Russian Psyche Is Slowly Shedding Soviet Shackles : Reforms: Eight years after <i> glasnost</i> , independence of mind is taking root. But nostalgia for old order remains.

“I squeeze the slave out of myself drop by drop.”

-- Anton Chekhov

Tatyana A. Yegorova used to epitomize the surliness, sloth and inefficiency for which the Soviet worker was infamous.

Spare parts could never seem to be retrieved from the storeroom she supervised at the Neftemash pump-manufacturing plant. According to her boss, the prevailing attitude among the workers was, “That’s not my job,” “Why should I work more than everyone else?” and “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

Yegorova is disturbed by the changes that have swept Russia in the three years since a failed coup shattered the Soviet Union. Yet on the job, she embraces a new work ethic. She and her clerks recently asked for a computer to help keep track of their inventory.

“I don’t do things sloppily at home,” Yegorova said. “Now I’ve started doing things at work like I do them at home.”

Eight years after glasnost began cracking the rigid Soviet system, the historic changes in Russia’s economy and political life are hard to miss. And beneath the skin of this deeply troubled society, an equally profound and painful process is gradually reshaping the psyche of Russia’s people.

In Saratov, a 16th-Century merchant city on the banks of the Volga River, Soviet-think is fading. But the residual Soviet mentality still slows reform. Thousands of workers at the city’s mammoth, dying defense plants cling to their jobs--though they have not worked or been paid for months--hoping that the state will bail them out.

Many Russians feel suddenly vulnerable as they realize that their government will no longer provide the sweeping social guarantees that Soviet citizens considered a birthright. Gone is the totalitarian state that supervised everything from how many pumps Neftemash manufactured to what Yegorova’s son did in Communist Party-sponsored summer camp--a state that also promised lifelong security in return for unquestioning obedience to the system.

Into the power vacuum left by the party have rushed despotic local authorities, tyrannical bureaucrats and predatory mobsters. All three exploit the legal and psychological weaknesses of a people trained for centuries to bow before the strong.

Nevertheless, the independence of mind that is an essential prerequisite for real self-rule is slowly taking root.

“If you create the conditions for initiative, you will get it,” said Andrei A. Laptev, a former economics professor who is Neftemash’s deputy director for economics. “Initiative was always there, but people just got frustrated and gave up.”

In an effort to boost productivity, the factory is introducing a system of merit pay based on performance reviews. Managers are attending evening classes in free-market business administration.

The change-or-die attitude took hold as the factory’s work force shrank from 1,200 to 900, Laptev said. Goaded by a pro-market management, its workers realized that the lovely socialist job guarantees were meaningless and that the Russian government is too broke to bail out failing factories even if it wants to.

Although most workers have adapted, Laptev said, Yegorova and her colleagues say their lives have become much more stressful, financially and psychologically.

Yegorova, an ample, gentle-faced 45-year-old, says life was better under communism. She can vote now and feels free to voice political opinions with impunity. But she says the new freedoms have not given her the power to exercise real control over her life.

To Yegorova, freedom would mean being able to walk the streets at night without fear and being able to buy what she needs at the market without counting her kopecks.

She is now a shareholder in her factory, which sells its pumps to the oil and gas industry. But she is also her family’s sole breadwinner, because her husband and son have been laid off.

“I felt freer before,” Yegorova said. “I can’t travel. I have no money. I can’t go out on the street at night. And I can’t afford to buy anything. I have to suppress myself all the time now.”

Neither Laptev, the reformist manager, nor Yegorova, the worker forced to reform, would turn the clock back. But Yegorova did admit to being nostalgic for a time when everything seemed simpler.

“Under Big Brother, all of life was arranged so that you had no real choice,” said educator Mikhail V. Klarin. “Now that the strict regulations are being lifted, many people are at a loss. People say: ‘At least before, we knew what was good and what was bad. Now we have no guidelines. . . . We don’t know what to do.’ ”

In fact, though Big Brother is dead, his legacy lingers in the hearts and minds of many Russians. Dismantling the Soviet system means not only establishing civil and economic freedom but also freeing people from the psychologically paralyzing habits of totalitarianism.

In Moscow, it is now common to assert, with all the intense gloom that the Russian intellectual can muster, that it will take generations to purge society of its fatalism, apathy, fear, envy, lack of personal initiative and slavish obedience to authority. Those attitudes were essential to survive under the czarist and Soviet systems, but they hobble Russia’s development today, observers say.

“The way out of slavery to freedom is just as difficult as the road from freedom to slavery,” said psychiatrist and author Aron I. Belkin. “Deep in our hearts, we remain slaves of totalitarianism, just as in the past. . . .

“Moreover, the people don’t want to leave slavery,” he said. “They liked it. Someone else thought for you. You were not paid much, but at the same time, nothing special was demanded of you.”

Despite its collectivist tradition, post-Soviet Russia has embraced individual rights and Western values in theory. But it has not yet sorted out just how much unbridled individualism it can stand.

“Today, there is freedom for speculators, freedom for gangsters, freedom for destroyers,” nationalist painter Ilya Glazunov said in an interview from his antiques- and icon-crammed studio in Moscow. Sounding a persistent theme of the Russian right, the controversial artist warned that whatever Russian spiritual grandeur survived communism is now being corrupted by a malevolent wave of Western consumer culture.

“We are becoming a colony of America,” Glazunov said.

This view is not mainstream. But across Russia, people are arguing about whether freedom has a downside. Clearly, the collapse of communism has triggered a crisis of values.

All that the Soviet Union considered evil--greed, conspicuous consumption, commercialism and the glorification of the individual over the collective good--is suddenly in vogue, people complain.

All that was seen as noble--idealism, disdain for money, egalitarianism and self-sacrifice in order to build a just, communist society--now seems naive and dated.

People wail that what was billed as “freedom” has degenerated into a free-for-all. Those willing to break the law and trample their comrades get rich quick, they say, while “decent, modest, law-abiding” people have grown poorer and more powerless.

Still, in Saratov, a city in the spiritual and economic heart of Russia, the mood is less gloomy than these generalizations would suggest. In this provincial capital far from Moscow, people have been forced to fend for themselves. The sense of self-reliance is palpable.

“I don’t think that we, like the Jews, need to wander for 40 years in the desert--having first created the desert for ourselves,” said Alexei I. Slapovsky, a novelist and dramatist who has experienced a surge of personal creativity and success since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“I have seen an amazing ability to change, even among the older generation.”

Just three years ago, when food was in short supply and what little there was in the state stores was often rotting, clerks used to berate buyers who tried to rummage through the vegetable bins for decent carrots.

“You want to take all the best ones for yourself!” a saleswoman would snap indignantly. “What am I going to give the next person?”

For 70 years, a communal ethos of “share and suffer alike” meant that a person who openly pursued individual interests--even in putting palatable food on the table--was considered selfish, shameless, even antisocial.

Today, Saratov’s markets are overflowing with fresh food. Customers now scurry from stall to stall to find the least exorbitant prices. Buyers can haggle, and bruised fruit sells at a discount.

Saratov is a conservative city that was closed tight to foreigners until 1992. Ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky was the top vote-getter here in the 1993 parliamentary elections, and a local candidate who promised to protect ethnic Russians from darker-skinned traders from the Caucasus also won handily.

These ethnic and political tensions are more subtle than the riot of color, smell, grime, crime and hustle that has made the city livelier--and more dangerous.

Along the city’s main strolling arcade, dozens of private stores are thriving. The traditional unmitigated Russian contempt for “speculators”--a term that has come to mean anyone who sells what he has not made himself and is applied with special contempt to non-Russians--does not stop people from snapping up the shops’ wares.

Despite Saratov’s economic woes, business on the main street is booming. There is an Yves Rocher French cosmetics store, a Swiss snack shop, a private art gallery--and the smell of unabashed commercialism in the air.

Casinos have opened up along the beaches of the Volga, where vacationing businessmen sip imported beer and deafen themselves with mega-decibel American rap music.

And in downtown Saratov, a newly consecrated Russian Orthodox nun has set up a small shop of religious materials in the center of a store that sells the consumer wares now produced by Saratov’s aviation and defense plants.

Customers peruse Mother Yefrosiniya’s collection of icons, Bibles and prayer books before walking over to see whether Saratov’s own rototillers, coffee grinders, microwave ovens and toasters are a better buy than the Japanese- and South Korean-made goods that have recently flooded the city.

Selling icons is a job for which Mother Yefrosiniya is uniquely qualified. For 34 years, she was a saleswoman in a food store. Now her profits go to rebuild her convent and restore Saratov’s churches, one of which had been turned into a planetarium.

Mother Yefrosiniya’s son is a police captain and nonbeliever. To his mother, freedom came with the knowledge that her decision to become a nun would no longer pose a threat to his career.

Freedom of religion, speech and travel are now treated as matter-of-fact. So is intellectual freedom, a precious commodity in a city that boasts a rich pre-revolutionary tradition of art, theater, scholarship and belles-lettres.

At Saratov’s 110-year-old Radishchev Art Museum, Yefim I. Vodonos, curator of the Russian art collection, has no nostalgia for the old regime.

He recalls a museum director who was driven from his job in the bad old days for trying to force his curators to work.

Flouting the Soviet maxim “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us,” the director wanted his staff “not just to show up at their desks, but to write lectures, to give tours,” Vodonos said. The put-upon proletariat quickly conspired to have the boss ousted.

Vodonos grouses that this anti-work ethic persists at the museum today. But to him, what matters more is that he can now display his religious art, his Impressionist collection and even several paintings by Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, works that were politically incorrect and once even slated for destruction.

Still, Saratov’s people scoff at the notion that the civil rights and liberties “guaranteed” by the 8-month-old Russian constitution will be implemented anytime soon.

They still believe their telephones are tapped, though they wonder whether the revamped KGB has the manpower to listen to the conversations. They complain that gangsters are growing stronger, that the government is corrupt and unresponsive, that the bureaucratic mind is impossible to change.

But life goes on in spite of the government, the bureaucrats and the mob. Emboldened, more and more people ignore or defy them. And this is perhaps the most profound psychological change of all in a nation with a thousand-year tradition of autocracy.

Russians must still be wary of another ancient tradition, though: the envy of their neighbors.

When writer Slapovsky won an international literary award last year, he was stunned that the prize money was enough to buy the ultimate international capitalist status symbol: a Mercedes-Benz. Then he realized that the mob would quickly take it away from him. So he has nicknamed his old bicycle “my Mercedes.”

“Life has become multicolored, in the good and the bad sense,” he said. “Our lives have widened.”

With no more Communist Party to skewer, Slapovsky has turned to poking fun at the foibles of the Russian nouveaux riches . He likes to mock their penchant for such English words as OK , office and racketeer , ideas for which the Russian language already has a fine lexicon.

“What is funny is the hurry we are in,” he said. “We are in a great hurry to become something other than what we are. . . .

“Of course it is dangerous to betray oneself,” he added. “But one must change every day.”