In a Shabby Courtyard--No Real Change Is Expected : Reaction: Turmoil in Moscow has little impact on the lives of ordinary people.

A jagged, listing fence pieced together from scrap wood does a poor job of hiding the construction debris that has littered Galina Kemova’s neighborhood since the slipshod high-rises were built in the area a decade ago. It’s nobody’s job to clean up the courtyard of the nameless settlement on Vasiliev Island, sandwiched between a bus-building works and a repair yard for foreign cars. So, for 10 years, nobody has bothered to clean it.

The nearby shoe repair enterprise where Kemova works with a studied languor is in much the same shape. The dank, brick entryway reeks of urine; the glass of the sole window guiding a customer to the second-floor shop is smudged with soot where it isn’t broken. It’s nobody’s job to keep the neighborhood “trade center” tidy, so for as long as it has been open, nobody has tended it.

The shabby courtyard, overgrown lawns and ramshackle shopping center are a depressing mirror on the lives of the proletariat in this Leningrad suburb. In these neglected open spaces between home and factory, Soviet workers are expected to run their errands, commune with their neighbors and find some escape.

“I don’t expect anything to change in my lifetime,” grumbles Kemova, 53, gesturing around her cluttered workplace and quickly spotting an old gripe. “Why can’t these windows be opened up, as I’ve begged the trade center administration for years? We could do with some air and light in this tomb!”

The nether world between reform and prosperity has alienated Soviet clerks and hard-hats from the political hubbub in Moscow. Those who people the prefabricated concrete monstrosities in neighborhoods like Vasiliev Island have decided to tune out on events until they see some tangible evidence that the latest revolution will mean real change.

“We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about politics,” says Pavel Pavlov, as he installs a new fuel pump in a friend’s Lada in the same all-purpose courtyard where Kemova steps out for her break. “Our politics are in that stroller over there.”

He refers to 1-year-old Pavlik, the son who has inspired his new ideology of survival. “Good thing I don’t drink or we would never get by,” jokes the 30-year-old proud father.

Pavlov recently gave up his job as a state driver to live by his own hands doing odd jobs and repairs. It was time, he says, to stop waiting for the Soviet system to change around him and to provide for his family as best he could.

He laments the cost of car parts on the black market, the only place where they are available. “This fuel pump cost 200 rubles. That’s a month’s salary for a lot of people,” Pavlov says. “I don’t know what it would cost in a state store, because I’ve never seen one there.”

Pavlov and his wife, Natasha, a nursing student on post-childbirth leave, have no grand expectations for life, an outlook they say is the best hedge against disenchantment. “We want a second child, some day when we can afford it, and a good apartment where we can live as a family,” says Natasha, hands spread is a gesture that says “Is this so much to ask?”

She doesn’t like to predict how many years it will be before her simple dreams are fulfilled. “It doesn’t pay to get all worked up about things you can’t change,” she says with more pragmatism than resignation.

Like most young Soviet couples, the Pavlovs must live with their parents. Husband, wife and baby share a single-room apartment with Natasha’s mother. “Our big dream is to buy a Chevrolet,” says Natasha, giggling at what today seems like a frivolous fantasy.

For Kemova, the frustrations of the day focus on the frumpy conditions in which she must work. Behind the scuffed counter where sullen customers hand over their worn footwear is a bank of windows covered over with plywood that has soaked up the shop’s grit and old-shoe smell like a sponge.

“But no! The windows have been boarded over for a reason, they say!” Kemova goes on with her diatribe about a life steeped in bureaucracy. “No one remembers what the reason is, but they will stay closed just the same because no one can change the system!”

She unleashes a derisive hoot and a dismissive shake of her bulk when asked if the recent coup attempt in the Kremlin or the unraveling of Communist power make a difference in the well-being of working people.

“Look at this place--this equipment is from the Stalin era!” she complains, thumping first a dented metal tray holding blackened hardware, then a resoling machine powered by a treadle. “They want to privatize this shop, but what’s to privatize? No one is going to buy such garbage, certainly not for the 10,000 rubles they are asking for it! Who has that kind of money?”

Yuri Shvalov knows. The 33-year-old electrician dashing about the trade center’s littered courtyard says it is the Mafiosi spawned of perestroika who have become rich at the proletariat’s expense.

“What we need is a new dictator--I think Stalin had the right idea about how to keep society in line,” Shvalov insists, giving voice to a concern many Soviet workers share about the breakdown of order that has come with reform. “I’m not saying it should be dictatorship without democracy, but something has to be done.”

He may preach allegiance to strong-arm leadership, but like most working-class Soviets, what he practices is a contradiction. His 450-ruble salary, he claims, is woefully insufficient to support his wife and two children. So taking advantage of the looser system in place in the name of perestroika, he moonlights as an electronics repairman and brings in twice his normal salary, na levo, on the side and out of tax range.

“We don’t live well, but we can survive,” he says.

Stroking a two-day growth of beard as he contemplates the future, Shvalov says no one knows what will happen as their 70-year-old system crumbles around them. “I’m not afraid, but I think there will be conflict, maybe even a kind of civil war,” he forecasts without emotion. “What’s to be afraid of? Matters couldn’t be worse than they are.”

Viktoria and Roman Kushnir--another couple strolling the courtyard, the common space between housing blocks that for most Soviets is an extension of home--have lost the Pavlovs’ ability to shrug off a future that holds little promise. They have been surviving on his 240-ruble-a-month salary as a construction worker and living in two rooms with Viktoria’s parents while deciding where to emigrate.

“To be honest, we don’t expect anything to change because of this so-called revolution,” Kushnir says of the unraveling Communist system. “There is still no genuine will for change.”

Eligible for exit visas to Israel because they are Jewish, the Kushnirs have given up hope for a dignified life in their native land. “We don’t trust anyone. Not the current leadership or anyone else seeking power,” says Viktoria, 21, whose striking ebony eyes are already shadowed by the fatigue written on the faces of older Soviet women.

The Kushnirs will leave for Israel soon, or for Germany, if a building job they have heard about pans out. There is no sense clinging to a life where a woman’s lot is standing in line doing fretful arithmetic, insists Viktoria, balancing a watermelon on her hip--the reward for a two-hour wait.

To calculate the odds of ultimate success in buying the few items on offer at the courtyard’s state produce store, shoppers spend the waiting time counting crates and dividing by the number of customers ahead of them.

Lyubov Moravyeva, a 41-year-old economist resting on a wooden rail as a friend holds her place in line, admits to having thought briefly about politics last month when Gorbachev was said to be ousted. Her life’s savings are tied up in a small business that resulted from his fledgling economic reform. “My job would have been in jeopardy if the coup had succeeded,” she says. “Thank God it has all passed.”

The durability of perestroika was never something she worried about, Moravyeva says. There’s just too much else for a working mother to keep her mind on. “I was on vacation until last week, but I couldn’t even go out to our dacha because I had to chase after products for the family,” the mother of two teen-agers says with a weary sigh.

She contemplates the current political storm in Moscow that seems hardly to ruffle the lives of the masses and dejectedly predicts there will be no improvement in her lifetime.

“Maybe our children will live better, but I don’t know,” Moravyeva says with a calm fatalism that seems to engulf most Russians. “Sometimes I worry that nothing can save us.”