Communism Never Meant Community : Russia: People cherished the little areas of life they could control. Getting them to care about filthy stairwells and alleys will be a major reform.

With or without the rest of the Soviet Union, Russia is stuck in an economic morass. To get out of it, says conventional wisdom, Russians must develop a stronger sense of private property. I’m not so sure. Living in Moscow for the first six months of this year, I saw people who cherish private property as much as citizens anywhere. It’s their feeling about public property that’s the problem.

My family and I were the only foreigners living in a Stalin-era apartment building--a thick-walled, sturdy colossus with high ceilings and double windows to keep out the cold--that took up an entire city block. I’ve never lived anywhere where there was such a contrast between public and private spaces.

If you went into the average apartment in our building, or the average apartment in Moscow, you entered a loved and cared-for space. People hung Persian rugs and framed photographs of their favorite writers on the walls; almost invariably they had one glass-doored bookshelf of the Russian classics, and another proudly displaying various knickknacks and souvenirs. Usually their apartments were immaculate, and they had special slippers called tapochki ready for visitors, so you wouldn’t track in street dirt.

But the moment you stepped outside someone’s apartment, our building’s public areas were filthy. The dimly lit stairways were full of cigarette butts, empty bottles, apple cores, an old, rusted radiator on its side. A layer of greasy black grime covered everything. The elevator smelled of garbage and worse, and looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned since World War II. In the hall stairs on our floor was a hole in the concrete, right through to the air beneath, big enough for a child’s leg.

Beside the building’s front door, big rats scurried in and out of a hole. At one point they gnawed through the telephone cable in the basement, knocking out the phones for 10 days. The building’s courtyard was strewn with piles of debris. Entering the narrow front hall, you had to dodge the open, swinging metal door of a cabinet full of exposed electrical wiring.

Why, I wondered, didn’t anyone protest the mess? Why not put out rat poison, have a cleanup day, take turns sweeping the stairs, rouse the janitor? I asked several Soviet friends. “If we fixed the building up, they’d take it away from us,” one said. “It’s our heritage of serfdom,” said another.

He’s right. I think that after many centuries of autocracy, most Russians are so estranged from anything that smacks of public life that any public space, even so close by as an apartment building’s hallway, seems alien, beyond their influence. During 74 years of communism, the private sphere became a refuge from a public rhetoric that rang cynical and false.

The result is that Russians are, in some ways, even more conscious of private property than we are. An American businessman who goes back and forth between the two countries told me that when a Russian friend came to visit him in the United States, she was astonished when she saw him planting flowers in front of his apartment house. “But you don’t own the building!” she said. “True,” he replied, “but I have to look at it each day.”

Even in death, a Russian’s grave is usually separated from the rest of the cemetery by a little waist-high iron fence around its borders; thus the distinction between public and private space remains. I saw a particular chilling example of this in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk.

In the last year or two, a hillside cemetery in Krasnoyarsk has expanded onto the territory of a secret mass grave from the Stalin years. The grave contains hundreds, possibly thousands, of bodies. Dozens of these burial sites are turning up all over the Soviet Union. But what struck me about this one was how, as public property, it was ignored by people burying their loved ones in the cemetery. To get to the newest graves, each one with its iron fence encircling its private space, mourners with flowers have to step over yellowed pieces of human skeletons--thigh bones, hips, ribs, skulls with bullet holes in them--that are strewn on the cemetery’s overgrown paths and along its borders. No one has bothered to pick up these anonymous bones, much less honor them.

The real job of reformers in the Soviet Union today is not to build a greater sense of private property. It is, instead, to create a society where people have enough faith in the social fabric to value the property that they hold or use in common: an apartment lobby, a cemetery path, a school, the street, the workplace, the government itself. The job will not be easy.