Russia on the Road to Reality

...But the ambience, of course, has changed throughout Russia...

...Future revelations are expected to detail the roles played by Lenin, Stalin, Nikita S. Khrushchev, and various cohorts—such as secret police chiefs Felix E. Dzherzhinsky and Lavrenti P. Beria—in deportations, labor camps, and starvation of Ukrainian and Russian peasants...

...Today," declares a piece surveying the ruins of Soviet authority, "the only hope and sanctuary can be found in the Orthodox Church...

...It will take many years to undo the damage done by an ideological onslaught that has for the most part left Russia spiritually hollow...

...The symbols of the Soviet State, by contrast, are hawked to foreign tourists for hard currency...

...Thousands of pictures and busts of Lenin have similarly disappeared...

...Here in the former Leningrad, the grand Smolny Palace where Lenin directed the first months of the Bolshevik Revolution, and where Party functionaries later installed themselves, is the headquarters of the St...

...The local government's crass venture, though, was not the worst blow to what, after all, has been the national mythology...

...The people consider themselves citizens of a beggar nation...

...When Yeltsin took his oath of office in June of 1991—the first popularly elected president in Russia's history—he pledged that the republic would rise from its knees to again achieve greatness...

...The archives Yeltsin and the Russian government have opened to the public hold some 4.5 million documents, and it will take years for historians to digest the rich menu...

...Dissident intellectuals were impervious to the incessant barrage...

...Renovated churches across Russia are drawing millions—not simply the elderly women who tended the altars during Communist times, but young men and women, their children, and Russian soldiers in uniform...

...Now we are just Russia, a poor nation...

...It is terrible that there is no Soviet Union," she complains...

...At factory and office agitprop meetings everyone was urged onward, told that for their sacrifices they were leading the world...

...In the 1960s or '70s a Russian worker would tell you that his society was far more progressive than capitalist societies, where unemployment was endemic, blacks were persecuted and the Rockefellers and their ilk ruled...

...Other documents testify to Stalin's fatal decisions not to prepare for a German attack, which resulted in the deaths of millions...

...Gone, too, are the three-foot-high illuminated slogans atop buildings—Communist political advertising—that read, for example, "The Party and the People Are One...

...But the social consciousness of tens of millions of less critical workers and farmers was molded by the official message...

...Now the sustaining myths are being shattered...

...A young woman from Ekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk), who is wed to a pediatrician, plans to leave as soon as financially possible because she does not want to raise her 3-year-old daughter in this country...

...Red velvet banners featuring a profile of Lenin and crests of the 15 Soviet republics?pitched as authentic items from Party offices—carry prices of up to $800...

...Petersburg apartment, several Russians sit around a dark mahogany table doing what Russians tend to do well: toasting and talking...

...Meanwhile, 150 million Russians have seen the Soviet Union's dominant republic reduced to Third-World status in less than a year...

...Mark Hopkins is chief of Voice of America's news bureau in Moscow...

...Russia without rockets, it says, has become a very different place...

...Everything they were taught to believe under the Communists is turning out to be a lie...

...And they are perhaps understandably distressed that no one seems to respect, let alone fear, the contracted Armed Forces of yesterday's superpower...

...Another essay, in a journal for civil servants, describes the disintegration of the military machine, the centerpiece of Soviet power...

...One laments the passing of the USSR last December, but she is no Party apparatchik...

...A young journalist, also in Moscow, cannot say enough about corruption, political ineptness or the nation's dismal future...

...Minority publications like Nash Sovremennik are filled with articles about Russia's need for salvation...

...Rain beats down on Nevsky Prospect, the city's main street, splashing grime onto boots, trousers and skirts as a throng of people search for sausage, butter, potatoes, carrots, cooking oil...

...Talk with Russians in any major city, and their sentiments will travel the road of hopelessness, despair, cynicism, and disillusionment...

...A shortage of funds likewise forces Russian soldiers to wear their old uniforms bearing the green and white Soviet shoulder insignia...

...If anything, the word used to describe them since the era of Leonid I. Brezhnev, "stagnation," has been italicized...

...They are embarrassed by the sight of President Boris N. Yeltsin passing the cup, as they put it, to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and Western governments in hopes of collecting a few billion dollars...

...The obsolete State crest—a hammer and sickle surrounded by sheaves of grain—hovers over the classical Greek St...

...Last May Day, to the apparent dismay of many Russians, Moscow City officials sold advertising space in Red Square...

...Conditions, in short, are hardly different from what they were before the Soviet Union's dissolution last December...

...Europe and the United States are called the "far foreign countries...

...Many Russians suffered and died during the years of Communist rule...

...It was on that once hallowed ground that in 1941 Red Army troops were personally commanded by Stalin, standing on the Lenin Mausoleum, to march to the front just a few miles away and defend the city against German invaders...

...In a St...

...Buses chugging up the broad avenue spew out gray exhaust with a peculiar, almost sweet Russian smell that permeates the sweating shoppers' clothes...

...Russian athletes wear dark blue jackets with the Cyrillic letters "CCCP" on the back because their organizations lack the money for new outfits...

...Nelly is a democratic liberal as well as a biochemist—an educated, informed woman who regrets the demise of a formidable state that, in her view, was a global leader in scientific research...

...But the majority were brainwashed by the banners and billboards everywhere proclaiming the supremacy of their workers' state...

...A 70-year-old Russian World War II veteran, still proudly wearing five rows of multicolored ribbons won en route to the capture of Berlin, says he is at a loss to know what to believe in...

...Russian television refers to the others—Ukraine and Kazakhstan, for instance—as the "near foreign countries...

...A year ago the Patriarch stood at the President's side as he was sworn into office...

...The ebullient Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, an ardent anti-Communist, sits in the wood-paneled office previously occupied by the Party secretary...

...Light will be shed as well on the rape of the environment—the rapid industrialization and the nuclear weapons development that turned much of Russia into a toxic waste dump...

...The real damage is being done by truths emerging from the Central Committee archives that are more stunning and demoralizing than anything the banned books or Western scholarly studies circulated in samizdat could begin to describe...

...The people here have not experienced such a wrenching change of values since, perhaps, the Revolution itself...

...There's nothing to be happy about, and it's even difficult to give an account of the happenings, of this sad collapse of culture...

...Gone are the once prevalent red banners and posters extolling, among other things, the victory of Communism, or the leadership of the Party...

...Even the bureaucracy has discovered the profit to be gained from exploiting the Communist past...

...a tin relief of Stalin, stamped "1935," sells for $25...

...Petersburg government...

...The mother of a teenage boy in Moscow has been encouraging him to marry a foreigner so he can move abroad...

...Petersburg city parliament and hundreds of official buildings elsewhere in Russia, waiting for stone masons to come and chisel away history...

...All that is left for him are Yeltsin's vision of Great Russia, and the Orthodox Church...

...The commission charged with organizing publication of the archives' contents has shown that Lenin himself signed the decree confiscating all church property and gold for use by the new Soviet State...

...But from the little already revealed, it is clear Soviet Communism will be so thoroughly exposed that its staunchest believers will have to concede they were victims of seven decades of hypocrisy and lies...

...We used to be a world power...

...Today, they struggle with the fact that politically, economically and culturally their new nation is one of 15 remnants of an empire that took three centuries to create...

...Moscow stores currently offer a replica of the Russian imperial double-headed eagle, surrounded by a plastic gold-colored frame, for the equivalent of five cents...

...In addition, a huge newspaper, radio and then television propaganda machine rumbled on 24 hours each day...

...Subsequently, year after year, huge missiles were paraded there as proof of the Soviet Union's military prowess...

...Yet not all the trappings of the old USSR have been eliminated...

...Red Square also was where victorious Soviet soldiers threw to the ground the divisional flags of defeated Nazi troops...

...A bust of Lenin goes for $20...