Stability Deadens Dreams for a Russian Family

Katya veers between despair and resignation, powerless to affect events, whether the presidential election that she calls "a game" or the future of a city where everyone is now divided into winners and losers and those like them hovering precariously between two conditions.

"New times bring new illnesses," she said of the depression that struck her last fall. Then she squared her slight shoulders and headed back down four flights of stairs in the dank hallway that always smells slightly of cat urine. She had to take Danil to the $2.75-a-month music lessons that let her preserve the illusion of belonging to the middle class.

There would be no dinner for the two that night; Misha was out entertaining bosses from Moscow and mother and son were too tired. Besides, Katya said as she gestured at the closet-size kitchen, "I hate cooking."

'City of Brides'

At 6:30 a.m., Misha was already awake, ready to head to his office in the blue tax building, in the shadow of the massive Lenin quote praising Ivanovo's proletariat for helping give birth to the Bolshevik Revolution. He commutes by foot and bus because he and Katya have no car. "Ivanovo," he said, "is like when they say on the weather forecast that it will be sunny everywhere except for one place where it's raining. Ivanovo is the rainy area."

In Soviet times, everyone knew about Ivanovo, the textile city 160 miles northeast of Moscow, thanks to the song from the 1981 movie, "Honest, Intelligent, Unmarried." People still hum it from memory, the one about a man's unrequited love and his threat to go to Ivanovo, "the city of brides," to find a woman grateful for his attentions.

Back then, in Misha and Katya's childhood, Ivanovo was called the "Red Manchester," and its 44 mills turned out two-thirds of all the cotton fabric in the Soviet Union. It was here they made the suits for Central Committee members and the uniforms for the Soviet army. Thousands of women, many imported from Central Asia along with the raw cotton, worked in the mills. Men were outnumbered 10 to 1.

Capitalism arrived as a particularly brutal slap here, as factory assets were privatized and workers lost their jobs en masse. These days, the factories mostly sit idle in the city of 432,000. Some have been converted into malls filled with imported fabric, which is both cheaper and of higher quality than the few bolts still turned out in Ivanovo. Official figures show that 63 percent of residents now live in poverty, the highest rate in central Russia.

Misha and Katya came of age in the chaos. They started college in 1991 during the Soviet collapse. In 1996, they married and Misha went to work in the Tax Ministry; a year and a half ago, he was promoted to head the regional legal department. Trained as a pharmacist, Katya could find work only as a lab assistant.

Now 29, Misha has been a tax man his whole working life; even his parents call him a born chinovnik, a bureaucrat. He sees little but corruption and paper-shuffling. Talk of modernization, he said, "is like believing you can launch a nuclear missile from a peasant's hut." In court, he faces private lawyers he calls "sharks" and wonders whether he could be like them.

To the extent that anyone has heard of Ivanovo lately, it was only when its regional legislature demanded in recent months a constitutional amendment so Putin could extend his term of office from four to seven years. Ivanovo was famous again, although to Misha and Katya as a source of embarrassment.

Putin has been here just once, during the 2000 election. He visited the institute where Katya works and announced he would never stoop to campaign advertising, as if the president of Russia were "Tampax or Snickers," as he put it.

Left to divine Putin's intentions, Misha voted against all candidates in 2000 because "I quickly understood that this was what we were offered to eat and I didn't want to partake of it." Now, he is more sanguine. "At least I know what Putin is," he said, "and I'm not that allergic to him."

After four years, they have seen modest improvements in the city, like the supermarket around the corner where Katya now shops, and the electronics store where they bought a computer for Danil on credit.

And they have also seen how Ivanovo has been left behind, its airport closed, its streets cratered and mostly unlit in the perpetual gloom of Russian winter. For all of Putin's promises of reform, mortgages to help them buy a better apartment remain more urban legend than reality. Government salaries were raised recently, but as Misha said, "If my salary went up 11 percent, inflation was 12 percent."