Islands Of Calm In Russia’s Free Fall

In a nation that seems to wobble from crisis to calamity, it is worth knowing that there are cozy little towns where life is improving after communism.

Fifty miles down the highway back in Moscow, beggars sprawl in the subways and paratroopers are posted along thoroughfares to look for terrorists. President Boris Yeltsin is threatening to toss out the parliament later this week while deputies make noises about impeachment.

But while crisis is the capital’s watchword, much of the rest of Russia is enjoying a summer of unaccustomed stability. Workers aren’t striking and there is plenty of food in the stores. And to everyone’s surprise, the ruble has leveled against the dollar after four years of free fall.

They just hired 80 workers at the furniture factory, the biggest employer in this town of 20,000.

The wages, averaging $115 a month, aren’t magnificent. And converting raw timber into kitchen cabinets involves heavy, lung-dusting work.

But pay comes on time and the plant belongs to the employees after making a successful transition from central control and state ownership.

The semimonthly Elektrogorsk News reflects subtler changes on every page. One feature describes a fund-raising campaign to rebuild a village church destroyed under Josef Stalin. Another tells how to buy an extra plot for your vegetable garden.

At the Elektrogorsk central market, private stands brim with imported bananas, and ordinary people are not shocked by the 60-cent-a-pound price tag.

There are also tomatoes, beef, cheese, vodka - even Uncle Ben’s rice and Crazy Glue - an assortment that would have been astonishing even in a store for the Moscow elite five years ago.

“I think we live much better than we used to,” said factory worker Natalya Nedorozova, 49. “Our biggest problem here is that we used to have a beautiful park in the center of town, and they’ve let it get all overgrown.”

The problems she and others in Elektrogorsk mention seem to form a pattern. They are not the angry sores that can spread revolutionary spirit, but rather the quandaries of a hard-pressed American factory town in the 1950s. For example:

Furniture factory president Vladimir Syroezhkin complains of escalating taxes and the rising cost of electricity from the town’s gasfired electrical plant.

“A few years ago, we didn’t used to pay much attention because energy was so cheap,” he said. “Now our energy prices are close to the world standards, and we are forced to buy equipment from Germany that uses less power.”