Uneasy Russian Voters Badger Reformers as Election Nears

Five men running for Parliament faced a demanding audience: 700 people in a town crippled by the demise of its military electronics factory. It wasn’t long before the debate turned nasty.

“The state cannot keep pouring money into dying enterprises,” argued Oleg I. Novikov, the only candidate on the stage in favor of President Boris N. Yeltsin’s free-market reforms. “Better to take that money and give it directly to the unemployed.”

“Your time is up!” snapped a voice in the packed auditorium, which erupted against the candidate.

“Let him speak,” insisted the moderator, tapping on a water glass. “Let him clarify himself.”

“It’s all clear to us,” another heckler shouted. “Make him sit down!”

Such outbursts, which greet Novikov wherever he campaigns, have democratic reformers on the defensive as Russia prepares for its first post-Communist election Sunday.

Urban voters seething over factory layoffs, high inflation, shrinking wages and dim futures appear unwilling to give them a clear majority in Russia’s new two-house legislature.

According to surveys of Moscow voters, the Communists, centrists and hard-line nationalists who dominated the Soviet-era Parliament that Yeltsin dissolved could gain enough seats in the new Duma and Federation Council to continue stalling his 2-year-old free-market program.

The outlook for reformers is even worse here in Election District 114, embracing five high-tech industrial suburbs northeast of Moscow.

Although Novikov is the only reform candidate on the local ballot, his supporters doubt that he will get even a fourth of the vote.

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District 114, with 500,000 voters, is a revealing window on the national campaign, resembling any one of scores of urban areas across Russia that depend on a single, threatened industry.

Two of every five voters here work in factories hit hard by the cuts in government spending on military and space programs.

Istok, the chief employer in Fryazino and largest radio-electronics plant in Russia, has lost or laid off 3,000 out of 11,500 workers. Its top engineers now earn about $50 a month, several times less than a bricklayer makes.

Here, as in the whole of Russia, more than half the voters endorsed Yeltsin and his reform policies in a referendum last April, when his adversary was a Parliament identified with the old order.

But in this election, voters associate “reform” not so much with Yeltsin, who is not on the ballot, as with Yegor T. Gaidar, the controversial advocate of economic “shock therapy” and leader of the pro-Yeltsin party Russia’s Choice.

And they don’t want any more of it here.

“I hate shocks,” said Galina V. Pynti, 47, an engineer at the Energiya complex in nearby Kaliningrad, which made the booster rockets for Russia’s now-grounded space shuttle. “I like the way they are making changes in China--gradually and calmly.”

Attitudes like hers work against Novikov, a Moscow economist seeking the district’s Duma seat as the Russia’s Choice candidate.

He still has a chance, because five rivals will split the opposition vote, but three of them are far better known to voters.

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Alexei N. Adrov, a former Energiya employee who represented Kaliningrad in the old Parliament, is backed by Civic Union, a national pro-industry party. Nikolai P. Pashin, mayor of nearby Shchyolkovo, is an independent candidate with strong Communist support.

Each is expected to carry his home suburb.

A third rival, Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, has stolen the show at a series of debates across the district. He is the only national figure in this suburban race, an extreme right-wing nationalist who promises to revive Russia as a military superpower--boosting the local defense plants with it.

The debates have filled union halls and cultural centers with agitated voters, a large number of them elderly, complaining about high taxes, rising crime and shriveling pensions.

The moderator in the Fryazino contest had to come down from the stage to break up a fistfight between two men.

Some in the audience have come away leaning toward a candidate, others disillusioned and uncertain whether to vote at all.

“The politicians do not care about people like me and my children,” said Yelena G. Alexandrova, a housing construction designer in Fryazino.

“All they do is make experiments, trying one economic model after another. We are just guinea pigs. . . . None of the candidates can solve this crisis.”

Deep inside Istok, in Workshop 34, three women in white dust coats gather around a radio to listen to the debates. They are now the entire night shift of an assembly brigade shrunken from 23 to 11, but there still is not enough work to keep them busy.

Politics is as opaque to them as the milk carton-sized electronic amplifiers that they are paid to assemble and test as components for some kind of lethal weapon. All three backed Yeltsin in the referendum, but now they believe that he betrayed them by failing to turn the economy around.

“We have no more trust, only fear,” said Lyubov Komaricheva, who came to work for Istok in 1984. “We got used to a life that could be planned years in advance. Now we’re afraid for our jobs. There’s nothing else here. Moscow is two hours by bus. Only people with no children can commute to work there.”

Istok has begun making hearing aids and other civilian products, but its future depends on issues left unsettled during Yeltsin’s battle with the old Parliament. Novikov and other reformers want to phase out the credit subsidies that keep Istok afloat, split it into several companies and sell them to private investors.

Alexander N. Korolyov, general director of Istok, worries that such plans leave too much too soon to market forces.

He would rather see “calm centrist forces” keep the plant intact, shore up its production and then ease it away from state control.

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“Why does it have to be either communism or wild capitalism?” he asked in an interview in his spacious office, dominated by a white bust of Lenin. “The whole world is looking for a golden mean. Capitalism is different in every country. Russia should have its own brand.”

Opposition candidates echo this rhetoric, without specifying how Russia can keep supporting what is left of its giant military-industrial complex.

Adrov, of the centrist Civic Union, insists on rejecting any advice on this subject from the International Monetary Fund.

He also hammers away at the Yeltsin government for yielding to U.S. pressure last summer when it canceled a sale to India of Russian boosters and rocket-making technology worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

His debating points win applause from Russia’s frustrated scientific elite.

“We are the brains of our nation, so why doesn’t the state appreciate us?” asked Alexander A. Mitaklev, a 36-year-old physicist who makes $80 a month at Energiya.

Novikov, the reform candidate, is discouraged by the debates, which he calls a “total waste of effort” for him. But a few in the audience end up agreeing with him.

“He’s right. There is no simple way to improve our work and our life,” said Pyotr S. Platonov, 40, an engineer at Energiya.

“There is no spare money. It cannot come from anywhere but our own hard work.”