Russians Sift Past to Find Selves

Leonid Parfyonov is a dashing creature of the new Russia, a 37-year-old entertainment mogul who writes, produces and stars in television shows. He is also one of the first to sense--and cash in on--a popular mood of nostalgia for the Soviet past.

His New Year’s Eve extravaganza, in which singers re-created scenes from campy Brezhnev-era musicals, captured 64% of the national TV audience. The video has been outselling pirated copies of “Evita” in Moscow.

Last week, Parfyonov launched “1961-1991, Our Era,” the most sweeping look at Soviet history ever on Russian TV. Viewers of the opening installment relived 1961 through footage of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s pioneer space flight, Soviet women in their first spiked heels, the construction of the Berlin Wall and the first Soviet sci-fi movie, “Amphibious Man”--all narrated with irony and irreverence.

Parfyonov uses computer tricks that thrust him into the picture, Forrest Gump-style, to hunt bear with Nikita Khrushchev and receive a Hero of Socialist Labor award from a doddering Leonid Brezhnev.

The TV host’s prodigious work is part of a striving for self-discovery at all levels of life in a Russia that, after five years of painful post-Soviet disorder and drift, remains uncertain of its identity.

There’s a void. Russians have lost their infatuation with Western culture and democracy, but they voted last year against a return to Communist rule.

Now, from Kremlin councils to kitchen tables, they are sifting their past for some golden mean, some values worth saving.

“The period of openly aping the West is over, and so is the inferiority complex we felt in the early 1990s, when we were ashamed of our history,” Parfyonov explained. “People now realize that their Soviet experiences, however terrible or ridiculous, are unique. Audiences are homesick for something called the Russian soul.

“That is why it’s important to reconnect with our past without repeating it,” he said.

Russia’s new mood of introspection is refreshing after years of bad news. The army is home from Chechnya, defeated and disgraced. The treasury is unable to pay overdue wages and pensions to millions of people. The mafia runs amok. The president is often ill, the government paralyzed.

Yet, as disillusioned as they are by all that, Russians are improvising and innovating. Breaking a millennium-old psychology of dependence on the state, they are reaching into themselves for guidance.

The Kremlin sensed the mood last summer. Days after his reelection, President Boris N. Yeltsin lamented that the country--ruled in this century under successive banners of monarchy, communism, perestroika and liberal democracy--is now bereft of an ideology.

He urged an advisory panel to develop by this summer “a new national idea to unite all Russians.”

The official newspaper, Rossiskaya Gazeta, offered the equivalent of $2,000 for the best idea, prompting thousands of letters. It’s not the money, said Mikhail Kushtapin, the editor who reads them. “Russians are moved by eternal questions: How should we live? And what for?”

Indeed, plays about fate are filling theaters for the first time in years. Wealthy entrepreneurs are going back to campus to study philosophy. Once again it’s hard to find a seat in the Lenin Library.

“There were three or four dead years when intellectuals and ordinary people lost faith in everything and began to think only about their own survival,” political scientist Liliya Shevtsova said. “Now, having become more self-reliant, they are starting to think about Russian questions . . . restoring their faith in Russian culture, tradition and abilities.”

Linguists are lobbying to ban a long list of foreign words from Russia’s mass media. Teachers report that many parents have brought home children who were studying in the West, convinced that Russian schooling is superior. Thousands of communities are restoring churches shuttered or destroyed by the Soviet regime.

By playing only Russian music, Russkoye Radio has become the nation’s most popular station, with 664,000 daily listeners in 39 cities.

In a challenge to McDonald’s, the king of fast food here since 1990, Russkoye Bistro serves piroshki, borscht and other traditional fare to 40,000 Muscovites a day at 16 outlets and plans to open 180 more.

After a period of deep denial, pollsters say, Russians accept the fact that their Soviet empire is gone and Russia diminished.

Yet, politically, it’s easier to define this Russia for what it isn’t than what it is. True, its people have adopted the ways of capitalism and the habit of electing leaders. But Yeltsin has won and held office more for his anti-communism than anything he believes in.

Voters today reject candidates identified too closely with the ideologies of czarist rule--Orthodox Christianity and ethnic nationalism. On the other hand, candidates who espouse free markets, civil liberties and partnership with the West, undiluted by some unique Russianness, aren’t winning elections either.

Until last year, Yeltsin’s Communist and nationalist foes monopolized debate over what that Russianness is. The belated Kremlin search for a “new national idea” aims to seize the initiative and redefine the president’s historical legacy while he’s still alive.

A hint of a new Kremlin line surfaced in December when Rossiskaya Gazeta awarded half its prize money to historian and philosopher Guriy Sudakov for an essay asserting that an “individualist, money-oriented mentality” is alien to most Russians.

“For a European, social importance lies in business skills, in wealth, hence the guiding values: freedom and law,” he wrote. “For a Russian, the important thing is society, motherland, glory and power.”

But recent conversations with Russians turned up little consensus on this or any rival ideology--except, perhaps, that the state should stop trying to impose one.

“Russia has been united [in the past] on an imperial idea, which presupposed that the state was superior to society,” Igor Klyamkin, a sociologist, wrote in the Kommersant Daily. “The peculiarity of the present moment is that for the first time a relative majority does not want to return to taking orders from the state. The priority now is personal interests.”

In pursuit of those interests, Russians who were shaped by the Soviet system have clung to some traditions while pulling themselves and others through herculean adjustments. Their experiences may help answer those eternal Russian questions about identity and the purpose of life. Here are three Russians’ stories:

*

Maybe because we’ve suffered, maybe because we’re so close to nature, Russians understand better than others that people must help each other.

-- Lyudmilla Sipidina

*

It’s 9 p.m. and her rotary-dial telephone is ringing as Lyudmilla Sipidina arrives home to her cramped Moscow apartment after work. “It’s the hotline,” she says.

A niece needs help finding work. Until past midnight, Sipidina is on the phone with relatives, friends and co-workers, trading tips on hand-to-mouth survival.

An ample woman with an infectious smile, Sipidina is a Soviet-trained geologist at Russia’s State Oil and Gas Institute. A photo album records her summer expeditions scouring Siberia with a radiometer, dodging floods, mosquitoes and the occasional bear.

But the pictures show a younger woman. Sipidina, now 48, was last in the field seven years ago. With private oil firms prospecting for themselves and state funds drying up, she hasn’t received a ruble since July for her work in the lab.

In fact, the job she came home from this evening has nothing to do with geology. A single woman with a son, mother, sister and immense cat to feed, she cleans other people’s homes for a living, earning up to $40 per day--two weeks’ salary at the lab if they get around to paying her.

More central to her life than her photo album is her frayed black address book. By her estimate, she keeps in close touch with at least 40 people--a mutual-support hotline dating to the time they saved places for each other in Soviet bread lines.

Today they share food, used clothing, leads on odd jobs, emergency cash and emotional support.

“We have this tradition,” she says. “It’s our safety net.”

Not all informal networks are as stable as Sipidina’s, but they persist among Russia’s new poor.

Huddling together for survival is a centuries-old Russian frontier instinct--dictated by the vast spaces and harsh environment--that has survived urbanization. It also outlived the Soviet socialist safety net that once guaranteed everyone a paying job and steady pensions.

Like millions of others who are paid too little, too late or not at all, Sipidina still reports faithfully to work--on a flexible timetable that accommodates moonlighting.

“At least I still have my profession,” she says. “If I quit and did nothing but clean, I know that, psychologically, I would feel a lot worse.”

*

We still climb mountains. It keeps us in touch with the source of our spirituality.

-- Vladimir Shumakov

*

Vladimir Shumakov boasts that there were few Communist Party members on his world-class Soviet mountain climbing team. “Our collectivism was not ideological,” he quips. “We were simply joined by one rope.

“We worked as a single organism,” he reminisces. “We knew each other so well that each of us could predict the behavior of any teammate under stress, in the mountains or in real life.”

Shumakov has kept his alpine mates together on a decade-long expedition from tall mountains to big business. Last year they reached a new summit, helping overturn city hall in a bellwether revolt against corruption.

A cheerful, sandy-haired man still fit at 40, Shumakov is a source of contagious civic energy in Revda, a smokestack city of 100,000 people in the Ural Mountains, where he runs a prospering industrial maintenance service with 600 employees.

His enterprise, Vyso, was born in the old days to fill a hole in state funding for Soviet sports. To pay their way to competitions in the late 1980s, he and 39 teammates joined to hire themselves out painting steel mills, power stations and other towering objects.

The company, now an end in itself, thrives on the discipline and mystique of its founders. Newcomers get six months of technical and philosophical training from experienced climbers. Drinking on the job brings swift dismissal.

“Mountaineering is not just a sport but a way of life,” Shumakov tells new hires. “It’s the ability of people whose survival depends on each other to unite and reach any goal.”

Tired of mobsters extorting business profits with city hall’s blessing, Shumakov used his team-building experience to organize Revda’s new entrepreneurial elite two years ago. In December they rallied voters to their side; their candidates swept control of the mayor’s office and local legislature.

Fostering this new collectivism in Russia is not easy. The Soviet KGB planted informers everywhere to breed suspicion and crush initiative. Russia never had a “civic society”--a web of strong, independent interest groups that can hold elected leaders accountable.

If Shumakov’s mountain-bred uprising means one is forming at last, it’s a sure sign that big business will lead the way.

The climber says bluntly: “The authorities should act in the interests of business so business can flourish in the interests of the people. That will help everyone realize what the ‘new national idea’ is.”

*

People are franker in the kitchen than in the living room. It’s just a fact of Russian life.

-- Olga Solodovnik

*

Olga Solodovnik spends long winter evenings at the kitchen table, trying to fathom where she--and her country--are heading in such a rush. Like most Russians, she has an overwhelming sensation of being swept along.

The summer before last, Solodovnik was a $500-a-month university English professor embarking on her first vacation abroad. At the airport in Moscow, a mysterious travel agent handed her $1,600 in an envelope and whispered, without explanation: “Take this where you’re going.”

She was too astonished to object. Two weeks later another agent from the company demanded the money in Greece. It was too late: She and a companion had figured it was all a lucky mix-up and spent the money on the best bargain of the trip: six fur coats from a factory outlet.

They sold the furs in Moscow and returned the money, keeping a $2,000 profit. That launched Solodovnik’s risky but lucrative career as a “shuttle trader.”

Russian “shuttlers” buy wholesale goods abroad, pay bribes, evade import taxes, avoid middlemen and sell back home at huge markups. Solodovnik, 42, a single mother who lives with her parents, has been robbed once, but she’s adventurous, charming and clever. After six shopping trips, she believes that she is ready to quit teaching and do this full time.

The adjustment is not simple for a graduate of a top Moscow institute who was brought up to prize ideals over money. She tries to deal with it in her parents’ kitchen, where she heard three generations of straight talk as a child.

“The whole political and economic situation has changed, but inside ourselves we haven’t really changed,” she says. “We cherish the same things as before--close relationships, understanding.”

Since czarist times, the kitchen has been an inner sanctum where Russians bare their souls. For Solodovnik, it is the ideal of Russia itself--a warm, enduring retreat where she can get back to being herself among old friends.

“Are you crazy?” they often ask about her new line of work.

Her answers pour out with the tea in rambling conversations.

What’s going on in Russia has her “disappointed and upset,” she says. “Russia is sliding back into stagnation. As long as we have opportunities to make money, we want to make it quickly because we’re not sure what will happen in a month or two or in a year. . . .

“You know, money is not everything,” she adds after a pause. “It’s the means of getting things in life, not the purpose.

“In the kitchen we like to relax and be philosophers,” she says, assuming a tone of mock authority. “Here we don’t discuss work or money. That’s the dirty part of life. We try to keep the kitchen clean.”

Richard Boudreaux was a staff writer with The Times’ Moscow Bureau for the past four years. Last month he became The Times’ Rome Bureau chief.

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What Russians Want

Russians were asked to choose which identity they want for their country. They could check no more than three options. The results:

52% Russia must become a state whose might and power are ensured by the growing prosperity of citizens.

41% Russia must be a state with a market economy where democratic freedoms and human rights are observed.

35% Russia must be a multiethnic state of peoples enjoying equal rights.

21% Russia must be a strong military power.

19% Russia must become a state around which the former Soviet republics will voluntarily reunite.

16% Russia must be the state of the ethnic Russian people.

13% Russia must become a Christian Orthodox country.

12% Russia must return to socialism.

7% Russia must restore itself as a strong military empire within the borders of the former Soviet Union.

Source: Institute of Sociological Analysis and the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, January 1997; survey involved 1,519 Russians.