Changing Lifestyles : Spring Brings Little Hope to Blockaded Armenians : Caught between the 20th Century and the Middle Ages, they feed sofas and desks to their wood-burning stoves. Still, they cling to grim humor.

Four-year-old Maysik Shakhbazian was lying in bed with his grandmother one night and looking up at the bright full moon. As usual, there was no heat or light in the Yerevan apartment where he lives.

“See how pretty the moon is,” his grandmother said.

Suddenly, Maysik had an inspiration.

“Grandmother,” he asked, “isn’t there some way we could lay an electricity line to it?”

Maysik was not just fantasizing. He was imitating his elders, his young head already at work on how to ease his family’s daily grind in a heatless, dim-lit, penny-poor world.

As Armenia has come through its third winter of misery into a tentative spring, inhabitants of the former Soviet republic seem to have reconciled themselves to the depressing prospect that more privations are all that awaits them.

There is no end in sight to the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, the small Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, nor to the hostility between Armenia and Azerbaijan. That means there will be no lifting of the Azerbaijani blockade aimed at bringing Armenia’s economy to its knees, particularly its energy sector. Turkey, Azerbaijan’s ally, lets virtually no supplies through and Armenia’s other neighbor, Georgia, is so anarchic that supply routes there are chancy at best.

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Many Yerevan residents who hoped initially that life would soon return to normal now believe that they will spend the next several winters without heat and light. Instead of looking forward to the end of this tunnel, they focus on coping, refining the art of survival in a world caught somewhere between the 20th Century and the Middle Ages.

Maysik knew about electricity lines, for example, because of the widespread practice in Yerevan of stringing a line “on the left” between neighboring apartment houses. When the power company gives one apartment block its hour or two of electricity per day, friends in a neighboring house can siphon off some of the juice for themselves through a pirate line. Government workers come around tearing down the illegal lines periodically, but they soon sprout again.

Although they live in central Yerevan, a city of about 1 million residents, the Shakhbazians also have a wood-burning stove that has already turned their creamy new wallpaper a dingy gray. And they have a gasoline-powered generator that allows them to keep one light and a television--a small one, the big one takes too much power--running in the evenings.

Their neighbor, Lilia Azatian, 52, is not so lucky. She comes by once or twice a week to escape reality by watching American soap operas on the Shakhbazians’ little television because she has no generator and no illegal line at home.

A doctor who has done administrative work for the last two decades, Azatian heated her home this winter mainly by burning unneeded documents from work. She and her two grown children, a 22-year-old daughter and 24-year-old son, all slept in the same big bed for warmth. Her ailing mother also slept in the same room, near the stove.

“We don’t manage, we just exist,” Azatian said.

The Armenian government, adjusting to its chronic energy crisis, managed to prepare special fuel supplies this winter for hospitals, bakeries, communications centers and other strategic facilities. It also hopes to restart Armenia’s nuclear power plant within the next year. It was shut down in 1989 for safety concerns. But for now, most individuals are on their own.

“My salary is enough for one pound of cheese,” Azatian calculated. “I’ve hoarded everything from the past--oil, soap, toilet paper, napkins--and the consignment store helps. I’ve sold crystal glasses and some plates,” as well as some of her clothing.

This winter, the Azatians chopped up and burned a desk and a chest. Last winter, they fed a sofa to the wood stove.

“Now I’m gathering paper again for next year,” Azatian said. “The situation probably won’t change.”

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According to a report by the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Armenian households were caught even less prepared for winter this year than last. The median amount of food stores was 30% lower compared to the year before, although very little serious malnutrition has shown up.

“The most important coping method among households during last winter was sharing available resources with relatives, friends and neighbors,” the report said. But this winter, it said, resources were so tight there was far less to share.

The average stores of food, it found, were about 15 pounds of flour per household, less than half what they were in the winter of 1992-1993. Subsidized bread is rationed at about half a loaf daily per person--although more is available at market price.

The shortages of everything have spawned a Yerevan joke that if a guest comes to your home uninvited, he’s considered a racketeer; if you’ve offered an invitation, it’s considered humanitarian aid. Humanitarian groups provide some fuel and food, with millions of dollars worth of kerosene funded by the U.S. government and the United Armenia Fund, but families like Azatian’s do not qualify for much of it--she is considered well-off compared to elderly people without families and single mothers of young children. Gift packages from relatives abroad help a bit.

In contrast to the Soviet period, the greatest shortage of all is money--the new Armenian currency known as the dram, exchanged at about 200 to the dollar. Maysik’s mother is still on extended maternity leave after giving birth to his younger sister and is expected to make ends meet on a government maternity payment of 100 drams--50 cents--a month.

“Here’s a hundred drams--that’s what my mother gets for her monthly pension,” said Samvel Hovannisian, a cousin visiting the Shakhbazians. “A pack of cigarettes costs more than that.”

But his mother gets by, Hovannisian said, because he supports her with his business earnings.

And that, said Maysik’s grandfather, Martin, is how it is done: “You either do business or sell what’s at home.”

One family of the Shakhbazians’ acquaintance is doing business on just $100--they lend the money out repeatedly and live on the interest. Others try to import candy bars or cigarettes or whatever they can, but the market is weak--the CDC said 94% of the population is considered below the international poverty line.

Still--the Shakhbazians say, sighing--they do have each other.

“We just get together and talk and that’s our main happiness,” Azatian said. No one goes to the theater anymore, or the movies or restaurants--but they still have the entertainment they make for themselves, even if it is only sitting around discussing their misery. And an unsinkable sense of humor--with jokes stemming even from the cold darkness of their lives.

Winters have become so miserable, Maysik’s grandfather, Martin, said, that they have spawned a new saying: “You count your chicks in the fall, to see which have survived, and you count Armenians in the spring.”