Soviet Revolution in Microcosm: Hope, Fear Infuse a Single Family : Reform: Father was a hero of the barricades in Moscow but feels that leaders are squandering their opportunities.

Nikolai Golovenkov took the tiny hand of his son, Tolik, and walked up to a barricade of stones, concrete slabs and metal playground equipment that stands near the Russian Parliament as a symbol of the victory of the people’s resistance over the reactionary coup.

He crouched down to Tolik’s eye level and pointed to places where tanks had stood and to one of the doorways of the mammoth, white-stone building where he had been posted to prevent “evil men” from entering.

In language a 4-year-old could understand, Golovenkov explained how these “evil men” had tried to take away their country’s freedom, but the people of Russia, including his father, had refused to let them.

Tolik listened carefully and then ran over to his mother, Marina, to repeat the story: “A war happened at this building, and there were tanks here!” a wide-eyed Tolik told her. “But Papa and a lot of other people didn’t let the tanks get through. So, the evil men lost.”

The failed three-day August putsch that shook the Soviet Union and dealt a death blow to the Communist Party showed the Golovenkovs how much they have changed during the years of perestroika and how dear their freedom has become.

But Nikolai feels bitter and disappointed. Although he and thousands of others risked their lives to resist the coup, he believes that the country’s leaders are squandering the opportunity to drive the reforms forward.

“After the coup there was euphoria,” recalled the 33-year-old Nikolai. “I thought, ‘Now everything will change, and we will finally have the life that we want.’ But I don’t see any real changes yet. The Communist Party has been thrown out, but everything else is the same.

“It’s very difficult for me to say what will be in a few years. . . . Maybe there will be another putsch.”

When the democratic reforms began in 1985, Nikolai was a captain in the Soviet army opposing capitalists in Mozambique. Now he works as a translator for capitalists--and loves his job.

His wife, Marina, considered herself among the luckiest children in the world because she was born in the just society created by her beloved V. I. Lenin, but her new hero is Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who step by step is destroying the system Lenin built.

Marina’s mother, Nelly Gridina, had no interest in politics for the first 55 years of her life, but she was swept up by her country’s reform movement, and in three years she can’t remember missing a pro-democracy political rally.

Nikolai’s mother, Ludmila Lapchinskaya, used to push Soviet propaganda on fellow workers in the Pacific port city of Vladivostok. These days she gives lectures based on Dale Carnegie’s self-improvement teachings.

On Monday, Aug. 19, Nikolai awoke to the news that a military coup was under way. Reserved and unusually independent for a Russian, he went to work but could not concentrate. “I felt that I was being pulled out into the streets,” he said.

Hearing that the Russian Parliament building, popularly known as the White House, was the focal point of the anti-coup protest, Nikolai rushed over and found several hundred people already building barricades of concrete blocks, metal poles and anything else they could find.

“I had a feeling that everything was tumbling down--that the end had come,” Nikolai said, recalling why he felt he had to stand up to the Red Army, his former comrades in arms. “I understood that if those people came to power, it would be the end of my life here. I understood it would be dictatorship all over again.”

“I did not go to the White House to defend Yeltsin or anyone else. I went there to defend myself, my way of life, our family and our future.”

Nikolai’s life had turned 180 degrees during the perestroika years. When Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power, Nikolai was working as a translator for Soviet military advisers in Mozambique, where the Marxist regime was battling “imperialists” trying to restore capitalism.

It was during his service in Africa that Nikolai comprehended the “farce” of Soviet ideology. An avid reader since early childhood, he found for the first time books such as George Orwell’s “1984,” and they revolutionized his thinking.

Although he had been trained at an elite academy for military translators where Marxist-Leninist philosophy was the main fare, he never accepted Communist ideology. After returning from Mozambique he was barred from further foreign posts because he repeatedly refused to join the Communist Party.

“I could not join,” Nikolai said. “The Communist Party is responsible for too much bloodshed, and I knew that if I joined, I too would be responsible.”

A year and a half ago, when career officers were allowed to resign in an effort to reduce the size of the armed forces, Nikolai quit after 13 years in uniform. Drawn to the money and opportunity offered by the new private sector, he found a high-paying job with a Soviet-American firm that finds and renovates apartments for foreigners in Moscow.

Thoughts of how far his country, and he personally, had come filled Nikolai’s mind as he stood guard throughout the tense night at the White House barricades. Armored vehicles were expected to attack the building before dawn, and the defenders, by then several thousand, braced for the assault.

“It was an unforgettable moment,” said the dark-haired, trim and muscular Nikolai. “We all thought the tanks were going to shoot at us, but then we saw that they were each carrying a white, blue and red Russian flag. Everyone who had a hat tossed it in the air and the crowd shouted: ‘Oorraahhh!”’

Visit to Dacha

While Nikolai kept vigil at the White House, Marina and son Tolik, short for Anatoly, were at the family dacha, or summer home, about an hour’s drive away in small resort community in one of the forests around Moscow.

“I did not even know that Nikolai was at the White House,” said Marina. “But I think it was the most natural thing for him to do. I think it would be unnatural not to go.

“If I were in Moscow and had someone to take care of my child, I would have been there too--I’m feisty,” she added, balling her fists for emphasis.

When she heard about the putsch Monday morning, “I remember that I couldn’t control myself from crying,” said Marina, 28, her eyes filling once again with tears at the memory. “I knew that in our country everything is possible, even a return to dictatorship.”

An obedient child of the Soviet system, Marina never questioned her country’s official ideology until after Gorbachev came to power.

“I always loved Lenin,” she remembers. “As a child, I thought, ‘Oh, how good it is that I was born in the Soviet Union and not in America, where . . . the capitalists live like kings while everyone else lives in poverty.’ ”

Then the liberal press started running articles in the late 1980s disclosing how hideous the Stalinist and Brezhnev regimes had been.

Marina grasped that the ideology on which she was raised was a lie, and she swung to support the country’s radical politicians. Yeltsin, she said, became her new idol.

“I love him so,” Marina said, flashing a big smile.

Woman Shattered

Although Nikolai and Marina were shaken by the coup, it was Nelly, a retired government administrator, who was shattered.

“She was in shock,” Marina said. “Her whole life for the last three years has been going to demonstrations, watching television and listening to the radio to keep up with her democratic politicians.”

Nelly, 59, like many women of her generation, had been apolitical until the democratic reforms began in earnest three years ago. But she, like her daughter, was converted by the information about her country’s past that, for the first time in her life, began flowing from the newspapers, radio and television.

Now, says Nelly, a short, stocky woman, “I can’t live without politics. “I never missed a chance to go to a rally to yell ‘Hurrah for Yeltsin!’ or ‘Down with the Communists!’ ”

Nelly was the first one in the family to celebrate the victory over the junta, whose members were arrested just three days after they claimed power. She did it the Russian way--with shots of straight vodka.

Politics the Topic

On an autumn Sunday, Nikolai’s mother, a young-looking 52-year-old with bleached blonde hair, came to visit. The conversation quickly turned to politics--and family harmony is not a rule.

In the 1970s, Ludmila worked as “propagandist” teaching the employees of a large toy store in Vladivostok about the glories of the Marxist-Leninist system.

Now she works in one of Moscow’s new brokerage firms and gives self-improvement lectures based on Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”

“The lectures I gave as a propagandist were just as essential for people in those days as lectures on the market economy are to people these days,” said Ludmila, who has a habit of repeating herself in the manner of a schoolteacher. “Everything in its own time, everything in its own time.”

Nikolai said that if the coup had succeeded, he is sure his mother would have been capable of adjusting her philosophy one more time.

“I don’t respect her because she is content to push communism or capitalism,” he said caustically after his mother left to take Tolik to the circus. “You never know what she really believes or if she even has her own beliefs.”

During a family conversation, Ludmila initially voiced her support for the Yeltsin democrats but then admitted great “nostalgia” for her country’s socialist past.

“We were happy then,” she said. “We were not wealthy, but we were satisfied. We had free medical care, basic foods, a chance to educate our children and no unemployment--the government took the burden of providing all of this.

“I even feel nostalgia for communal apartments--because we all helped each other,” Ludmila went on.

Nikolai, recalling the apartments where several families shared a bathroom, kitchen and entryway and no one had any privacy, shot back: “I remember how you cried when you lived in a communal apartment and how all the families argued with each other.”

Days of Order

Ludmila’s longing for the past is common among older people. Prices are soaring for the first time in decades. There are only a few products left in the stores. And economic and violent crimes, never reported in the past, are increasing. Many people look back fondly on the days of order with a capital “O.”

The emerging private business sector has let some people earn enough money that their lifestyles approximate those of the middle class in Western Europe--while most people here can hardly afford meat or magazine subscriptions.

In this new stratified society, people such as Nikolai--who drive new cars, have video players and wear imported leather jackets--are increasingly the object of scorn.

Nikolai, however, sees a rapid transition to a market economy as the only way out of the country’s economic mess, no matter how painful.

He is noticeably more impatient than Marina for economic change, one reason being that while she grew up as the privileged daughter of a high-ranking trade official, he lived in virtual poverty. His family was so poor that, as a boy, he slept on a shelf because there was no other space in the tiny apartment.

What Nikolai really wants is a business of his own. But current Soviet legislation is so tangled and biased against private companies that he has decided to wait until there are more favorable laws on small enterprises.

“I was hoping the victory over the coup would change all this,” he said, “but it hasn’t.”

Two Christened

Groping for meaning in a confusing time, Marina, who was raised as an atheist, has started attending church and together with her young son was christened recently.

“I feel a lot closer to God since then,” said Marina, who wears a large silver crucifix around her neck.

Nikolai, who was christened as a child, said he cannot attend the Russian Orthodox Church because of the compromises church leaders made over the decades. “I’m a Christian, but . . . I do not respect our Russian church for the same reason I do not respect my mother--for its conformity.”

Both Marina and Nikolai feel that religion should give moral fiber to the new Russian person, now that the religion of communism has been rejected, and they have bought a children’s Bible for Tolik.

“I don’t believe our generation can ever be a moral or ethical generation,” Marina said. “Maybe our children’s can be.”