Documentary : Aid Takes Bumpy Road to Russians : Western food and toys are appreciated--and sometimes sold on the street. Red tape takes its toll.

Chief doctor Mikhail Anisimovich Kornushin knew his young patients at this country’s largest children’s hospital would be thrilled with the chocolate bars and teddy bears arriving along with Western donations of food and medicine. But his enthusiasm quickly faded when he discovered that parents were taking the treats away from their sick children.

“Why don’t you just leave it for the kids?” he demanded of some guilty mothers.

The gaily wrapped chocolates will fetch up to 200 rubles on the street or from one of the new private shops in town, the parents explained--roughly a week’s salary at a time when they are already hard-pressed by skyrocketing prices. A pretty toy could bring even more. Then, the parents said, they could afford to buy enough porridge for the whole family, or maybe even some meat.

Even the children seemed to understand and accept these economics, Kornushin said. “Now, when chocolate comes, they don’t eat it. They save it for their mothers to take and sell. And they never play with their new toys. They just put them aside to be taken away.”

While this is clearly not the happy ending the Western donors must have imagined for their gifts, the story illustrates the sometimes unpredictable path that humanitarian aid takes in unpredictable times. And just as it is a story about heartfelt generosity and gratitude, so is it a tale of incomprehensible mistakes and misunderstandings as this nation copes with a flood of Western aid.

A U.S. government airlift of food and medicine began Monday with the first 12 planeloads of supplies landing in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities. The American effort, dubbed “Operation Provide Hope,” is to include a total of up to 64 relief flights during the next two weeks, with supplies delivered to virtually every capital of the former Soviet republics except Tbilisi, Georgia.

Meanwhile, it’s the frustrations of distributing tons of aid at this end of the pipeline that preoccupy Juergen Weyand and have him bumming cigarettes from his staff at 8 in the morning.

As the chief logistics delegate for the German Red Cross, Weyand is overseeing the distribution of some 20,000 tons of food and medicine donated by the European Community. After 20-odd years in the relief business, Weyand is a cool-headed choreographer as he directs his wheezing ballet of rattletrap trucks and lumbering locomotives. He spends his life going from disaster to disaster--earthquakes in Turkey and Peru, Kurdish refugees fleeing Iraq guns, wars, famines, the cyclone that left half a million Bangladeshis dead overnight.

The disintegrated Soviet Union is proving to be an even tougher challenge than those disasters, Weyand believes--not in terms of the level of need or human misery, but in terms of sheer logistics.

“This is no place for amateurs,” he asserts from the stifling little hotel room he fondly calls his control center. “You need experience. You can’t do it just from the bottom of your heart. There’s a whole slew of real problems.”

Not to mention mere aggravations and baffling roadblocks.

Take last week’s relatively routine cross-Moscow journey of 270 cartons of French powdered milk.

Shortly after 10 a.m. on this dreary morning, a dirty blue Zil truck pulls out of Moskovretsky, the sprawling complex of government warehouses where European Community aid is stored. The 21-year-old driver, Volodya Burtsev, bumps along slushy roads for an hour before reaching the Sunny Canteen, a dilapidated brick building in the city’s northern hinterland that serves as a catering supply point for 24 schools in the district.

Burtsev takes his documents to the administrator’s office to find out where the milk should be delivered. The woman in charge, who gives her name only as Yelena, rushes back and forth through the dank halls, clutching handwritten ledgers. Someone tells Burtsev his milk will be warehoused here. No, Yelena says, she is looking for another truck and driver to take the milk to one of the schools.

“We could take our truck, but they’re saying we don’t know where the schools are,” Burtsev says after a wasted half an hour, as another truck--identical in size to his own--backs up to the Zil. A Russian worker transfers 246 of the cartons to the second truck--the remaining ones are to stay behind.

“We’re doing double work, unloading our truck and loading it onto the other one,” Burtsev complains. “There are always problems almost everywhere we go.”

Couldn’t someone just have given Burtsev directions to the school, or sent someone along to guide him, rather than waste the time and effort of transferring the cartons?

“I am not doing anything wrong!” a flustered Yelena retorts. “Every box is accounted for. No one takes anything! We have very strict controls,” she wails, fighting tears.

The presence of a Western reporter frightens her. She wishes aloud that she had known ahead of time about the visitors. Minutes later, she nervously puffs a cigarette and mutters something else to a bystander she may or may not have realized was with the unwelcome visitor.

“There are no controls,” Yelena mumbled. “Several boxes will end up getting stolen here and once they reach the school, the teachers will take some more.”

Yelena eventually offers yet another explanation for the seemingly pointless truck transfer: “We need to provide work for our own drivers, too. They need something to do.”

As it turns out, the new driver doesn’t know how to get to the school, either. So Yelena--or somebody--comes up with a guide.

The school, No. 1101, is less than five miles away, but the guide directs the new driver down the wrong street. He gets out and tramps across a snowy playground to ask where the school’s main entrance is. Finally, at 12:40 p.m., the truckload of French milk pulls up to the door.

The back of the truck opens and dozens of boys hold out their arms to take the boxes. A first-grader weaves down the hall, unable to see over the top of his box. A husky show-off parades past with three boxes stacked high. The school’s deputy director stands in the hall, monitoring the delivery. The boxes are stacked in the absent director’s office, where a large television set is blaring Russian music videos.

Once inside, the boxes are again counted. Several are open, and loose packets of milk are left on a table. All 246 boxes are here, now watched over by a glaring portrait of V. I. Lenin, founder of the now discredited Soviet Communist state.

“This is the first time we’ve gotten milk,” says the school’s deputy director, a 44-year-old math teacher named Galina Rodzhkova. “Last week we got canned meat. We distribute the aid to the children to take home. It’s distributed equally, and anything left over goes to larger or needier families. If there’s milk left over, we’ll give it to the smallest children first, since they need it most.”

With 12 packets of milk per carton, and 1,672 children in the school, this shipment clearly won’t come out even. Rodzhkova insists there will be enough for two packets per child. A visitor does the math and comes up with 2,952 packets--enough for just one each with an awkward 1,280 left over. No, the math teacher asserts: the total is 3,952. The visitor does the calculation again. So does Rodzhkova. She slaps her forehead when she realizes her error.

The school has had no problems with its two aid shipments, according to Rodzhkova, no losses or thefts. As for the children, the sudden appearance of charity from countries that were supposed to be enemies is proving somewhat puzzling, as an impromptu visit to a classroom full of 11-year-olds showed.

“What is life like in your country now?” their visitors ask the children. They shout out their answers excitedly.

“Prices are going up.” “Everything costs too much.” “Things are hard.” “My parents used to buy clothes, but now they don’t.” “My parents don’t buy as much for us as they used to.” “My parents get upset when I ask for money for chewing gum.”

“What happens when you bring the free food home?”

“My mom said, ‘Good, now there’s more food.’ ” “My parents said some schools got more than 10 cans for every child.” “My mother said, ‘At last someone’s taking care of us.’ ” “I opened mine on the way home.”

Would the children like to ask a visiting American any questions? “How high is your tallest building?” comes the first one. The next, from a pale boy with wide, blue eyes: “Why would the West want to help us?”

A boy in the back jumps up to answer confidently: “I know why the West is helping us--because you want to use us to solve your own economic problems!” How? he is asked. “We have natural resources you want,” he replies.

On the way out, 12-year-old Sergei Zhukov, son of a teacher and a policeman, stops to chat in the hall. His parents worry a lot, Sergei says, and there is no ice cream at home anymore, or chocolate, or butter.

“My parents say it’s shameful that we’ve come to the point that strangers are helping us,” he says. “On one side, I think it’s good that we get some help, but on the other side, what they say is true.”

Back at his cramped “command central,” Weyand is not surprised to hear of the French milk’s misadventures. “There’s an awful lot of red tape. Sometimes they change trucks just because our trucks are not registered in a particular district. We have to deal with lots of unimportant problems, problems that are completely without reason, or hard to understand.”

Still, in the four months he has been here, he has not had any reports of theft or major loss, so the myriad small problems are easy to shrug off. “Either we’re too dumb to notice or we’ve been lucky,” Weyand said.

The food and medicine in his warehouses comes by truck or rail from Finland. The trains can pull right into the warehouses’ own rail yard, the gates locking behind them.

Once the aid is delivered, however, it’s anybody’s guess where it eventually goes.

Weyand is neither shocked nor indignant when he hears of the bartered chocolate bars and teddy bears at the children’s hospital.

“You can give someone something, but you have no right to say how they use it,” he says. “You have to first and foremost preserve people’s dignity. If I distribute milk powder to a wino sleeping under a bridge, so what if he wants to trade it for something he likes better?”

It is a lesson he learned as a 10-year-old when Germany fell in World War II. “U.S. Army boots would be stolen in the American occupation zone and traded for French cognac in the French zone, then the cognac would be brought back to the American zone and traded to GIs for coffee and bacon,” he said.

At the hospital, Dr. Kornushin is less worried about the disappearing candy bars than he is about the half-ton of American pills he wishes would disappear.

He is reluctant to discuss the mysterious white tablets taking up precious storage space. He doesn’t want a scandal.

“They came loose, packed in big plastic bags,” Kornushin said. “We’ll have to throw them away because there are no labels or identification or anything. We don’t know what to do.

“The trouble is, you can’t just burn 500,000 tablets when you don’t know what’s in them; the cloud of smoke could be toxic. We can’t bury them, either.”

So there they sit in the First City Children’s Clinical Hospital. Kornushin can’t trace the donor--there’s no time, really, and no hospital records to even show when the pills arrived.

“I don’t want a fuss,” the doctor insists. “We don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. It’s hard to be organized in this mess. We’re getting a lot of aid and we don’t always have time to look through it right away. So now sometimes we don’t know where it came from.”

Occasionally, other well-meaning gestures also go awry. The children refuse to eat the canned beef from China, and medication has mostly come in the form of tablets, which are impossible to administer to babies. A private German aid team arrived and insisted that doctors log every single donated tablet they administered, and then send the records to Germany.

Hospital workers have been told that they could go to prison for three years if they are caught stealing any of the donated goods. So far, the only case involved a cook fined for a first offense of pilfering some chicken.

“I understand there are rumors in the West that all the aid is stolen or sold,” Kornushin said. Controls like those demanded by the German group “are humiliating,” he went on. “This is not a question of control, but of trust.”

Kornushin is quick to add that the fruit juice supplied by Europe makes afternoon tea a treat for the children, and that the aid ensures four meals a day for his young patients--two of them with meat. “We have had children who don’t want to go home because they eat better here,” Kornushin said.

The white-haired doctor survived World War II and knows what hunger is. “I used to quarrel with the nurses because there used to be so much bread we had to throw it away. They would toss it in the street and thousands of birds would come. Now you won’t find a single piece of bread out there. The birds no longer come.”

The doctor has another mystery, one not quite as troubling as the half a million useless pills. He goes to a cabinet and pulls out three packets sent by an American donor who offered to send tons more if the hospital wanted them. There is only one problem:

Kornushin has no idea what Lipton’s “Cup-of-Soup” is.

Who’s Helping the Former Soviet Union

(in millions of U.S. dollars) Germany: 44,818.57 Italy: 5,827.25 France*: 2,157.88 Spain: 1,398.19 EC & Other EC Member States**: 5,140.86 EFTA Countries***: 2,433.15 United States: 5,115.11 South Korea: 3,596.08 Japan: 2,501.44 Other Countries: 8,473.28

Handing out $81.5 billion

A) Food and medical aid (grants) Total $3,203.89

B) Balance of payment support Total $8,358.88

C) Export and other credits and/or guarantees Total $48,724.67

D) Strategic and technical assistance, including withdrawal of Soviet troops and destruction of nuclear warheads Total $12,573.11

E) Other types of aid or information not available Total $8,601.26

SOURCES: European Community, Los Angeles Times

NOTES: The EC estimated as of January 20, 1992 that more than $78 billion had been committed by various countries to assist the independent states devolved from the former Soviet Union. Some $3.5 billion in additional assistance was pledged at the subsequent 47-nation Washington conference on aid to the new states.

These commitments may cover several years.

* Does not include $1.1 billion in aid promised Feb. 7 to Russia.

** The other European Community countries are Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Portugal. Some aid is also given by the European Community as a group.

*** Members of the European Free Trade Assn. are Austria, Finland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Figures do not include debt rescheduling nor grants from private sources.