Changing Lifestyles : Culture of Capitalism Gradually Taking Root in Russia : * ‘People are coming to understand that their fate is in their own hands,’ marvels a rural official.

Stanislav Gronsky, a gangly, 28-year-old engineer with a pale, horsy face, figures he could moonlight loading boxes or work as a watchman all three shifts a day and take home a triple salary.

Lida, a slim, studious art historian, has started to think about abandoning her profession and taking a higher-paying job as a janitor. And Igor, a blond, acne-pitted wheeler-dealer of 22, calculates that if he can just get the start-up money, he could build his own china factory.

Slowly but unmistakably, residents of this sleepy provincial town are beginning to change.

Even in the heart of the Russian countryside, even in a line of 400 people willing to stand in the cold for hours on the off-chance of buying a few bottles of vodka, there are signs that the old, passive mentality is dying and a new, forced willingness to learn how to hustle is starting to take root.

“We were raised as parasites,” said Alexander Kislov, deputy governor of the Penza region of 1.5 million people. “You were always waiting for kindness from your boss, waiting for a raise or a job or for products to appear on the store shelves, but you did nothing to make it happen.”

Now, with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin warning that within weeks, freed prices will shoot upward and millions of state-owned apartments and stores will be sold or given away, the Communist-cultivated aversion to anything that smacks of business or enthusiastic moneymaking appears to be fading ever faster.

“People are maturing; people are coming to understand that their fate is in their own hands,” Kislov said.

“And now,” he added, “I see that people are starting to get to like the taste of money. A thousand rubles ($600 at the commercial rate) might not do it, but 20,000 does. And people have started to take a more realistic attitude toward life--they’ve started to take more land for their potato growing. . . . People feel that they’re in danger.”

They are starting to understand, Kislov said, “that under the reforms, you’ll have less money but you’ll have a chance to get rich. It will be like in Alaska. Here’s your plot of land, you can dig up the gold.”

According to a poll in the weekly Moscow News this month, 35% of Muscovites questioned said they would favor higher prices if it meant that the store shelves would be full, compared to 50% who said they preferred state-controlled, lower prices and the shortages they foment.

The numbers do not bespeak great enthusiasm for Yeltsin’s reforms, but they do indicate a growing contingent willing to take their chances with a market-driven economy.

“The general mood is that, ‘I guess this is something we have to do,’ ” said Nikolai Popov, a pollster at the National Public Opinion Research Center, “although it’s all very theoretical. The newspapers and the democratic economists have said, ‘We must,’ and the people are saying, ‘Then I guess we must.’ ”

Gronsky, the lanky engineer in the vodka line, said that he already moonlights evenings in a bread store in addition to the 270-ruble-a-month factory job he keeps because it secures him a place on a waiting list for an apartment.

But now, he said, he is thinking of taking three watchman shifts because he gets up at 5 a.m. as it is to be at work by 7 and gets home after 10 p.m., when his young son is already asleep.

“And if it gets harder, I’ll get a third job,” he said.

Lida, a 44-year-old art historian who said she needed vodka to persuade a repairman to fix her broken window, turned gloomy when she considered her economic future.

“I’ll just have to be a janitor,” she said. “The salary is better than an art historian’s.”

A young professional driver standing nearby said that he was considering becoming a coat-taker in a restaurant--the pay would be better and he would be assured of some food supplies from the restaurant kitchen.

Although one of the primary goals of the reform is to stimulate entrepreneurship, the driver said that even though he would love to be his own boss, he could not imagine trying to go into business for himself.

“How can I work in business?” he asked. “I can go buy a car, but it would need spare parts, and to get them you have to feed the people at the repair garage and buy them Napoleon brandy--and I can’t afford that.”

The people of Penza, and of the Russian countryside in general, may still be far from the ideal entrepreneurs, but they will learn, said Alexander Kondratiev, the Penza region’s equivalent of a governor and the man who plans to force Yeltsin’s reforms on the population just as fast as they come out.

“If they raise you for 70 years to hate the market, you can’t change overnight,” he said. “People have understood (that they were wrong) but psychologically, they haven’t worked everything through yet.”

For all their plans to make do, the Penza line-standers spoke more of their fears and confusion than of any anticipation of good times to come.

“We don’t expect anything good from the reforms,” said Alexei Shilo, a 38-year-old farmer. “All this will be like snow on our heads. And if they raise the prices too far, we just won’t be able to feed ourselves.”

An aged babushka who had wandered up to the line tut-tutted. “They’ll raise our pensions,” she said. “They won’t let us die.”

But for Igor, the 22-year-old would-be businessman, mere survival cannot be enough.

“I have to think up something,” he said. “I can’t just work in official structures. I want my own thing. But I don’t know how to start. By the time I’m 40, though, I’d like to be producing china.”

At Penza’s central department store, the workers under director Galina Kadiankova have already turned the sprawling building into a leased enterprise, and now they are planning to transform it into a joint-stock society.

“We’re rapidly getting organized for privatization,” she said. “At this stage, we’re just preparing for it because we’re not yet sure exactly how it will go.”

About 80% of the workers have agreed to turn the store semiprivate, she said, and most are ready to invest their savings to buy stock.

“Until not long ago, I didn’t think we’d get out of this crisis; now it seems like maybe we can,” she said. “We just have to work with our heads.”

A Kondratiev aide put it differently.

“This is the real glubinka “ -- the deep countryside, he said. “Until the periphery moves, Russia won’t move. And now, it has started to move.”