For Russia’s New Cross-Border Traders, Yeltsin’s the One

Poring over the silk shirts, knockoff designer sunglasses and stuffed toys at Beijing’s bustling Ritan Market are the people who could return Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin to power.

They are called “shuttle traders” back home, where they peddle at a handsome profit the cheap clothing and trinkets they collect on trips to China, Dubai, Turkey and Greece.

While the sentiment among voters in the Russian heartland argues against voting for the status quo in the June 16 presidential election, those taking advantage of open borders to seek their fortunes in the shuttle trade are virtually unanimous in their support for the embattled Yeltsin.

“I had a fairly good life during the Communist era, but I live even better now,” said Marina Sakyan, a modern Russian version of a department store buyer. “The difference now is that those of us who have the incentive to work get the rewards of a bigger income, while those who just sit around all day are having a tough time.”

Her companion on this shopping trip for summer clothes to sell back in Volgograd, known as Stalingrad during the Soviet years, agreed that a return to communism would be the death knell for their thriving business.

“We try to talk some sense into our friends and relatives at home, but many of them are having a hard time in this transition,” said Amalia Tishenko, who is more sympathetic than Sakyan toward those struggling to get by on the untamed frontier of capitalism. “They think they can vote themselves back into the past, which makes us very afraid of the possibility of a Communist victory.”

Yeltsin is running for his political life behind the Communist candidate, Gennady A. Zyuganov, although the incumbent’s recent spree of summits and state visits, including one to this Chinese capital, may have helped lift him to within striking distance of the front-runner with less than seven weeks to go.

Russians in big cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg are expected to back Yeltsin and his unfinished work toward a market economy. But the poorer provinces are being swept by a wave of nostalgia for the meager--some would say imagined--security of the Communist era.

While the suffering in the heartland is reflected in polls, the voting preferences of the shuttle traders are not. The self-made business people who number at least in the tens of thousands are seldom at home long enough to be queried.

Every Russian questioned at Ritan Market and at Beijing’s Capitol Airport--en route home with booty--vowed to vote for the candidate these entrepreneurs credit with making it possible for them to escape the drudgery of the past.

“There are a lot of us out here hustling and making a go of it. Only the old people are nostalgic for communism,” said Sasha, a thirtysomething former engineer now making monthly trips to buy clothes and toys for Moscow’s Luzhniki Market. “Communism was a farce. I could have worked my whole life and never been able to buy a car. Now I’ve not only got a car, but a driver.”

Sasha, who did not want to give his last name because few shuttlers operate within the letter of Russia’s repressive trade laws, said he and everyone he knows in business will support Yeltsin because Zyuganov would target their activities to appease those who resent anyone making money.

At least 25,000 Russians have permanent or temporary resident permits in Beijing, and hundreds of thousands cross the border each year to shop for the millions of new boutiques and kiosks across Russia.

Russian citizens in Beijing and elsewhere abroad can vote at their embassies in the June election, and many benefiting from the switch to a market economy say they are confident Yeltsin will win.

“It’s not that we think Yeltsin is the same hero who stood up on a tank five years ago” to defy the 1991 coup attempt by Communist hard-liners, Sasha said as he took a flight back to Moscow with bags stuffed full of toys and swimsuits. “But we have to stick with what we started in this economic transition or we’ll have another collapse.”

Ritan was a small collection of stalls for selling China’s cheap consumer goods until Russia’s border opened with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Since then, it has blossomed into a sprawling village of wholesale outlets selling everything from toilet paper to hand-sewn quilts.

“Almost all the customers are Russians,” said Zhangkin Fang, who runs a family outlet selling beaded angora sweaters for less than $15 each. Like most of the local sellers, she has learned enough Russian to bargain with her chief customers.

“Language is no problem,” salesclerk Ling Ming insisted as she nibbled at a bowl of noodles in front of a stand selling sunglasses and silk flowers. “Some Russians know a little English, and they all understand the calculator.”

Local merchants say business is actually down since a peak in 1993 but that the Russians remain their most important market.

Some shuttlers, like 22-year-old Natasha Van, complain that the corruption rampant under Yeltsin’s tenure is depressing the trade. There are now so many government bureaucrats in Russia wanting a piece of the commercial pie that the demand for bribes has become unmanageable.

“The taxes and tariffs are just ridiculous now,” said Van, nevertheless defending the reforms that allow her to choose her livelihood and travel. “If you don’t have someone helping you at customs, you can be wiped out by a single incident.”

By “helping,” Van means a paid insider who will wave through a trader’s wares at the labyrinthine customs channels of Moscow’s thronged airports.

One thing all the Russian patrons of the Ritan Market fear is a new government back home that would set in motion a top-to-bottom turnover of officialdom, wiping out the relationships they have nurtured.

As one burly Muscovite browsing through the stalls put it: “Yeltsin is no great democrat, but better the devil you know than the one you don’t.”