August 25, 1998 With Resignation, Russians Work Ever Harder for Even Less By MICHAEL WINES MOSCOW -- Nina Kostina cheered Boris Yeltsin's ascension to the presidency in 1991. She voted to re-elect him in 1996. She expected to be comfortably into her retirement by now. Instead she is a cleaning woman at the Old Moscow Circus, working 11-hour days and taking home $70 a month -- maybe -- after last week's ruble devaluation. Better not to ask what she thinks about Yeltsin's promise Monday that his latest government shakeup will bring stability to Russia. "I thought we would live normally," she said bitterly, trudging toward a Moscow metro station as dusk fell Monday evening. "He said to wait half a year; wait a year; wait another year. Now I've waited seven years -- and nothing. We don't expect anything better, because there's nothing good. I only count on my own self." Russians have waited seven years for Yeltsin's capitalist revolution to bear fruit, only to be confronted this month with the certainty that life will again become more expensive, and probably harder, before it gets better. Russians are famous for their stoicism. But there are hints that the country's legendary forbearance -- with Yeltsin's bureaucratic pirouettes, with their hard lives -- may be eroding. A nationwide poll of 6,000 Russians conducted shortly before the latest economic crisis registered a marked increase -- from 50 percent in March to 65 percent in mid-August -- in the share of respondents who said Yeltsin's government could "no longer count on the people's patience." Twelve percent of respondents said they were ready to join a strike, and 11 percent said they supported an armed uprising against the government -- figures that have roughly doubled in six months. Only 8 percent had any faith that Yeltsin's program of tax and economic reforms would improve their lives. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus two percentage points, according to Nuzgar Betaneli, head of the Sociology and Parliamentarianism Institute, which conducted the survey. In an interview Monday, Betaneli said that Russians' dwindling hope for economic improvement is directly tied to their increased willingness to protest. He also predicted that the public will see Yeltsin's latest reshuffling of his government in a poor light unless the president can better explain his motives for the change in leadership. Polls can be conducted or interpreted wrongly of course, and Russia is so vast and diverse that snapshots of the public mood are difficult to take well. (complete article at www.nytimes.com) Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
