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Sorry for the long post, but there's no way to linc this story here.
Living Larger in the New Russia
Broke in the Nineties, the Starodubovs
are bouncing back -- and thanking Putin
By GREGORY L. WHITE
November 3, 2007; Page A1
Reutov, Russia
Svetlana Starodubova swings left past the cold-cut case, pointing out the stick of salami she picked up earlier in the week. "On sale," she crows. Her 16-year-old daughter, Irina, catches up to drop a package of mussels and her beloved Lay's potato chips into the shopping cart as the two head for the checkout.
After a brief wait at the cash register, the family is headed back home to their apartment in this high-rise suburb just east of Moscow, passing the new Kofe Khaus cafe and the Chevy dealer.
When The Wall Street Journal first visited the Starodubovs as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, salami was also an important issue. To get some, Svetlana and her husband, Vitaly, had to stand in line for three-and-a-half hours in the winter cold holding baby Irina.
The paper returned after Russia's financial crisis in 1998 to find Svetlana standing for hours at an open-air market selling meat pies to make money for the family while her jobless husband helped Irina get ready for first grade. Their marriage was near collapse.
Like millions of Russians who have been lifted out of poverty by a booming economy over the past seven years, the Starodubovs' life has been transformed. Both now have steady jobs. They say they've patched things up. Sitting in their cramped but sunny kitchen, they show off the new Polish-made stove they bought on credit this spring. Svetlana opens the refrigerator to show the well-stocked shelves. "There was a time when you opened the fridge and there was nothing," she says, remembering the lean days of 1991.
"We live modestly, like all working people," says Svetlana, a plump 52-year-old.
"Modestly, but we have enough," chimes Vitaly, 49 years old.
The Starodubovs' ascent from the hand-to-mouth existence of the 1990s to relative security today helps explain why President Vladimir Putin is perceived so differently in Russia than he is in the West. For many here, he is a hero. After nearly two decades of crazy desperation and living from one day to the next, the relative calm of the Putin era feels like such a tremendous achievement that for many in Russia, it's more than enough to earn their loyalty.
"To tell the truth, I don't know who runs out of money these days," says Vitaly. "I don't think anyone is that badly off."
Since Mr. Putin took office in 2000, about 20 million Russians have been lifted above the official poverty line (another 20 million remain in poverty, according to government figures). An oil-fired economic boom has brought long-awaited stability after a string of crises in the 1990s and more than doubled average incomes, adjusted for inflation, since 2000. A middle class is growing, but so is the gap between rich and poor. Still, the government is scrambling to pour tens of billions of dollars into rebuilding Russia's crumbling roads, power networks, hospitals and schools, all of which have seen little investment since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Rising incomes are the big reason why nearly half of Russians say they want Mr. Putin to stay on when his term ends next spring, even though that would require changing the constitution. Mr. Putin has said he won't do that, but recently said he might become prime minister after the March elections.
Though the Starodubov family is better off than they've been in years, rough edges remain. Among the shiny shopping centers and the new McDonald's that have popped up around their neighborhood, the Starodubovs' dilapidated brown Soviet-style high-rise is a dingy throwback to an earlier era. The elevator smells of urine. Over the summer, Vitaly was mugged nearby and couldn't work for over a month, forcing the family to dig into savings because neither his nor his wife's job offers sick leave.
Vitaly says he could barely recognize his native village in central Russia when he went to visit his 83-year-old mother this fall. "Everything is in collapse; there's nothing but old women left," he says. "People survive on what they grow themselves."
Like most Russians, Vitaly and Svetlana never marched in the rallies for or against the democratic transformations that swept the country in the past two decades. They voted for President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. After he abruptly resigned in 2000, they cast their ballots for the man he recommended to replace him, Vladimir Putin, even though Vitaly says he thought the former KGB agent seemed too "soft" to pull Russia back together then.
They say they aren't concerned by Mr. Putin's crackdown on political opponents and the independent media or his increasing use of Soviet-style symbols.
Indeed, the reassuring stability he has brought leads Vitaly to wonder why the Soviet system couldn't have been adapted to allow fully stocked stores and freedom to travel like today.
Under communism, "we were like children. We went where we were directed. Then they gave us freedom and we were lost, we didn't know where to go and what to do next," Svetlana says. "I like Putin's policy."
By Moscow standards, the Starodubovs are lower-middle class. Vitaly usually earns about 20,000 rubles ($800) a month, double what Svetlana makes. Sergei, their son, contributes about 5,000 rubles a month from the 15,000 rubles a month he earns as a forklift operator at a warehouse. Svetlana says the family spends about 15,000 rubles a month on food and utilities. They got their two-room apartment, plus another one granted to Svetlana a few years ago, free from the state, so they pay no rent or mortgage.
Starting a few years ago, the steady income allowed the family to start saving money each month again, building up a rainy-day fund of several months' income in the Sberbank savings bank across the street from their apartment.
Svetlana says they dream of buying a car, which would cost at least $10,000 new, but haven't saved enough. Vitaly demurs that they don't really need one.
The Starodubovs' two-room, 520-square-foot apartment is a visual reminder that the family's fitful journey to prosperity isn't complete. The fading flowered wallpaper and worn linoleum are a sharp contrast to the richly finished new wood doors with smoked glass on the bathroom and kitchen. In the bathroom, the floor is done in dark red ceramic, but the bare concrete walls still await tiles.
"We do the renovation bit-by-bit, so we can afford it," says Vitaly.
The habits born of a lifetime in cramped communal apartments mean the Starodubovs aren't sticklers about personal space. Sergei sleeps in one room, which he's been sharing with two visitors from Vitaly's hometown who've come to Moscow to look for work.
Vitaly, Svetlana and Irina sleep in the living room on beds that double as couches during the day. There's also Irina's white rat in a cage, and the family cat.
Irina's pride is her computer, which stands nestled in a bookshelf just to the left of the television set. Svetlana says the family bought the top-of-the-line model last year at the Eldorado electronics store nearby, paying for the nearly $2,000 machine with an instant consumer loan they signed up for in the store.
"We just bought it and didn't really figure out how much we'd pay," Vitaly admits. Svetlana says she doesn't know what the interest rate was, but that the 10-month loan cost about $200 over the cost of the computer.
Last month they finally gave in to Irina's calls to connect the PC to the Internet, which costs about 800 rubles a month.
The kitchen is bright and nicely finished with brown cabinets and blue tiles bought with the proceeds of one of Vitaly's rich paydays building villas for the wealthy in the 1990s. It's a squeeze to get in between the refrigerator and a cardboard box of cooking oil bottles. "On special, 12 bottles for 19 rubles apiece," crows Svetlana.
Over Vitaly's embarrassed objections, she opens the refrigerator to show off the five frozen chickens she got on sale, as well as the lamb they use for soup.
"We need about 300 rubles for food for all of us each day," she says. Irina, whose tastes run richer, puts down her bottle of Coke and corrects her, "sometimes 500."
"Potato chips are a necessity," her father teases.
Irina buys X-men comic books and loves Hollywood movies, which she watches on pirated DVDs sold widely for a few dollars in the neighborhood. One of her first questions for an American visitor was whether he'd ever met Paris Hilton or Britney Spears.
Svetlana complains that Irina has already spent all the money she earned over the summer filling in as a concierge with her mother. "She doesn't know what she spent it on," Svetlana scoffs.
Irina shrugs. She needs a new pair of jeans for school, she says, although her classmates aren't that fashion-conscious. But cellphones are an important status symbol, she says. "I want one with speakers," Irina adds.
"You want a new mobile?" marvels her father. "Why do you need another one?" Irina backs off and leaves this issue for another day.
Irina graduates from high school in the spring, but her career plans are still a matter of discussion.
"I wanted her to be a dental technician," says Svetlana, but when Irina visited a family friend's clinic, "she almost fainted" from the blood. "We'll be signing up for bookkeeping courses now," declares Svetlana.
"What bookkeeping courses?" Irina squeals. "I won't do that, I don't want to be a bookkeeper."
Since early August, the family has had to dip into their savings for everyday expenses because Vitaly's earnings have all but dried up.
Vitaly was mugged walking back from visiting Svetlana in her concierge compartment one evening. He says a young couple he thought was waiting for the bus asked him for a cigarette. As he reached to get one, he was hit from behind.
He wasn't carrying his cell phone, he says, so all the thieves got was the 800 rubles he had in his pocket. When he stumbled home, he didn't call the police or a doctor. "The police will just accuse me of something I'm not guilty of," he says.
Vitaly has tried several different jobs in security over the past few years. He moved up from his old parking-lot job to a position as a guard in a new supermarket. But he says his supervisor started demanding kickbacks from his paycheck, threatening to report him for nonexistent violations if he refused. Vitaly says his request for a transfer was refused, so he quit and found another security company. There, he worked round-the-clock shifts of four days on with four days off in between, guarding construction sites and auto junkyards. As the weather turned colder, he left that job to look for one indoors.
Since the mugging, Vitaly has been spending most of his time around the apartment, but there's no sign of the tension that wracked their marriage back in 1998 when he was out of work. Now, Svetlana coos about his signature chicken recipe and he affectionately calls her his "little bookkeeper" for her close watch over the family finances. "We worked things out," he says.
When they're not working, the two spend a lot of time together. One afternoon found them headed to the local outdoor market to buy a new pair of pants for Svetlana.
"I have three pairs of pants," says Svetlana. "When one is in the wash, I wear the others."
Squeezed in along a sidewalk in front of a new shopping mall going up near the railway station, the market is a maze of narrow passages between cramped compartments made of corrugated metal. Dodging other shoppers, Svetlana heads for a section whose walls are draped with clothes. She picks out a pair of dark polyester pants and asks to try them on. The saleswoman slides out of the unheated 4-foot by 6-foot box that serves as her shop and signals for Svetlana to go in. Standing in the walkway, the saleswoman holds up a small curtain for privacy as Svetlana tries on first one pair and then another.
She asks Vitaly how they look, and gets his approval for the pair that cost about 700 rubles.
"In stores, things are much more expensive," she says, tucking the purchase into her bag.
Further down the passage, Svetlana stops at a stall selling linens, looking for a new bedspread for the living room. The saleswoman shows her a white satin one for 4,000 rubles and looks perplexed when Svetlana asks if there are any available for closer to 500 rubles. But after heading off to an unseen storage spot, she comes back with a deep-red one that costs about 700 that Svetlana says will work just fine.
On the way home, Vitaly and Svetlana show off Reutov's new city park. On a late summer day, workers are still bringing soil in to plant lawns. A golden-domed Orthodox church stands to one side.
"You go in, I don't have a scarf to cover my head," Svetlana tells Vitaly. (Orthodox tradition requires women to cover their heads in church). Religion was suppressed under the Soviets, but now it's back. Svetlana increasingly turned to the church in the 1990s. Vitaly is less of a believer and prefers to walk toward a newly installed fountain just down the path, a computer-controlled one laid with black granite tiles.
Asked about politics, Svetlana and Vitaly say they welcome Mr. Putin's tough-guy image and agree that he should stay on for a third term, even though he's said he won't do that.
"Yeltsin shouldn't have let the reins go," Vitaly says, as Svetlana points out that both voted for the former president at the time. "Our country is used to a firm hand." He's happy Mr. Putin has said he'll remain influential after the elections. "I wouldn't turn down the chance to vote for him again if I could," he says. He's also impressed by Mr. Putin's new prime minister, Viktor Zubkov, who is considered a potential presidential candidate. "He's not scared of anyone," Vitaly says of the former Soviet collective-farm boss.
Putin's rollback of democratic institutions such as elections and media freedom doesn't bother them. Opposition demonstrators beaten by police this spring are probably paid stooges, Vitaly says, citing state-TV reports.
"Nobody's twisting arms," he says. "But just like in any country, a person shouldn't talk too much."
In any event, politics takes a back seat to everyday concerns. Sitting at the kitchen table, Svetlana recites prices from memory for summer fruits and where the best deals are. The sleek shopping center directly in front of their building is for "rich people, the ones with two or three cars," she says. Their family goes around the corner to a cheaper store, where fruit is still plentiful.
"It was just awful before," says Vitaly, recalling the deprivations of the 1990s and before that of the Soviet period. Lines for salami were so long shoppers marked their places with numbers written on their hands. Now, he says, "we're not used to waiting in lines anymore."
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