Russia: Unmerry Christmas

Neighbors are not happy about the barnyard noises and smells coming from the back of Alexander Torzhenko's house on a busy street in the center of the south Russian city of Krasnodar. But the elderly manual laborer and his wife Alexandra are determined not to give up the pigs or the dozen ducks they keep in two ramshackle wood shacks on their 15-sq.-yd. plot. In fact, the couple seem to be settling in for a long siege. "Around here, they steal," says Torzhenko, so he has dug a cellar with concrete walls and a heavy metal trapdoor to store pork and the potatoes he grows on a parcel of rural land in this rich, black-earth region. "I trust Mikhail Gorbachev when it comes to one thing," he adds. "He said there would be famine -- and there will be."

The soil is not as fertile in Bakarevo, a settlement 900 miles to the north on the Volga River, near the city of Yaroslavl. In fact, Venyamin, who prefers not to give his last name, cannot scrape a living out of his small landholding. He works as a ship chandler to support his wife Antonina, her mother and two young sons. They also have damp earthen cellars beneath their wooden cottage to store their winter stash: 15 sacks of potatoes, two barrels of salted cabbage, heaps of onions and carrots, five huge jars of pickles and 40 quarts of fruit preserves.

Both families have one thing to celebrate this grim Yuletide: they are fortunate enough to have stockpiles of food for the difficult months ahead. Russians may not understand the notion of the new commonwealth being created by President Boris Yeltsin, but they can see with their own eyes how the fabric of daily life has been torn to shreds by six years of political and economic upheaval.

They are not expecting any dramatic improvements either when the red hammer- and-sickle flag is lowered over the Kremlin, giving way to Russia's white- blue- and-red banner, and Gorbachev finally steps down as Soviet President. Both might happen momentarily. Meeting Saturday in the Kazakh capital of Alma- Ata, presidents of 11 former Soviet republics -- only Georgia was absent -- signed documents formally creating a Commonwealth of Independent States to succeed the U.S.S.R. and settled some of the last details. For example, they agreed to form a military council to exercise unified control of the armed services and to have Russia take over the Soviet seat on the United Nations Security Council.

That also should enable Yeltsin finally to lift controls on prices and "privatize" state-owned property. To many Russians, that prospect is as appetizing as a large dose of castor oil. With everything in short supply, it is not surprising that the collectivist ethic has given way to the principle of every man for himself.

Social and economic decay are evident everywhere. Domestic airports look like refugee camps as stranded passengers keep weary vigil, hoping the state- owned Aeroflot airlines will soon resume flights canceled by a severe shortage of fuel and spare parts. With more than 8,000 wells standing idle, oil and gas production have dropped 10%. Life in the far eastern city of Khabarovsk, a key industrial and defense center on the Chinese border, has almost ground to a halt because of dwindling food and heating oil.