European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - August 6, 1990, Darmstadt, Hesse                                A everything around us is going downhill by David Remnick Washington Post h of Little the dreams of Russia have changed. A decent pair of boots is still the stuff of fantasies and stratagems the end of a dramatic quest through the poverty of everyday life. In the soviet Union few live otherwise. Poverty is always clearest among the desperate in the underpass near Pushkin Square in Moscow old people with pensions of 2 or 3 rubles a Day slump against the Wall and spread a rag for spare change. Others collect bottles in alleyways for 20 Kopecky apiece or self used shoes used sheets used tools at the Wishinski Market. At he Kazan station desperate vagrants Dodge the police buy some cabbage or a bottle and try to sleep the night through on a Bench or in the bathroom. A a but soviet poverty More broadly defined reaches Well beyond the broke and the lost. It is a state of being for tens of millions of people and is reflected less in salary Levels than in daily unending shortages of meat and apartments medicines and vegetables soap and shoes. On Nikolai Ostrovsky Lane the airy pre revolutionary apartments of merchants and artists were Long ago divided up into communal Flats. Five or six families most of them with regular salaries or pensions share a toilet and a Kitchen and take turns complaining to Blank eyed local officials about the rusted pipes the Cascade of plaster. Evenings after work they stand endlessly in lines Hunting for milk Oatmeal toilet paper whatever can be found. Beyond Moscow miners in Vor Kuta in the Polar North done to have enough soap to Wash the Coal dust from their faces mothers on the far Eastern Island of Sakhalin give birth in rented rooms for Lack of a maternity Hospital there byelorussian villagers scavenge scrap Metal rags or even pig fat to pay for shoes and the staff at a huge Hospital in the siberian City of Krasnoyarsk reuses Needles after As one doctor admits Quot we Sharpen them up straighten them out and scrape off the  such stories and countless others Are now printed in official papers that once told Only of the triumphs of the soviet system. Poverty in the soviet Union is not bloated bellies and famine but rather a common condition of need that seems Only to Widen and grow worse with every month. Just As dangerous it haunts the heart As Well As the stomach. Quot i watch everything around us going downhill every Day and i think that life will be even worse for my children than it is for me. For a Parent there is nothing worse Quot said valid Baramov a truck Driver who shares a five room apartment with 15 people on Nikolai Ostrovsky Lane. A do you know what that is to a person Quot he asked. Quot to know that working harder is useless because it makes no difference my wife and i and our three kids live in one room and we be been waiting 10 years for our own apartment. Ten years i Don t want to Call us poor but you go ahead i m not  poverty at first the government of Mikhail Gorbachev like those before it could hardly bring itself to pronounce the word. But from the Start poverty has been the. Precondition the Bottom line of the perestroika Reform program. The open admission that the soviet Union was a military superpower with a ruined aimless Economy influenced a virtually every critical change in Europe Over the past five years from Moscow s decision 1o Cut its troops and let Eastern Europe go its own Way to the erosion of marxist Lenir Sist ideology. Quot How can we feed ourselves and live decent lives that is what it s All about Quot said Tatyana Zaslavskaya a sociologist  has Long been a keen intellectual influence on Gorbachev Quot everything revolves around that Quot some of the 16 residents of a communal Moscow apartment poverty is a state of a being for tens of millions of people in the soviet Union at right peasant women in a russian old age Home. Alexander Solzhenitsyn once. Remarked with characteristic russian insularity that there Are three standards a of living in the world the West Moscow and the rest of the soviet Union. But visitors expecting Little More than Long lines for Vodka and a certain rowdiness Are Likely to be appalled a even in Moscow. Only the naive look at the opening of a few Plush hotels and cooperative restaurants and speak of Well being. To describe the soviet Union in terms of overwhelming poverty is no longer the work of fire breathing ideologues from abroad. Now even the press organs of the soviet communist parly ruthlessly Survey the wreckage of everyday life. Nothing it seems poisons ideological purity More thoroughly than an empty shelf. Komsomol Skaya pravda the party s youth newspaper blames the system of which it is a part As it Points out that before the 1917 revolution Russia ranked seventh in the world in per capita consumption and now is 77th a Quot just after South Africa but ahead of Romania Quot Quot of we compare the Quality of life in the developed countries with our own Quot the paper said Quot we have to admit that from the viewpoint of civilized developed society the overwhelming majority of the population of our country lives below the poverty  after decades of official concealment numbers and statistics Are still notoriously unreliable. But the soviet Union does have an official poverty line of 78 rubles a month. About 43 million people Many of them pensioners fell below that line of Quot minimum material Security Quot last year but no one not even the government itself takes the official poverty line seriously and most officials and scholars in the soviet Union and in the West argue that figure should be raised to 125 rubies at that level about 131 million out of 285 million soviet citizens would be registered As poor. Some soviet experts believe the number is higher Silil for decades we wore striving to translate into life the idea of uni mrs Al  Etc Cut Anatol Deigham Aihini Lon   Post wrote in the official journal Molodi communist. Quot so what have we achieved after All these years Only 2 3 percent of All soviet families can be called wealthy and about 0 7 of these have earned that income lawfully. About 11 2 percent can be called Middle class or Well to do. Quot the rest 86 5 percent Are simply poor. What we have is Equality in  a everyone agrees that income is hardly the Point. Hardly anyone save the government elite can insulate themselves Nuch from the soviet version of fax Verty Quot even the millionaire farm chairmen Don t have hot water out Here Quot a Cotton Farmer said in the turkmen an Countryside. Or As soviet emigre Joseph Brodsky the Nobel prize winning poet remarked Quot Money has nothing to do with to since in a totalitarian stale income brackets Are of no great variety a in other words every person is As poor As the  How then to get a sense of the problem let alone the reasons and the solutions a few published figures Only begin to give some sense of the scope of soviet poverty the average soviet must work 10 times longer than the average american to buy a Pound of meat at least 500.000 internal refugees lied unrest in the Travis caucasus and phor regions and now mainly live in ramshackle settlements the soviet press estimates Between 1 5 and 3 million homeless More than 1 million unemployed m  Aluie and a National infant mortality rate 250 percent higher than in must Western countries at jut the Vimo  is Panama monday August 6. 1990 the stars and stripes a a a Page 13