COLUMN ONE : Russians Try to Help Themselves : Fed up with government paralysis, citizens groups take on child abuse, pollution and other problems. They are seen as vital to democracy, but their survival is tied to precarious U.S. aid.

Svetlana Lobayeva is a young Russian with a bold new cause. Touring high schools in this rough industrial city, the 21-year-old law student lectures teen-agers in a matter-of-fact tone on how to take their mothers and fathers to court.

As a teen-ager herself, she saw too many peers land in the street, abused or abandoned by their parents.

The numbers are growing, she says, because of desperate alcoholics who sell their apartments--which until recently belonged to the state--and run off with the money, leaving their families homeless.

Appalled by police inaction and haunted by the death of an orphaned friend, Lobayeva last year joined Chance, a new organization here that offers free legal advice and serves as an advocate for children in need.

“We live for the orphans of the new Russia,” she says. “This is the calling of our souls.”

Chance is one of thousands of private initiatives that have sprung from the ruins of the Soviet Union to confront problems with which its successors--Russia’s weakened state and wild free market--cannot cope.

Borrowing from Western traditions of volunteerism, a society mired in decades of passivity is spawning grass-roots civic groups to provide services and fight for causes as broad as clean air and as narrow as “rescuing” people brainwashed by cults. Even anarchists boast several organizations.

Many Russian intellectuals say the country’s democratic future depends more on this “civil society”--independent institutions that help people solve each other’s problems and make their will known to officials--than on political parties and private enterprises. Without it, they argue, Russia can never fully escape the totalitarian past.

But as the U.S. Congress prepares to slash aid programs that foster these institutions’ growth, Russians and Americans involved in the movement caution that it is still small, financially weak and dependent on U.S. money.

“Russia has never had a civil society. It’s a radical idea here--far more complicated than voting or counting money,” says sociologist Vladimir Kharitonov of Yekaterinburg’s Independent Institute of Humanitarian Practice. “Many of these groups are no more than a year old and do not wield much clout. But new people are emerging and moving in the right direction.”

Russia has about 30,000 non-government, nonprofit organizations, including 6,000 charities. Two laws signed this year by President Boris N. Yeltsin enshrine their right to exist without government license, to rent offices, to open bank accounts and to petition authorities.

Some are high-profile, such as the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, whose members went to Chechnya last winter to drag their sons home from war; others, including rape crisis centers in nine cities, deal quietly with private emergencies. Civic organizations have telephone hot lines, radio call-in shows and slick publications such as Spros, a magazine modeled on Consumer Reports. Many talk to each other and to foreign partners using e-mail.

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While Moscow and St. Petersburg lead this movement, the activity in Yekaterinburg, a Ural Mountain mining and industrial center of 1.4 million people, indicates how deeply it is penetrating the heartland.

Off limits to outsiders until 1990, Russia’s fifth-largest city has opened up, drawing $3.7 million worth of U.S. grants, technical assistance and advisers to private groups. All this makes Yekaterinburg something of a Eurasian classroom for the ABCs of U.S. civics--how to form an action group, recruit members, raise funds and lobby.

City Hall counts 1,222 local civic groups, including ones for women filmmakers, dog breeders and historians probing the 1918 execution here of Russia’s last czar.

About 130 help the homeless, the addicted, the disabled and other unfortunates, delivering social services neglected by the state.

“The most interesting ideas for solving the city’s problems come from these groups, not from government,” says Oleg Kuzmin, who publishes a local newsletter on grass-roots activity for 200 subscribers.

Links to Government

In Soviet times, Russians could join chess clubs, sports leagues, labor unions, professional guilds and other social organizations. Most were creatures of the Communist Party and enforcers of its social codes.

As the party weakened in the late 1980s, new groups burgeoned from the ground up, often led by dissidents to confront the state. But their ranks thinned after 1991, when the Soviet collapse brought economic hardship and sapped people’s time and energy.

In Yekaterinburg, the grass-roots movement is growing again--more in influence than volume, more as a lobbyist than an adversary of the Soviet-bred politicians still running the city.

Indeed, some of the most effective activists here have one foot in government and one out.

Grigory Tsekher, a hyperactive army veteran of 57 with frizzy gray hair and oversized horn-rimmed glasses, is a colorful example. Bounced from the Communist Party for criticizing the shooting down of a Korean Air Lines passenger jet in 1983, Tsekher got even by exposing corruption in the Soviet food supply system and won election to the City Council in 1990.

Today, he heads a fast-growing private association of 30 consumer credit unions with 5,000 members. He calls them “seeds of self-government” because many provide neighborhood services the city no longer can afford.

He also is deputy director of the city’s consumer protection agency, which is supposed to regulate such credit groups.

Conflict of interests? Not in Tsekher’s mind.

“This is one and the same job,” he says, shrugging, sitting at a City Hall desktop computer that stores his public and private files. “I dedicate all my time to teaching people how the free market works.”

The 2,000-member Urals Assn. of Women is another private group whose clout depends on an official connection. Formed by businesswomen two years ago, it approached Galina Karelova, a member of Russia’s upper house of Parliament, and made her its president. Seven in 10 jobless people in Yekaterinburg are women, many skilled professionals from the shrinking military-industrial complex.

Karelova’s name opens doors for the association’s pet project--retraining those women for the private sector.

Hard-Earned Funding

The project is an exemplary case of private initiative taking over from government: A state agency pays to retrain the jobless, but the men who run it offer women only courses in sewing and massage. Dismayed by such narrow options, the association has coaxed tens of thousands of dollars from the agency to teach new skills to 400 women and to help 11 launch businesses.

Chance, the children’s rights group, is the brainchild of Vera Strebizh, a lawyer who works for the city researching youth problems.

Frustrated that her research was being ignored, she set up Chance on her own but persuaded the city to give her free office space and $3,900 to pay eight of her 15 activists. She also got $15,300 from the Washington-based, U.S.-funded Eurasia Foundation to publish two handbooks on minors’ rights.

The results are remarkable.

People come daily to Chance’s nine reception centers with claims of incest, abandonment and other forms of child abuse. Overworked police and prosecutors are reluctant to pursue such cases--until Strebizh’s merciless lobbying sways them.

Chance has won most of the 150 cases it has taken on.

But more important for Russia’s future, Strebizh says, children learn to stand up for their rights: “Kids call on the hot line. This is a breakthrough in the Russian mentality. Adults have no faith in the law, but when kids turn to us they think they can win.”

Despite such bright spots, Yekaterinburg is not exactly a model community.

In recent polls, a tiny fraction of citizens said they belong to associations, 40% said “the mafia” runs the city and 60% said bribery is the only way to influence officials.

Even civic groups lose their way; an Afghan veterans’ club formed to help disabled, jobless members turned from soliciting for charity to shaking down vendors in the markets.

As has happened elsewhere in Russia, disillusionment bred by hardship has deflated the human rights and ecology movements that mobilized crowds and sent activists to Parliament in the Soviet glasnost years.

Both movements are struggling here. Memorial, the leading rights watchdog, depends on U.S.-paid lawyers to counsel draft dodgers. Environmentalists hold futile public hearings against unsafe nuclear power plants.

Gennady Rashchupkin, a physicist, says it is hard for his group, the Urals Ecology Fund, to pin down candidates’ views on the environment and impossible to get its own candidates elected.

“In 1990, we had no money but we had enthusiasm and mass support,” he says. “Then people got accustomed to terrifying facts about the environment and started worrying how to feed themselves. Today, when money makes all the difference in politics, we still don’t have enough. Russia is living by the rules of a consumer society.”

Indeed, the most dynamic groups are those defending the pocketbook--such as the independent trade unions gaining thousands of new members here.

One of the KGB’s successor agencies monitors civic groups and blurts an occasional warning that their U.S. funding threatens Russia’s security.

One city bureaucrat tried, without success, to get all foreign grants channeled through his office.

For the most part, though, civic organizations operate freely--but with little attention from politicians and the public.

No group has a dues-paying membership big enough to finance or elect like-minded candidates, as do many in the West.

One reason is the tendency for two leaders of any organization to fight over its funds. The loser then splits off, forms something new and solicits his or her own money.

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Such limitations do not worry Lena Young, head of a British-based foundation that teaches Russian charities how to raise money.

What’s important, she argues, is that grass-roots activity is developing a generation of independent-minded leaders.

“It helps instill discipline and democratic habits,” Young says. “It may not give them control over the government or control over destiny, but it gives them control over themselves. This is the real revolution in Russia--the inward movement, the individual seeking right within himself.”

Russians involved in the movement speak of a personal mission.

Tamara Alaiba, director of a private school, visited California three years ago, studied nonprofit organizations and “decided it was my duty to go home and start as many as I could . . . make them sprout like mushrooms.”

Today, she works with 20 groups that form the Urals Assn. of Women.

But while U.S. inspiration is still strong, the heyday of U.S. funding is ending. The size of aid cuts looming in the Republican-led Congress is uncertain. But the U.S. Agency for International Development expects little new money for Russian civic groups.

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An American advising grass-roots aid recipients across Russia says: “We’re telling them, ‘U.S. AID is pulling out. There are opportunities now that will be gone two or three years from now [when current funding runs out]. You have to figure out what’s next.’ ”

Looking ahead, Yekaterinburg’s grass-roots leaders have begun joining forces, with each other and the City Council, to try to fill the void with local funding.

A seminar organized in May by Nikolai Geller, a local charity organizer, drew activists from 81 organizations. It inspired legislation, still in the works, to give tax breaks to charities and allocate city funds to nonprofit groups that offer the most needed social services.

But public money is scarce, and civic groups have failed so far to dig deep into the pockets of Russia’s new rich. Capitalists fearful of drawing the attention of racketeers reject the pitch that a charitable donation is good advertising. Others insist that charity is still the state’s domain.

“Try selling a businessman on the idea of social partnership,” Geller complains, “and he’ll tell you, ‘I won’t get anything for my money.’ ”

Attitudes in Yekaterinburg, however, may be changing.

Yevgeny Zyablitsev, a wealthy financier, set up a clothes-for-the-needy foundation to promote his candidacy for regional governor last summer--he finished fifth with 330,000 votes--and kept the charity going to run for Parliament in December.

‘Help Thy Neighbor’

And at City Hall recently, a leading private builder, Vyacheslav Novikov, joined with the Urals Refugees Assn. to offer a plan to shelter 72 of the hundreds of Russian families returning from the Soviet empire’s lost outposts.

Valentina Dmitriyeva, a refugee organizer who spent 27 years as a construction engineer in Uzbekistan, came up with this radical idea: With money it spends to build homes for refugees--a sluggish program with a years-long waiting list--the government should pay Novikov’s company to add a tower to an apartment complex already under way.

Local authorities agreed to pay part of Novikov’s cost. To make up the difference, refugees chosen to live in the tower will donate their labor and the builder will absorb some loss.

“These are our people,” Novikov says. “They are victims of wars and ethnic discrimination. They came home to Mother Russia. It says in the Bible, help thy neighbor.”