by Vincent J. Schodolski
Moscow - When my family and I arrived in Moscow five years ago we decided to spend our first Saturday afternoon in Gorky Park soaking up initial impressions of the new country we had come to live in.
That was the summer of 1988, back in the days when the place was still called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, when a man named Mikhail Gorbachev was charming the world and seemed to be building a bright future for his country and a more peaceful one for the rest of us, when the Communist party ran everything and when it was still often hard to buy a loaf of bread.
During our last weekend in Moscow, one that coincided with the 1993 May Day holiday, we decided that we would go back to Gorky Park for another look at the people with whom we had spent a tumultuous half decade.
Loaded with five years of experience and a shoulder bag stuffed with rubles, we walked back into the park and reveled at just how much had changed since that first weekend stroll. It was like going back to visit a house you once lived in. The surroundings were all familiar, but the people inside were not the ones you remembered.
Five years ago it cost 70 kopecks to get into the park. Now it costs 70 rubles. Shocking at first, but less so when you consider that both figures in their time constituted about a hundredth of the minimum monthly wage.
Part of the price Russians are paying for economic reform and greater availability of goods is higher prices, but the Gorky Park price index shows that the regular adjustment of wages by the government has kept most people at least even with inflation. Many are far, far ahead of it. The average monthly wage is now about 18,000 rubles. When we arrived it was 150 rubles.
The Russian economic reforms since the government freed most prices about a year ago have been a sloppy affair riddled with inequalities. What has happened, however, is that a rough and tumble market has taken shape and now shops, kiosks and newly sprouting supermarkets are reasonably well stocked.
But statistics are statistics and they are dull. People are people and they are not so dull.
The man on line in front of me waiting to buy tickets for himself, his wife and ten-year-old daughter had a $1,000 video camera over his shoulder and a $2,000 portable phone slung across the other. He was wearing shiny new Reeboks that put my tattered Nikes to shame. He had designer jeans and a superb haircut. His wife was equally well done up as was his daughter who looked like she could walk into a San Fernando Valley mall and pass for a native.
Five years ago the people standing in line were a far different lot. Typically they - adult and child alike - wore summer clothes that had quite obviously been passed down through generation after generation. One shoulder would have had a shabby shoulder bag with a few sandwiches and a World War II vintage thermos. The other might, just might, have a still camera of about the same age.
The man in front of me this May Day was not a freak spawned by a rampant black market. All around me were similar families and couples, similar reminders that despite all the chaos of this transitional phase in the Russian economy, despite the dire warnings of pending fiscal collapse, despite the genuine suffering of many, a growing number of people are working harder, being more creative and as a result living better.
Prices for shashlik may have been 1,000 rubles a head, but the lines were endless. A helium fill balloon might have cost 700 rubles, but almost every kid seemed to have one.
But it was May Day in this new somewhat surrealistic democracy and so it seemed perfectly natural to me - after five years of sharing change with Russians - that just down the block from these signs of inching prosperity a few thousand communists were throwing stones and bottles at the Moscow riot police.
Screaming that President Boris Yeltsin was a dictator bent on bringing limitless suffering down upon the nation in the name of personal political ambition and good relations with the West, they were out marching in the name of the party, the country and the system that were in place when I arrived.
They were a mix of older people, mostly in their 50s, 60s and 70s, and youth who with the shorn scalps, Schwartzenegger pectorals and tattoos would fit neatly into a rock hurling mob of skin heads in eastern Germany protesting the influx of refugees from abroad.
Blood had been drawn. More than 500 people - police and demonstrators - had been injured in a brief melee that ensued when riot cops blocked the marchers and their red banners. The scene was reminiscent of the Moscow streets during the August 1991 coup. This time, however, the sides were reversed.
My ten-year-old daughter who has spent half her life in Russia and seen more demonstrations, coups and riots than most adults have ever read about, was confused.
"Dad," she said her brow and nose wrinkled as her brain tried to make these pieces fit what her parents had told her before. "I thought the communists were gone. Who are those people? And why does that man have blood on his head? Yuck!"
As we walked toward the gate of the park I tried to make some sense of what this May Day scene was all about for Sofia and myself.
Yes, the communists were no longer running things the way they did when we arrived. Their day - prolonged into a totalitarian twilight by decades of terror and absolute control - was over.
But the changed Russia that was growing around us - the nouveau riche businessmen with their portable phones and Mercedes being one example - had yet to fill the vacuum left behind when the communists essentially routed themselves in their botched August 1991 coup.
Despite five years during which there have been numerous elections, referendums and rally upon rally, these people have yet to be truly enfranchised. The new democrats have not figured out how to translate their ballots - and for some now their growing wealth - into better government.
The latest referendum - held on April 25 - resulted in a vote of confidence in Yeltsin and even in his painful reform program. That vote dealt a major blow to Yeltsin's parliamentary opponents - particularly to its speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov.
That was another small step along the long road Russians have to traverse if this country is to come to resemble a prosperous, democratic state.
Trying to explain the May Day scenes to my daughter I dwelt upon one final contrast with that summer weekend in 1988.
The relatively small band of rock throwing communists seemed like a bunch of marginal gripers, people out of step with the times, allied with a band of hooligans spoiling for a fight. A far cry from the flag waving, slogan chanting, politically empowered inhabitants of Red Square on May Days past.
Somehow to me - and even to Sofia - the people in Gorky park with their video cameras, new clothes and new attitudes represented a fledgling new Russia, people with whom we in the West could work to build a safer and more democratic world.
But to me - maybe not to Sofia - a nagging worry remained.
Russia is a country with a long and rich history of coming to the brink of Westernizing reforms and then backing away.
Democracy and free markets are more than video cameras and fancy cars. A mind set has to change in Russia. It has started, but we probably won't know if it is enough to change things deeply until Sofia's generation is old enough to vote.
Editor's note: The author of this article was the Chicago Tribune Bureau Chief in Moscow between 1988 and 1992. He has been on leave for the last year and will take up an assignment as a National Correspondent based in Los Angeles in July 1993.
