Prices for everything but bread, salt, gas, coal and a handful of other staples will soar. Yeltsin’s chief economic adviser expects them to double. The former Russian economics minister says they will quadruple. And Soviet newspapers predict that prices for scarce items like lemons could multiply by a factor of 25. At the same time, state stores are to be privatized, but how that will be coordinated is unclear. Most wage ceilings have been removed, raising fears of hyperinflation. Unemployment is also bound to rise. Soup kitchens and special stores will help the neediest to cope. But the possibility of social unrest can’t be discounted. Already, war veterans and pensioners have been beaten when they invoked their right to go to the head of food lines.
Parents are panicky about their inability to find dairy products for children. “The prospect is for ongoing food shortages and hunger, if not starvation, in the big cities,” said Robert Legvold of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. Yeltsin’s strategy assumes that higher prices will shake out food supplies being hoarded in the countryside. But if inflation takes off, food may be withheld by producers waiting for higher prices. And how will workers pay those prices? Many large factories, not yet privatized, could grind to a halt.
A lack of crucial medical supplies makes citizens of the new commonwealth vulnerable to viral infections and disorders due to poor sanitation. “As many as 1.5 million people throughout the country may die this year due to the shortage of medicine,” says Vladimir Markaryants, chairman of the public medical fund responsible for hospital supplies. Hospitals, short on syringes, reuse them-and have become a major source of AIDS. “They haven’t got the simplest medical supplies, like sutures, Band-Aids or antibiotics,” says Karen Gordon of Project Hope, which has airlifted $26 million worth of supplies to the Soviet Union since February. But supplies go only to major cities. “In the countryside, there is no medical care,” she says.
As a result of the Soviet Union’s failure to improve its extraction and distribution systems, coal and oil production have been declining. Now the bills are coming due. Aeroflot, the national airline, has shut down some routes for lack of fuel . There is no gas at all in some provincial capitals, and it’s scarce in the big cities. A shortage of diesel fuel compounds the problem of shipping goods over a wrecked road and rail network. The national power grid is overloaded and working at peak capacity. “Should a major breakdown occur, huge regions and even whole sovereign states could find themselves immersed in total darkness,” Pravda warned. The most chilling threat of all: widespread shortages of homeheating oil. Says Legvold, “That’s the great dread.”
Yeltsin announced he would go forward with his reforms even before settling such delicate questions as who will control the commonwealth’s ground forces and whether all members will adopt a common currency. He also finessed the issue of nationalist longings. In Georgia, the only non-Baltic republic still outside the commonwealth, President Zviad Gamsakhurdia remained under siege in his Parliament building and rebels set fire to the local KGB headquarters; at least 53 died in last week’s fighting alone. Should such unrest spread, there are “any number of first-class demagogues” ready to challenge elected officials, said U.S. Ambassador Robert Strauss. And Yeltsin’s reforms will place heavy strains on the infant alliance, because few of his neighbors are prepared to follow suit quickly. Sharp price rises in Russia could suck consumer goods out of the other republics. That could lead to attempts at closing borders. The commonwealth would be powerless to intervene: it has no budget, no government structure, no right to compel any republic to do anything.
Secretary of State James Baker came away from a recent tour of republics convinced that the same forces of decentralization that broke up the Soviet Union would soon break up the new regime. Many Russian observers agree. “The commonwealth may swiftly fall apart,” the progressive newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta predicted last week. Yeltsin’s gamble is that the former Soviet people will see no practical alternative to a confederation with Russia as the dominant partner. That may make sense, but politics is not always practical.
