FAMILIES : Russia : Post-Soviet Poverty Brings More Pressure to Daily Life : The Yakusheviches of Moscow dream of a future for their children that their pocketbooks, drained by the nation’s economic crises, cannot afford.

Nastya is back from summer camp and looking for work--any job a restless Russian eighth-grader can do. She needs pocket money for a transcontinental bus trip and the opportunity for three weeks as a house guest in France. Her mother helps scan the want ads.

Teen-agers crisscross Europe every summer, but Nastya’s school-sponsored excursion will be a first. No member of her family ever ventured outside the Soviet Union or the post-Soviet borders. So her parents are treating her journey next month as a mission.

“I want her to understand that, whether it’s France or England, ordinary people live there,” her mother told a dinner guest as 13-year-old Nastya beamed over her salad. “I want her to be able to communicate with kids of other countries her own age, without inhibitions.”

Blocked for generations by the Iron Curtain, foreign travel now has become a popular and valued opportunity for Russian families of all classes. Mediterranean resorts from the Canary Islands to Cyprus are crowded this summer with free-spending Russian tourists.

But for Natalia and Viktor Yakushevich, whose combined income is $300 a month, their daughter’s invitation to a French village near the Belgian border spurred weeks of debate about basic values in a well-educated but downwardly mobile family--and the enormous sacrifice required to send her.

Viktor, 43, is a computer programmer with an engineering degree and a supervisory job with the Russian space agency. Natalia, 41, is deputy director of a Moscow district library system with 22 branches. Their older child, Sergei, 18, who wears his father’s somber expression, studies land management at a technical college.

They are a fairly typical Moscow family--one of the seven of every 10 that cannot afford to dine in a restaurant even once a year. Their slide toward poverty is heartbreaking but not uncommon in Russia--the result of collapsing government salaries, high inflation and economic uncertainty.

“Every family is unhappy in its own way,” says Natalia, quoting the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. In 19 years of marriage, her family has been deprived of one modest pleasure after another--seaside summer vacations, concerts, plays, soccer matches.

A few years ago, Viktor ventured into Russia’s free market, producing lamps and plastic toys until changing tax regulations erased profits. Unwilling to bend laws for profit, Viktor returned to the stable poverty of state employment.

Viktor and Natalia live in the small two-bedroom apartment of his late parents. After having two children, their goal, the couple dreamed of a country home, and the dream appeared to come true when Natalia inherited her grandmother’s home. But, resorting to a common post-Soviet vice, an aunt who coveted the property hired thugs in army uniforms to beat Viktor with tire irons and run his family off. They haven’t been back.

The couple absorbs these setbacks better than most by sharing in the important decisions--and simply sticking together in a country where 47% of all marriages end in divorce. As in a growing number of families, they cope as a small unit--with little help from grandparents or outsiders.

A stroke disabled Natalia’s mother two months into their marriage, and Viktor’s mother died two years later. Without a babushka around, Natalia took a job in a library a short walk from home so she could keep an eye on her children.

The only surviving grandparent, Natalia’s 72-year-old father, has his own Moscow apartment but lives in the suburbs with a new wife. He plays a peripheral role in the family and that’s fine with Natalia, who disapproves of his nostalgia for Soviet Communism.

But the Yakusheviches have agreed that their son will eventually move into the grandfather’s apartment, help look after him and drive his Ukrainian-made compact--the family’s only car.

The strongest external force in the family is Natalia’s Christian faith, absorbed from her grandmother. She credits a Russian Orthodox priest with helping her decide two years ago to take a job promotion that would take her far from home, leaving Sergei and Nastya on their own more often.

Her husband backed her. They strung house keys from the children’s necks and laid out a pay scale for the children’s help with the housework. Later came a system of rewards for good grades.

Natalia agreed to let her daughter go to France because it reminded her of a chance she blew 22 years ago. Then a university student, she had written a prize philosophy thesis and earned passage to a seminar in Finland. But a Communist Party screening panel canceled the trip when Natalia, under questioning, forgot the name of a Politburo member.

Nastya also earned her ticket; only the best 25 students out of 70 applicants were eligible to go to France. “They didn’t ask me about the Politburo,” she joked.

But the journey will cost $400, plus the expense of her family hosting a French exchange student next summer. Nastya had to persuade her father, who controls the purse strings and was scraping to save for a personal computer so he could moonlight by marketing his own programs, to put up money.

Viktor borrowed money for Nastya’s trip--a debt he figures will take a year or more to repay.

“The decision weighed financially on everyone,” Natalia added. “Everybody expressed his or her opinion . . . .”

“There was no vote, but the decision was unanimous,” Sergei said. “In the best Communist tradition!”

The joke led his parents into a disagreement about the past decade of changes--an ongoing debate certain to shape the children’s own expectations in the new Russia.

“It’s one of the few victories of perestroika that we became more relaxed and free to talk to foreigners,” Viktor said. “But there were far more defeats than victories.”

“More victories are in store for us,” Natalia countered. “All revolutions are painful, but my children will be more independent, more self-sufficient, freer. They will understand that no matter what happens in this society, there are parents and grandparents, and we are not to blame for the fact that we lived in another country, in another time.”

Profile

* Husband: Viktor Yakushevich, 43

* Wife: Natalia, 41

* Home: Small apartment in Moscow

* Father’s occupation: Computer programmer

* Mother’s occupation: Library system official

* Annual Income: $3,600