Russia Industry

Armed with military rifles and pursuing their prey in motorboats, the Chukchi men of this coastal village have become the most proficient whale hunters in Russia. With the breakup of the Soviet Union--and the end of its control over whaling by indigenous people--Lorino's inhabitants began hunting in the Bering Strait in 1994 for California gray whales to feed themselves and their foxes.

Here on the frigid shore of the Bering Sea, human endeavor has brought together two animals--the fox and the whale--in a way that nature never contemplated. On the beach, the bones and blubber of 39 California gray whales lie slowly decaying where the 35-ton animals were butchered. Waves wash over a whale's severed head and backbone, dragging its giant intestines back to sea.

The woe-is-me countenance of Yuri Skomorokhov could be said to be the face of capitalist Russia. A successful business, a supportive family and a home in this verdant Volga River boomtown have yet to disabuse the 35-year-old entrepreneur of his conviction that Russia's turn of history forced him to sell his soul.

Until state planning collapsed with the Soviet Union at the start of this decade, Valentina Lukshina never had to make a major decision about her life. She studied metallurgy because she came from the coal-mining region of Novokuznetsk. She then moved to this remote steelmaking city in the "distribution"--a Soviet-era practice of deploying college graduates wherever the state deemed their labor most needed.

They came in rags and shackles into icebound desolation, condemned prisoners packed onto Yenisey River barges among the tools they would use to cut through frozen wilderness and tap the north's natural riches. A tin-roofed shrine marks the blackened tundra where thousands died building this most notorious of labor camps in the 1930s. The more breathtaking monument, though, is the smoke-belching city of 300,000 left behind by those victims of "the Terror."

The people of Russia's dying cotton industry have little to thank President Boris N. Yeltsin for. Since he began dragging this city toward capitalism five years ago, many of its state-run factories have been forced to close, unemployment is nearly double the post-Soviet average, and its children are taking to the street to sell rival textiles imported from Turkey and Taiwan. But faced with a direct choice between the incumbent and Communist challenger Gennady A.

The rusty iron gates of the Kirov Factory creak open grudgingly, heralding the decrepitude and indifference within. A bored security guard, interrupted in his exercise of tipping back on the rear legs of his chair, eyes visitors languidly and takes another drag on his cigarette before bestirring himself to let them in.

"I squeeze the slave out of myself drop by drop." -- Anton Chekhov Tatyana A. Yegorova used to epitomize the surliness, sloth and inefficiency for which the Soviet worker was infamous. Spare parts could never seem to be retrieved from the storeroom she supervised at the Neftemash pump-manufacturing plant. According to her boss, the prevailing attitude among the workers was, "That's not my job," "Why should I work more than everyone else?" and "There's nothing I can do about it."

The factory stands idle, smothered by debt. The city is flat broke. And everyone with a garden is out planting potatoes to see them through the coming winter. Two and a half years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the grimy old steel town of Lysva (population 94,000) is a requiem for socialism. Capitalism never had a chance to transform this typical company town on the western flank of the Ural Mountains; Russia's lurch toward a free market killed Lysva from afar.

Russia is entering a new phase in its economic reforms and will now concentrate on fighting its disastrous industrial slump and bringing order to its tax system, officials said Tuesday. "You could call this the beginning of the stabilization period," Economics Minister Alexander N. Shokhin said, "although the statistics don't bear that out yet."