Soviet Air Travelers Must Pack Lots of Food and Patience; Few Complain : Infrastructure: Centuries of serfdom and decades of socialist rule have inured citizens to conditions that would set off riots in most countries.

Nearly a month after Galina Dzhavadeva embarked on a journey to get treatment for her daughter Svetlana’s ear infection, the 1991 vacation time she used for the trip was over, Svetlana’s pain was unabated and neither mother nor daughter was anywhere near home.

Pressed against a broken mineral-water vending machine at Domodedovo’s besieged airport, just outside Moscow, Dzhavadeva shielded Svetlana, 15, from the swarm of travelers while straining to listen above the deafening thunder for word of their 1,200-mile flight to Baku.

Twenty-six hours behind schedule, there was still no news of when they would take off.

As she struggled to stay on her feet and defend the small territory that allowed her ailing daughter to rest against the vending machine, Dzhavadeva--one of untold thousands stuffed into Domodedovo’s abysmal passenger terminal--lamented the conditions Soviet travelers must endure.

“We’re always getting pushed around, whether it’s at a train station or an airport,” said the downcast music teacher, weary from more than a full day on her feet. “It’s always a fight to get anywhere in the Soviet Union.”

The woeful scene on any given day at Domodedovo, the country’s busiest airport with 25,000 traveling through each day, would be enough to set off a riot in most countries.

But in the Soviet Union, people have been inured to hardship and injustice by centuries of serfdom and decades of dehumanizing socialist rule. The anger that wells up in Western consumers exposed to such brutal inefficiency and disregard draws little more than regretful sighs from downtrodden Russians with no memory of a system that cares.

While Eastern Europe’s overthrow of Communism was fueled by popular discontent that escalated into outrage, Soviets tend to see relief as far away and dependent less on citizen initiative than on a revolution from above. Uncertain and pessimistic about their future, most persevere through the encumbered channels without complaint.

For the masses of stranded travelers at Domodedovo this week, only two of five telephones worked, both trailing lines of hundreds hoping to call home.

The airport’s two cafeterias were closed by the caprice of employees who posted signs announcing a “sanitary day.”

Every muddy inch of floor space was covered with baggage, on which exhausted adults clutched slumbering children.

Outside one waiting hall, a welder set to work with no warning to the drowsy passengers resting against a nearby wall. Sparks from his torch sent them flying for safety. Not a single voice uttered words of anger or alarm.

“What can you do? Who can you complain to? Others have been waiting even longer,” shrugged Adela Kuprianova, a 22-year-old kindergarten teacher trying to get home to the West Siberian city of Surgut. Her 2-year-old daughter, Sveta, was sound asleep in her lap, done in by the wait Kuprianova described as “only 19 hours, so far.”

All Soviet travel falls under state control, making for a colossal monopoly that is as indifferent to service as it is steeped in bureaucracy that often grinds movement to a halt.

Days-long delays are common at the three Moscow area domestic airports, all of them carelessly situated over drained swampland that acts as a magnet for fog.

There is an increasingly frequent problem with fuel shortages as production has plummeted in the Soviet Union and the centralized distribution network has broken down along with with the Moscow-based government that manages it.

A lack of computers forces a 30-day wait to buy tickets, and routine overbookings make their validity subject to the whim of an airport staff that is harried and surly.

Few undertake air travel with less than a month to work with, knowing that it can take up to a week just to arrive. Those needing to travel for medical care, such as Dzhavadeva, are often forced to use their vacations to be sure of having enough time.

More than the inconvenience of being marooned in the Spartan airports, what stirs some emotion among Soviet travelers is the conditions in which they must wait.

At Domodedovo, food wrappings and nibbled corn cobs litter the floor and the tops of vending machines. The only thing the machines dispense is water--when they work at all.

A prohibition against smoking in the cavernous terminal goes wholly unheeded, an acrid cloud hovering over the islands of sleepers and the masses pushing to get by.

The wails of terrified children, separated from parents and trapped in a forest of legs, pierce the muffled roar of footsteps and mumbled requests to be let through.

Chairs are a precious commodity, occupied in shifts by friends traveling together. Smart travelers tote a two-day supply of food in anticipation of arbitrary cafeteria closures. Electronic boards, intended to display departure times, are inevitably broken or turned off.

Asked why they put up with such shoddy service in these days when glasnost encourages them to speak their minds, many look perplexed by the foreign notion that complaints or individual actions could ever effect change.

“It doesn’t help to get angry. It’s not the fault of the workers on the ground,” said Valentina Simovskaya, 44, an electronics engineer from the Central Asian city of Dushanbe. “Everything is so complicated with us because of our system. I think we are just not organized.”

It was Valya Matkarimova’s turn to guard the mountain of string-wrapped parcels filling the floor space between the ranks of chairs supporting her somnolent fellow travelers.

The retired Uzbek charwoman and her 18 companions had just spent 48 hours in line at Soviet customs upon return from a five-day shopping trip to neighboring Poland.

“We bought nothing special, just fabric,” Matkarimova sighed wearily through a mouthful of gold teeth. “The delay is caused just by the number of people traveling.”

Waiting at noon for their scheduled 1 a.m. takeoff for Tashkent, none in the Uzbek group was the least bit stirred by announcements over the squawky intercom that bus trips to Domodedovo were suspended because of a backlog of delays.

Irina Artyonova, a 33-year-old engineer from Yerevan, said she had been told all flights to Armenia had been put off “because there is no fuel.”

“That will be a problem until New Year’s Eve 2000!” bellowed Stanislav Maluga, a Moscow photographer trying, unsuccessfully, to return to his job in the Siberian oil city of Tyumen.

He joked that Moscow’s airports and train stations might get the spruce-up they need in the year 2017--”in celebration of the 100th anniversary of our Great October Revolution.”

Maluga belongs to the class of Soviet citizens that enjoys its newfound right to complain. But, like most others putting voice to their dissatisfaction, he does not necessarily expect anyone to be listening.

Asked how he intends to press for more attentive service to Soviet consumers, the burly, mustachioed commuter spread his thick hands in a helpless gesture.

“The breakup of the Soviet Union has already happened. (Boris N.) Yeltsin and (Mikhail S.) Gorbachev have now found a common language,” Maluga said of the Russian and Soviet presidents. “The democratic forces are united, so I have hopes for an improvement. I don’t know how many years it will be, but some day.”

Like millions of his compatriots exposed to the same careless service, a defense mechanism kicks into action when he feels his native land is being maligned. “I know that everything is nicer abroad, especially in the West. I’ve seen what it is like in the films,” Maluga conceded in earnest. “But there is also beauty and good in our country. We can enjoy nature, and we have very pretty women, don’t you agree?”