Employing the Collective Cork

The milkmaids were drunk, and not for the first time. Lyubov, a widow, was crying, and Svetlana had passed the rowdy stage, her eyes alight with anger, her tongue sharp and abusive.

Solemn, round-eyed children circled them gently, intervening when the women got out of hand, covering their mouths with small hands, restraining flailing fists, or pushing them back into their chairs.

With an hour to go till milking time, the last bottle of vodka was gone and the grimy table before them was bare except for a can piled high with the remnants of cheap Russian cigarettes.

Lyubov Ryzhakova, 32, and Svetlana Kulakova, 28, did not turn up for the milking that afternoon late in February, but their children would not go hungry.

Even if the milkmaids in this central Russian village wanted to spend all their pay on vodka, they could not. Workers for the local collective farm in Mundyr, about 480 miles east of Moscow, and in nine nearby settlements linked to the farm are not paid in cash. Instead, they receive coupons they can redeem at farm-run stores that sell basic goods--but not alcohol.

“I’ve lived in the past without bread at all because I have a low salary,” said Ryzhakova, who favors the system. “Now I have bread to feed my children.”

“Everything will grind to a halt if the milkmaids all start drinking,” said the collective’s director, 54-year-old Ivan Matantsev. “It will all go downhill.”

Mundyr is only one of many rural communities where Russians have introduced tough, at times desperate, anti-alcohol measures.

In Surinda, a remote settlement in Siberia, the residents took a vow of sobriety. In Verkhny Zhirim, also in Siberia, and in Durakovo, 12 miles south of Moscow, villagers can get free treatment for alcoholism. Authorities in Sofiyevka, in central Russia, even flogged a man for alcohol abuse, according to a report in August in the national daily Obshchaya Gazeta.

When Matantsev ordered the Mundyr collective’s three stores to halt alcohol sales in 1996, productivity went up. The farm survived an economic crisis afflicting rural Russia and even expanded--though it still does not generate enough cash to pay all its workers.

But with 600 cows and 105 workers, it is still on its feet, unlike most others in the region. People may have little, but they are consoled by the fact that they are much better off than other villages nearby.

Matantsev did conduct an “experiment” in July by paying the workers in Mundyr in cash.

“Everyone immediately went out and got drunk,” he said. “They used up their month’s salaries in a week. A couple of wives went to the superintendent and said their husbands were drunk and their children were hungry.

“The superintendent said: ‘Don’t bring any more money here. Let’s go back to the old system.’ ”

So the coupons returned. People still drink, but Matantsev says their lack of cash restrains alcohol abuse.

To some families, the change hasn’t made a lot of difference. On top of the cupboard in Tatiana Manin’s front room in Mundyr lay a dusty accordion, usually a symbol of joy and good company in Russia. Here, it seemed to cast a curse.

Its owner was out. Manin, 39, sat chin in hand, conveying as much pain with her hesitations as she did with her halting words.

A fellow with an accordion is the life of the party at any Russian gathering. But Manin’s husband, Nikolai, 41, turned into a drunkard. He may get alcohol by trading his pay coupon to an illegal vodka seller.

A tractor driver by trade, he shrugged off his relatively high-paying and responsible job to be a farm laborer for 780 rubles ($25) a month. His wife makes 600 rubles ($19).

“I don’t know where he gets the money for alcohol. It causes arguments in the family. He gets angry,” she sighed.

Her 17-year-old son, Alexei, sat slumped, mesmerized by cartoons dancing soundlessly on the TV. He dreams of being drafted at 18 so he can leave home and fight in Russia’s bloody Chechen conflict.

In the dark, squat barn in the neighboring village of Gorlovo, with 90 cows lowing to be fed and the pungent smell of manure in the air, it is difficult to put oneself in the cheap rubber shoes of the women scurrying about, hauling buckets of feed. They begin milking at 4 a.m. and milk again at 5 p.m.

It was in the early 1990s, as cash dried up amid a national economic decline and Russian enterprises were forced to barter goods, that the collective introduced its coupon system in Gorlovo. It exchanged milk and meat for processed foodstuffs to stock its stores, and it also avoided cash outlays for salaries, so it could afford to set up its own bakery and milk-processing facilities. Now, as then, workers can get cash for special purchases or emergencies.

The relative discipline and order that resulted reflect the yearning Russians often express for a “strong hand” to guide and control them. Besides standing behind the coupon system, Matantsev has sent a dozen local men to be “coded” against alcohol by having their bodies implanted with “torpedoes”--capsules of teturam that cause nausea and fear if the men drink. More severe reactions can include heart failure and death.

Mornings, the store at Gorlovo is crammed as people line up for herring, flour, bread, sausage, macaroni, wheat, soap in a brown block, raspy gray toilet paper and cookies with the texture of compressed sawdust. There is only one brand of cigarettes, the cheap, high-tar Russian Prima.

The store eschews non-Russian products, saleswoman Svetlana Beloborodova told some foreign visitors in a tart tone as she added up customers’ bills on an abacus and copied the totals by hand into a fat accounts book.

She sawed a log of pink sausage. Reaching for shampoo for a customer, she inquired: “Which do you want? Pink or green?”

Outside, Alexander Pavlov, 37, outlined how the coupon system makes it easier to stretch his family’s money over a month.

“Only a telegraph pole doesn’t drink around here. I’m hung over now,” he confided.

Pavlov had boasted of making 4,000 rubles ($129) a month as part of a timber team, but that was either a lie or a delusion. He gave up drink for six months in order to join the team, Matantsev said, but fell off the wagon in January and was fired.

Out at the farm’s logging site, low clouds scurried across a pearly sky and the wind hurled snow in playful handfuls. A tree trembled for a second in midair after a hefty chain saw had cut through its base. Then it fell to the forest floor with a majestic bow.

“Accidents happen even to sober people,” said Matantsev, explaining Pavlov’s dismissal. “A person has to be in control or a tree might fall on him.”

Meanwhile, Pavlov spent the day with a bottle of vodka--his fourth day of bingeing. He was spotted that evening, another bottle under his arm, on his way home from the cottage of illegal vodka seller Galina Belikova.

“It took me all day to drink that bottle,” he said. “I felt sick at heart. I felt ugly in my soul, and I needed to go get a drink.”

Rambling on sheepishly, full of plans to approach Matantsev about getting back to work, he blamed himself for another wasted day. Everyone knows the houses hereabouts where cheap vodka is illegally sold. They have a collective nickname, “The Pit.” Knock on the gate at Belikova’s and a little square window pops open. For 30 rubles ($1), there’s your bottle and escape for the night.

“We’re not the only ones,” giggled Belikova’s adopted daughter, Yevgenia Smirnova, 18. “It’s how we survive. It pays well. My mother doesn’t work.”

Sometimes, the girl acknowledged, village wives or even the farm director have arrived on the doorstep, angry about drunken husbands or farm workers.

There is something patronizing about a pay system that treats workers as children. But most concede that it helps them manage their scarce resources.

Alexei Smirnov, a 24-year-old timber cutter who is missing a tooth, stood in the bitter wind with no gloves, ragged trousers and a hole in one boot. He said he was sure his wife would squander his pay on earrings if she could spend as she pleased.

“It’s all about psychology. If you have cash, women, more than men, are tempted to spend it all on things they don’t need,” said Smirnov, who never does the daily food shopping.

Critics say that with workers having to rely on the farm shops, no matter how grim the selection, the collective keeps money in its own coffers.

“If the card system goes and there’s cash on hand, it means the money goes somewhere else and not back to the collective farm,” said Anatoly Shishko of Mundyr. “There’s a feeling they keep us on a hook.”

The single competing shop in Gorlovo, partly privatized and not owned by the farm, operates at a loss. As saleswoman at the only legal outlet for vodka, Valentina Bolshakova, 43, knows the village drunks all too well.

“If a man’s sober and has money in his hands, of course I’ll sell [vodka] to him,” she said. “It’s his choice. With the coupon system, at least the kids will have something to eat.”

Farm director Matantsev, who has an old-fashioned collective mentality and strongly disapproves of privatization, speaks darkly of the “dubious freedoms” of the post-Communist era.

“Unfortunately, we have democracy today, and any alcoholic and any loafer and any lazybones has the same rights as a farm director. I can’t stop them from going and getting drunk. That’s the law,” he said.

“I’m not just fighting against alcohol. I’m fighting for life, for survival.”

Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.