Broken Dreams in Soviet Hinterland : Communism: A failed experiment leaves shattered lives--and a madness of sorts--in its wake.

Maria Savriova has lived her entire life for the wine. After 30 years, she is the resident expert at the State Champagne Factory of Kyrgyzstan, the official keeper of the knowledge of the wine. She dreams of making a classic champagne fit to be sipped in the cafes of France, “the motherland of the wine.” But for now, she wishes only that her factory had enough bottles.

“Democracy? I don’t know about democracy,” she told a recent visitor at the factory. “Wine I know. I would love to live in France or Italy, where the wine is good. But . . . I am here now, still living with this communism, and here, all of our problems are in the bottles. Champagne we have. Bottles? No.”

At Bishkek’s aging railroad yard a mile or so away, Nikolai Gavrilenko, 67, chain-smokes the marijuana that grows wild beside the rusted, 17-year-old rail car he uses as his office. He rolls it into joints made from torn pieces of the morning paper, a habit he picked up when vodka became scarce and expensive six years ago.

It is a cheap way of forgetting the 30 years he spent working in uranium mines in Kyrgyzstan (formerly called Kirghizia), the same mines that claimed the life of his father, who died at age 52 from radiation sickness.

“Independence? Democracy? Communist Party? It doesn’t matter to me,” said Gavrilenko, who is chief inspector at the yard’s shipping container terminal, laughing and hacking between puffs. “I don’t need Kyrgyzstan. I don’t need the Soviet Union. Any country that will feed me is good enough. Fifty years of work, and I can’t even pay for my lunch--four rubles a day.”

Nikolai, too, had a dream. It was to have enough money for lunch, a good lunch, and a better life for his son--something his father couldn’t do for him and that he couldn’t do for his own son.

These are the voices of a failed system, the litter of shattered dreams, broken lives and the continuing struggle for simple, daily survival in the wake of seven decades of Communist rule.

In this extreme southeastern corner of the crumbling Soviet empire, adjoining western China, they are just two of the millions of living testimonials to the price that even the most distant Soviet republic is now paying for that failed experiment in communism, and also to the absence of hope for a better tomorrow.

It’s a madness of sorts. Some here call it “the complex,” and it lies just below the surface of most cities and towns of Central Asia. These were the outposts of the empires that ruled the largest nation on earth for more than a century, first the Russian czars and later the Communists.

Much of the madness has its roots in the region’s fundamental instability: five republics with imposed borders and populations that are racial, ethnic, religious and linguistic melting pots fast approaching the boiling point, all of it the result of forced migrations imposed by rulers thousands of miles away.

And, of course, it is the result of seven decades of rule by an ideology that everyone lived but few believed.

In short, it is communism’s morning-after that now weighs down on Maria Savriova, Nikolai Gavrilenko and their millions of troubled neighbors. Together, their stories stand as human illustrations of how communism reached its ultimate illogical extreme out here on the fringes of the Soviet Union.

As a backdrop to their stories, one sees an entire city suffering from a large-scale version of the same madness:

The local saloon is a hole carved into the 50-foot-high sculpture that serves as Bishkek’s gate to the city. The state-owned central department store is out of almost everything, except plastic bags and odd-sized clothing. The city’s second-largest employer is a Soviet navy torpedo factory.

There are lines for everything in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan; for bread because wheat and flour are so scarce, for vodka because the neighboring republics that manufacture it have all but stopped delivery and even for children’s clothing because those deliveries also have slowed to a standstill.

An illustration of the madness appeared on the front page of a local newspaper last week. It was a cartoon of a customer with pockets turned inside out and arms spread wide, standing before a shopkeeper in a similar pose in front of empty shelves and counters. The caption read, “Consensus: I Have Nothing. You Have Nothing.”

Over at the State Champagne Factory of Kyrgyzstan, one could find a deeper reflection of a system gone mad.

Sitting at a large desk in the relatively modern factory, chief engineer Kamil Osmonbayev explained that his plant’s capacity is 6 million bottles a year. It has had to cut production in half this year, only because it cannot get enough bottles.

The reason: the State Bottle Factory in far-off Ukraine broke its contract with his factory and cut supplies to almost nothing.

The reason: the State Silica Mines that produce the raw materials for the bottles cut their supply to the Ukrainian bottle factory.

“You see, this is our system in this country now,” Osmonbayev said forlornly. “I could increase capacity almost overnight to 10 million bottles a year, and we certainly can sell every single bottle we produce. But I cannot get the bottles.”

The factory is still managing to produce about 4 million bottles of champagne this year, largely by recycling used bottles. But it is impossible to find a single bottle of champagne on sale in Bishkek.

There are two reasons for this, Osmonbayev said. Under a contract signed in Moscow, he is forced to send more than half his production to the neighboring republic of Kazakhstan. In addition, most of the champagne sent to the state-owned wine shops here is purchased immediately by professionals who resell it on the black market.

It was such failures of the system that preoccupied Maria Savriova as she sat sipping the fruits of her long labor of love with two recent visitors in the factory’s tasting room.

She never really wanted to become the keeper of the knowledge of the wine, Savriova said. As a young girl, she wanted to be an engineer. But the only technical school in Bishkek at the time was for nutritional sciences. It was the best she could do.

Eventually, the local Communist Party administration assigned her to the champagne factory, and she has been there ever since.

Although trapped, Savriova tried to excel, attending an advanced institute in Moscow where she studied under the Soviet Union’s master winemakers. One of them, she recalls near tears, committed suicide in 1985 when, during President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, the Communist Party bulldozed the winemaker’s experimental vineyards in the Crimea.

She talks about her unfulfilled dreams.

“You know, the scientists have determined that our climate and our soil here in Kyrgyzstan are precisely the same as that in the real Champagne regions of France,” she said. “But we are still controlled by a monopoly. If they would release us, we could become rich overnight. We have no competition in this whole region, and, believe me, we know how to make this fine, classic champagne, if only the system would permit us.

“This is my dream. Of course, it has always been my dream. But we get almost nothing for working here. Your salary doesn’t depend on the volume or the quality of your work. Look at me. I am the champagnist. I’m the only who knows about this specialty in the whole republic. My salary is 350 rubles a month. That would be worth . . . what, $11 in America?

“So, of course, you must try to keep the dreams alive. But how?”

Across town at the rail yard, Nikolai Gavrilenko’s dreams are long since dead. They died long before the demise of the system that destroyed them. They died somewhere out by Isakul Lake, 60 miles to the east of Bishkek, in a uranium mine that Gavrilenko reckons just might still be on fire.

“They sealed it up after the fire started,” Gavrilenko recalled, rubbing his weather-beaten forehead with the same hand that held his crude marijuana cigarette. “There was this explosion, back in 1955, I think it was. It was in a plant near the mine that enriched the uranium ore.

“But it spread down to the mines, and no one could put it out. So they covered it over with dirt and sealed it up. Three years later, they opened it up, and, sure enough, it was still burning.

“Hell, maybe it’s still on fire, and if it explodes down there now, all well and good. It’ll blow up all of Bishkek and me with it.”

Gavrilenko sat down at his tiny desk--cluttered with invoices for the goods that the thousands of ethnic Russians are now shipping out as they migrate from Kyrgyzstan--and he explained why he smokes so much grass.

Working in the uranium mines was hard, he said, but watching his father die made it harder. When he qualified for his pension in 1983, Gavrilenko left the mines for Bishkek, where his wife died and his son became a drug addict. Gavrilenko found his solace in vodka. But when Gorbachev launched the anti-alcohol campaign that caused shortages of all liquor throughout the Soviet Union, Gavrilenko turned to the plants that grow like weeds outside his rail-car office.

“So that’s why I smoke this stuff,” he said, rolling some more weeds into a piece of newspaper he never learned to read. “It blocks out the world, erases the past.”

Gavrilenko was asked about the future and his hopes for a better life. He shook his head.

“Not a chance,” he said flatly. “It will get worse. Just look at me. And my son. He’s a welder here at the yard. He goes for his drug treatments once a week. So now you tell me. Where is the future in all of this?”