Steel-Working Russian City Creates Its Own Mold for a Protean Putin

In the city of Volgograd, southern Russia, hope is the color of white-hot boiling steel pouring once again from a furnace in the broken-down ruin of the Red October steelworks. Hope has the weight of a pay packet in the pocket.

It smells like the fumes from the smokestacks of industrial dinosaurs that are getting up from their knees and lumbering back from the dead.

And it walks like Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s acting president.

In the industrial heartland, sparks of hope are flying like the red-hot embers showering from a vat of molten steel at Red October, where the furnaces are running again and workers are being paid.

The Russian presidential election Sunday is all about hope. For many here, the hope that Putin has kindled is an intangible stirring in the gut, not something concrete, rational or easily put into words.

They know they like him, even if they find it hard to explain exactly why.

People project onto him whatever it is they want to see, so that Putin, widely expected to win the election, appeals to liberals even as he appeals to Communists and nationalists, and to the proletariat as much as to the business moguls. Militarists praise him for taking war to Chechnya while pacifists argue that he is only trying to end the war.

“He walks well,” says pensioner Anna Antonova, 60, dreamily. “He’s decent, hard-working, honest, he’s goal-oriented. He’s tall.”

Tall? At less than 5 foot 6? But she insists, “No, he is tall.”

Volgograd, where gargantuan plants churn out tanks, military steel, chemicals and tractors, traditionally votes Communist, but voter allegiances are shifting. Putin is set to draw voters away from the Communists as well as from ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky.

“I’ve lost faith in the Communists. I approve of Putin. He’s disciplined and demanding, because the main thing our country lacks is discipline,” said Lidia Tolstopyatova, 35, a worker at Volgograd’s tractor factory.

Sergei Smetanin, 45, a Red October steelworker, was a Zhirinovsky man but got tired of seeing him involved in scandals and rows. Now he’s backing Putin. “As long as he gives me a job, I’m OK,” he said.

Looming on the only hill in Volgograd, a huge, 8,000-ton ferro-concrete woman stands, waving a sword above her head, her features crunched into a wild, anguished howl. The Motherland sculpture, almost twice the height of the Statue of Liberty, is a towering reminder of how deeply the military consciousness is embedded in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, where 1.3 million German and Russian soldiers perished as Stalin’s army stopped the Nazi advance in one of the most important battles of World War II.

Under its 14-ton burden, Motherland’s sword arm tends to sag a little in summer, when the metal inside the sculpture expands. Each year, a millimeter of her surface is consumed by sulfurous industrial gases. Like Russia itself, she is not in great shape.

But Putin, voters think, will put the steel back into Russia’s sword. His promise to direct millions of dollars to rebuild the military is good news in Volgograd, where military production is one of the most important local industries.

Red October’s mile-wide landscape of rusted hulks and smashed windows extends more than three miles along the Volga River. At the center, glowing like the surface of the sun, are two working steel furnaces.

Grainy dust cloaks every surface, sticking to the sweaty faces of the men who, dwarfed by huge machines, resemble figures on a Socialist Realist canvas.

“Can you imagine working in a hell like this and not getting paid for six months?” said Roman Bakharyev, 33. Andrei Chekmenyov, 35, a former worker at the plant, remembers 18 months without a kopeck.

Now, like the giant tractor and military tank factory nearby, the plant is paying salaries. Part of the reason is the state orders that both plants recently received and the payment of old Defense Ministry debts.

In the late 1990s, production virtually ground to a halt. But Red October now spews out 24,000 to 32,000 tons of steel a month--including steel designed for military hardware. The government orders enabled the plant to restore two furnaces, said Red October’s 31-year-old general director, Andrei V. Nadtochev.

The factory’s rebirth came after a recent ownership change that occurred when an opaque Moscow financial group, Flora, managed to buy the plant dirt cheap for $5 million, without having to acquire its $12-million debt.

Many workers here associate their present sense of well-being with Putin. “He does everything for the people. He’s raising our salaries, and he will raise the country,” said Valery M. Komissarov, 49. “He’s our muzhik,” added Komissarov, using a word that means a good, down-to-earth man.

Oleg Medved, 28, a junior lieutenant and sniper with an elite army unit, on leave because of a slight injury in the Chechen war, came to visit the Motherland memorial for inspiration before heading back to the fighting. He had planned to leave the army after 10 years of fighting in hot spots--a job he describes as “helping people”--but because of Putin, he will stay on.

“I pin great hopes on him. He means everything for the army. He’s trying to return things to the way they were before, back to the time when a man in uniform was respected,” Medved said. He heartily approves of Putin’s tough policy against Chechnya.

But student Irina Kosheleva, 20, said she planned to vote for Putin “because he’s trying to end the war in Chechnya. He wants to finish it.”

Putin is still as awkward and unsmiling in public as he was when he was appointed prime minister last summer. But his attraction to voters is amplified in catchwords, which bounce around the electorate like light in a prism. In Volgograd, people echo one another with words such as young, energetic, goal-oriented, honest, hard-working, order, discipline, strong power.

Lilia Shevtsova, a political analyst from the Carnegie Center in Moscow, told an American business luncheon in the Russian capital recently that Putin raises hopes similar to those roused when former President Boris N. Yeltsin rose in the early 1990s to slay the Communist dragon.

But the divergent groups attracted to Putin all hope for different things, she argued. To keep the opposing forces on board, Putin has been careful to avoid too many concrete answers on the details of his program.

“One group is hoping for stability. A second group is hoping for order. A third group is hoping that Putin will emerge as a reformer. But we all know that hope is simply a delayed disappointment. And we anticipate that, by the end of the year, Putin will have a lot of problems and troubles,” she said.

“People see what they want to see in him,” said Yefim M. Shusterman, head of a council of Volgograd’s most important newspaper editors, who is a firm Putin supporter. “Many people just invent their idea of him. No one really knows him.” One Russian pollster described Putin as a mirror.

“When I listen to him speaking, I catch myself thinking, ‘I’d say the same thing,’ ” said Volgograd businessman Tigran K. Karapetyan, who owns a local hotel and television studio. He believes that Russia has been waiting, paralyzed, for someone like Putin for nearly 10 years.

Chekmenyov, the former Red October worker, seems to have summed up the popular yearning: “I’m not for totalitarianism, but I am for strong power, a strong army and a strong Interior Ministry. I’m sick of all the chaos.”

In fact, with polls showing many Volgograd voters yearning for a strong hand, Putin’s KGB background is seen not as cause for alarm, but a positive advantage.

“If he served in the KGB and wasn’t kicked out, it means he has a big brain,” Medved said.

Nor do voters associate Putin with his predecessor, Yeltsin, and the powerful elite around the former Russian president known as The Family, which installed him in the Kremlin. Although he has brought in some of his own allies, including numerous former KGB men, he is still surrounded by key Yeltsin figures such as Valentin B. Yumashev, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, and Alexander S. Voloshin, the current chief of staff.

Yet for many voters fed up with the doddery Yeltsin years, Putin’s youth represents not continuity but change. Others are not so sure.

“He represents the same old Kremlin power. I don’t think he’ll do a thing. Everything will stay the same,” said student Yevgeny Lopukhov, 21, who supports Grigory A. Yavlinsky of the liberal Yabloko party.

“He’ll bring the same as everyone else: no good. They’re all from one team,” said tractor factory worker Alexei Sakhikov, 22, a disillusioned Yavlinsky supporter who plans to vote against all the candidates. “During the election campaign they all try to show a good face, but when the time comes they show their true face.”

But that’s a fear that troubles few people in Volgograd. Before the 1996 presidential election, Yeltsin, buoyed by a $10.2-billion International Monetary Fund loan agreement and with $1 million of Central Bank funds behind him, could ensure the payment of delayed pensions and state salaries across the country.

After the poll, the payments stopped. Of course, the same thing could happen this time around. And the promised government orders to the Volgograd plants could dry up.

Alexander Yegunov, 21, a technical student in Volgograd, who has high hopes that Russia will flourish under Putin, seems taken aback at the thought that Putin might let people down.

“Perhaps I’m making a mistake in my support for him. But that’s the peculiarity of the Russian soul. You burn your finger on something, you touch it again and burn it again and again.”