Russian Choice: ‘Free System’ vs. Socialism?

Nose to nose near the ballot box, 66-year-old Valentina Varlamova and 63-year-old Klavdia Sivakova slugged it out in a verbal battle that embodied the choice Russians faced as they voted in Sunday’s referendum.

“I want to live under a socialist system,” Sivakova, a doctor and member of the reconstituted Communist Party, proclaimed. “I want to go back to the Soviet regime. I think it was more humane.”

“Well, I want to live under a free system,” Varlamova, a semi-invalid and strong supporter of President Boris N. Yeltsin, snapped back.

“A free system? In the old days, I never felt any persecution,” Sivakova, neat in a schoolmarmish tweed suit, objected.

“I didn’t either, but now I live 10 times better,” retorted Varlamova, bright in a pink knit beret and raspberry coat.

Sivakova goggled. “How? Under perestroika (restructuring), life has only gotten worse because everything has gotten so expensive. I used to be able to afford stockings at 20 kopecks, and now they cost 200 rubles.”

“You’ll get your stockings, you’ll get all that, but you have to wait, you just have to be patient,” Varlamova argued.

“We’ve been reforming ourselves for eight years already,” Sivakova sighed.

And on the argument went at Polling Place No. 2222--normally known as Elementary School No. 8--of this bedroom community set amid birches and pines a half-hour drive north of Moscow. Around the two arguing women streamed families and pensioners to pick up their four ballot slips and cast votes that boiled down to whether they supported Yeltsin and his free-market reforms or not.

There was little of the festive holiday atmosphere once typical of Soviet elections, although some polling places blared music outside. Instead, the dominant mood seemed to be one of stolid hope.

“We’re feeling pretty so-so,” said retired lawyer Larisa Nikolayeva as her husband tugged her sleeve to urge her homeward. “Because our life problems remain unsolved. But we have hope, and so we came. It’s hard. . . .”

Pushing the voters too was an undercurrent of anger--either against Communists or against Yeltsin for the pain of his reforms.

Pensioner Ivan Kalugin huffed that he came to vote for Yeltsin “because I’m sick of Communists, and all their heads should be cut off.”

Ivan Bliznyakov, the observer from the Communist Party at the nearby village of Lesnoy, was willing to devote his day to policing the polls as a kind of protest against Yeltsin.

“I’m against Yeltsin’s policy because it has brought nothing positive,” the retired army major said. “Not in any sphere of life. We’re all for democracy and reform, but it’s a question of how and why and for whom, that’s the point.”

The arguments at the polls highlighted the deep rift in Russian society between Yeltsin’s supporters and opponents, but they held little threat of boiling over into violence. With the ice finally melting in the Moscow region and the air filling with the fragrance of new green shoots and buds, people wandered to the polls lackadaisically, flushed with spring fever.

The referendum was important, many said, but it lacked the combative tension of an election battle.

“I think this won’t decide anything,” said Yelena Tarasova, the Pushkino city official who oversaw much of the organizing for the referendum.

But, she said, “it’s important to see how much we’ve matured, to see where we stand now, to measure the strength of the political forces.”

In some sense, there was more of a battle before the referendum, as Yeltsin’s backers struggled against the conservatives in the Pushkino city government to get a room and phone for their headquarters.

“We don’t have enough supporters, and the Communists in the district are united and they use some dubious methods,” local deputy Aida Savinina, a Yeltsin ally, complained.

This time around, however, the methods seemed to consist mainly of a few posters plastered here and there and Yeltsin’s TV speeches.

“Nobody did much of anything this time,” said Pavel Simonyatov, the burly engineer who is chairman of Lesnoy’s election commission. “It’s not an election, it’s an opinion poll.”

Like Simonyatov, many people appeared to approach the referendum through a haze of incomprehension.

Vladimir Lobko, the heavily bearded vice chairman of the former Zelyenogradskoye collective farm--now privatized--just outside Pushkino, admitted that he felt so confused on some questions that he crossed out both the “yes” and the “no.”

“On some questions, I didn’t know the right answer,” he said. “So I crossed out everything.

Never mind, said Sergei Vlasenko, the local equivalent of a mayor. “This will make people think with their heads a little.”

In many cases, however, Russians came to the ballot boxes out of force of reflex.

For Valentina Orlova, a municipal worker in Lesnoy, it was a reflex of optimism. “We continue to believe,” she said. “That’s just our habit.”