

Anxious yet keenly hopeful, the crowd began clustering on the sidewalk outside Shoe Store No. 16 more than an hour before opening time, unaware that despite its tempting name, the shortage-stricken shop had no shoes to sell.

When, at about 10:30 a.m., the four-limousine motorcade bearing Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to the Kremlin raced by, sirens screaming, few heads turned.

In Moscow, the quintessential city of power, the powerless now have other worries--like finding a decent pair of loafers.

Scrubbed and a tad repaired, this grim, gray metropolis of 9 million souls will put on its best face this week when President Bush comes to visit. But even massive sandblasting and crash pothole-mending cannot cover up the wrenching, demoralizing changes that have occurred since the last superpower summit here three years ago.

“Honestly, I don’t like coming here often,” said Maya Plisetskaya, the celebrated ex-prima of the Bolshoi Ballet, when she was asked to describe her feelings upon returning home this summer after more than a year in Spain. “When you see it all from a distance, it doesn’t hurt so much.

“I don’t know who lives well in Russia. No one, I think,” she said. “Foreigners are beginning to understand something. But they are still rapturous. They come here and are put up at the Metropol Hotel--posh air-conditioned rooms, limousines with bodyguards--so they think everything is OK. And you don’t even have cheese.”

The city that will play host to the President of the United States, his wife and an entourage of hundreds is no longer just a national showcase but also an economic and social basket case after seven decades of socialism and the recent years of perestroika.

In the place that set itself the goal 20 years ago of being a “model Communist city,” more than 1.8 million people still hunker down in squalid, ill-lit communal apartments, where they endure the forced intimacy of common kitchens and bathrooms. For each inhabitant, obsolescent factories belch more than 100 pounds of toxins a year. Better known among their compatriots for their haughty, we’ve-seen-it-all air, most residents of the Soviet capital now seem to be prey to exasperation and gloom.

“Many Muscovites whose eyes only recently radiated political enthusiasm have become very tired of everything,” Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a modern counterpart of the 19th-Century classical poet Pushkin, said. “Life in Moscow has not been this expensive or difficult at any time since World War II.”

“Even in Moscow, we now live like beggars,” said Dmitri Dementiev, 21, as he hawked tourist trinkets on a downtown street to help pay for his wedding next month. A pair of slippers for his fiancee, he complained, cost 500 rubles, the same as a month’s rent for a nice apartment.

Under Gorbachev, this city that for centuries considered itself the “third Rome”--the heir of Rome and Byzantium as the crossroads of the civilized world--has been as humbled as the rest of the Soviet Union by shortages of chicken, glassware and shoes.

In what had been a pocket of relative socialist plenty, kept fed and clothed by the wholesale plundering of the countryside and other towns, even bottles to sell vodka in are running critically short.

In June, 1988, during the last Moscow superpower summit, Gorbachev performed a memorable crowd plunge into Red Square with Ronald Reagan. It was one of those marvelously symbolic moments that marked the dying days of the Cold War. But for Gorbachev to venture from the Kremlin this time to press the citizenry’s flesh would be an outrageous gamble--unless, of course, the KGB is summoned beforehand to cobble together a friendly crowd.

Why? Despite Gorbachev’s high government office and general secretaryship of the Soviet Communist Party, the national capital is no longer politically his at all. Earlier this year, Muscovites happily awarded huge majorities to his longtime populist nemesis, Boris N. Yeltsin, who reigns here as president of the Russian Federation.

Indeed, it may be harder to find a more anti-Gorbachev city in all of Russia than Moscow, as Bush may discover if he takes a morning jog from his accommodations at the U.S. ambassador’s official mansion to the nearby Arbat, where rows of wooden dolls mocking Gorbachev as a globe-trotting panhandler are peddled.

Aboard incoming Aeroflot flights, though, it is still possible to catch a bit of the old Moscow aura that, even now, spellbinds millions of Soviets from backwater towns and villages. A flight attendant comes on the public address system and says something like: “Dear comrades, we are about to land in Moscow, capital of the world’s first state founded by workers and peasants; a hero city in the Great Patriotic War.” She goes on to list the number of museums, theaters, sports fields--a compilation of riches to make the visiting Yakut or Uzbek believe he is arriving in a Communist Garden of Eden.

From such ostentation arises a resentment among many Soviets for the city that arrogantly refers to itself as “the center,” and to the rest of the country, Leningrad or Kiev included, as “the periphery.”

“Everyone looks at Moscow with mixed feelings of envy and hatred, convinced that Muscovites have been spoiled with an abundance of good food and other blessings while the rest of the nation has barely been scraping by,” Popov’s deputy, Sergei B. Stankevich, said. “In fact, Moscow and its residents have become a scapegoat for all those in the provinces who are trying to gain capital from anti-Moscow sentiments.”

As television coverage of Bush’s visit will show, the other superpower capital is no mirror image of Washington. Moscow is six times bigger, with 14 times the population. One of every 10 Soviet administrators works here, and by some accounts there are a million bureaucrats.

But it is also poorer, less cosmopolitan, and dowdy enough to merit the epithet “the big potato” awarded by foreign residents.

Some of the glories of world architecture are here, such as the thick-walled Kremlin fortress where Bush and Gorbachev will sign a treaty slashing the superpowers’ strategic arsenals.

The average Muscovite spends much more time in neighborhoods such as Teply Stan, a dreary expanse of shoddily built, look-alike high-rises plopped down amid muddy fields.

Asked what it means to live in the most important city of the Soviet Union, Valery Saikin, Popov’s predecessor as leader of the municipal government, once replied: “Moscow’s biggest advantage is that sausage is sometimes available.”

Alas, for the great majority of Muscovites, even that small hunk of the good life has vanished during the Gorbachev years.