Moscow Crisis Gives Provincial City the Jitters

Bad news has always come to this city on the roar of airplane engines.

When coup plotters took over the government in August, 1991, Tula knew something was up long before the rest of Russia: The whole city could hear troop transports revving up to carry off the local detachment of crack paratroopers. It turned out they were being sent to break Boris N. Yeltsin’s resistance to the plot. (Their refusal to obey the orders helped instead to break the coup.)

In the earliest days of the Afghan War, when it was still a government secret, the locals sensed from the constant shuttle of airplanes that the paratroopers were in action somewhere and the Soviet people weren’t being told.

So in recent days, with all Russia aware that one of Yeltsin’s options to end his standoff with Parliament is to send in the troops, Tula has been holding its breath, awaiting the sound of aircraft. So far it hasn’t come.

But the silence doesn’t mean that Tula won’t lose from the political stalemate in Moscow. In fact, it is in places like this, one of the most important industrial centers of the former Soviet Union, that the potential damage from Russia’s continuing political tragicomedy is most detectable.

In Tula, the population’s education level is comparatively high, but support for Communists and other left-wing and nationalist groups is unaccountably strengthening. Here the ticklish process of conversion from defense to civilian production depends particularly stringently on political stability and a functioning government.

“The schism between Yeltsin and the Parliament--that’s not important,” says Vladimir D. Dronov, director of the Tula Combine Factory, the enormous employer of 10,000 workers who manufacture more than 100 products, ranging from shovels and rakes to oxygen torches and harvesting machines. “But the fact that it has exacerbated the schism in the bureaucratic apparatus, that’s frightening. That the organs of state authority aren’t functioning, that’s sickening.”

Comments like these illustrate how much Moscow’s stagnation disquiets the power structure outside the “ring”--Moscow’s equivalent of the Washington Beltway.

Tula residents, or Tulyaks, queried on the street express the same indifference to the political spectacle as people in Moscow (“What could it have to do with us?” asks Valentina Voronina, on her way home from her defense factory job one recent night), but business and political leaders know more is at stake.

“Here we have always had very talented people working,” says Ivan P. Khudyakov, chairman of the local city council, or soviet. “If we lose (stability), what will be destroyed is a great deal of scientific and research potential.”

Separated from Moscow by 120 miles of Russian birch forest, Tula for centuries has had a special, even privileged, relationship with the central power. It has long been known as a center of metallurgical craftsmanship, of samovars for example.

Its other notable product is arms. Czar Peter the Great founded Tula’s armaments factory in 1712, and about 80% of the area’s industrial base is still defense-oriented. (Until 1991, the city and surrounding region were officially closed to foreigners.)

Alexander G. Yermakov, editor of Tula Izvestia, the leading local newspaper, notes that at this past summer’s international arms bazaar in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, fully 70% of the Russian merchandise for sale was manufactured in the Tula area.

Also tying Tula to the defense Establishment is the base for the country’s elite paratroopers, on the edge of town; Russian Defense Minister Pavel S. Grachev, who issued the anti-coup counter orders to the unit in 1991 and today would lead any military crackdown on Parliament supporters, is a former commander of the unit and a native of Tula itself.

“Tula needs Yeltsin because he connives with the arms sales,” Yermakov says. Beyond that, he says, its traditionally well-off, highly qualified work force is “accustomed to stability.”

There has been little surface reaction here to Yeltsin’s dissolution of Russia’s hostile Parliament last week, his call for new parliamentary elections in December and the resultant standoff with leading lawmakers.

On a few nights there have been small pro-Communist rallies next to the city’s Lenin monument, a towering bronze figure glowering across a vacant concrete square at a 17th-Century church with four jet-black onion-shaped domes. Locals describe the rallies as modest affairs of a hundred or so people, mostly the aged and infirm.

But inside the government building behind Lenin, and on factory floors and in offices across the district, dread at the continuing uncertainty is more pronounced.

Aides to Nikolai A. Matveyev, Yeltsin’s appointed representative to the local government, have set up what resembles a war room, presumably aimed at organizing for the December elections. So far they have done little but fill up Matveyev’s anteroom with cigarette smoke and issue manifestoes of support for Yeltsin, whose photographs line the walls.

Two floors above is the office of Khudyakov, a former Communist Party apparatchik who made a polished transition to post-Communist local government. “What’s going on in Moscow makes us uneasy and disturbed,” says Khudyakov, who treads carefully between the opposing bodies in Moscow.

After Yeltsin’s order last week, the local soviet approved a resolution calling for simultaneous new elections for the president and Parliament, a plan being increasingly mentioned as a way out of the conflict. Neutral as the proposal might appear, it defies the wishes of Yeltsin, who is insisting that presidential elections follow parliamentary balloting by six months.

Khudyakov, who says he was a Yeltsin supporter as recently as six months ago, confirms that the resolution is an expression of doubt in the president’s leadership.

“He’s got to work with the deputies who are elected, whether he likes them or not,” he says. “Even if there are new elections, the voters might elect people who once again don’t please the president. It will be endless.”

Not everyone believes that the soviet was motivated by support for democracy.

“There was never any doubt that the local soviets wouldn’t support Yeltsin,” says Yermakov, the Tula editor, with a laugh. “Their fear is, today the Supreme Soviet, tomorrow us”--that Yeltsin will move to dissolve the local councils next.

“This is not a very influential structure,” he says dismissively. “If the top deputies (in Moscow) are just concerned with their material interest, the locals are interested only in their status.”

The most important element of that, he explains, is legislative immunity, which prevents legal interference with the deputies for almost any crime. In Tula this has extended even to homicide; a year ago a drunken local deputy ran over and killed two pedestrians with his car. To date he has not been tried.

While such politicians maneuver to preserve their perquisites, industrial managers like Dronov, the combine factory director, can only fume and accommodate themselves to the deteriorating central order.

To Dronov, a big florid man with wild hair and a short temper, Yeltsin’s claims to be acting for the greater good of Russia are “demagoguery” and the parliamentary camp’s ability to better manage the country nonexistent.

“Pick anyone from productive management and he could run the country 10 times better,” he says. “Important questions are moved to the back burner. When we talk about reforms, what reforms? Privatization? That just allows the mafiosi to take over. The budget? What budget, when only 30% of taxes get collected?”

Dronov’s factory has suffered so much from non-payment for government equipment orders that its cash flow is dwindling. He is contemplating turning to barter. “It’s an older system, a Marxist variant, and it’s outrageous, but what else is there? We simply haven’t managed to accomplish anything.”