Surviving in the new bad times

To reach platform 16 at the Yaroslavsky Station in Moscow one walks past a small bust of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, beside which traders sell cabbage pies to intending travellers. This is not the way Vladimir Ilyich wanted it to be, of course. His statues all over Russia look down on scenes more reminiscent of pre-revolutionary Tsarist times than the utopia Lenin was determined to create.

I was on my way to a conference in Vologda, a nine-hour train journey directly northwards from the capital, where a much larger Vladimir Ilyich looks down from his plinth at the traders in the city's main square. There isn't as much to trade there, mind you, since the collapse of Russia's newly capitalist economy. A bottle of vodka or a kilo of carrots occasionally changes hands.

The White Sea Express destined for the far northern port of Archangel pulled out - as almost all Russian trains do - precisely on time. The ancient city of Yaroslavl was its first stop. Here as the express, constructed in now redundant railyards of east Germany, snaked its way into the station, scores of elderly women, the irrepressible Russian babushki, readied themselves to pounce on its passengers.

Half a dozen litre bottles of the excellent local beer were offered at five roubles each. This translates at 11 pints for £1.50. There was table linen for sale and strange swan-like lampshades made of frosted glass. The Russian grandmothers were fighting for their own survival and that of their children and grandchildren.

At Danilov, a few hours to the north, the range of products was far more limited: passengers were offered potatoes, carrots and onions with some beetroot and the odd pomegranate, a fruit whose presence signifies the end of autumn and the onset of the harsh Russian winter.

Lenin, by the way, would have heard of similar scenes for, in the early days of the Soviet economy the meshochniki, the bagmen, travelled the railways of Russia buying an item which was abundant in one city and selling it in another where it was scarce. In Moscow at one stage, there was a shortage of most things but if, by some odd chance, you wanted to get your hands on a French horn the city was coming down with this instrument.

The difference today is that it is the women, rather than men, who are trading, that few are buying and that music has become a commodity worth trading on the informal market. In the Chekhovskaya metro station in Moscow on Friday evening, a woman in her 20s, respectably dressed and with a haunting and beautifully trained voice, sang an aria from Borodin's Prince Igor in the hope of making a rouble or two.

The oldest profession is burgeoning too. Previously confined to the alleys off Tverskaya, the former Gorky Street, prostitution has now spread out on to the inner ring road with mobs of dyevki lined up to attract the owners of the flash western cars which prowl the streets at night.

At the seminar I attended, the Russian writer, Vassily Belov, made a forceful comparison between the girls who line Moscow's main streets and the journalists who sat around the long table discussing press freedom and independent media. The issue in question concerned what Russian journalists call "contract articles".

In today's Russia, a budding politician can be assured of a laudatory article simply by paying a reporter to write one and an editor to ensure that it is published. Even the mass circulation newspaper Argumenti I Fakti is planning to launch a political consultancy which will ensure the publication of "favourable articles".

The new bad times appear to have spawned as much corruption in one sector of society as the recent "good times" did in another. In the space of two months Russia's new middle class has been all but wiped out and at least some of its members are resorting to previously untried measures in order to survive.

The "New Russians", those who made vast fortunes quickly after the fall of communism in 1991, have held on to their wealth. The collapse of Russia's banking system had little effect on people whose fortunes were stashed away in Switzerland and Cyprus. At Chekhovskaya metro station, the copy of Izvestia I bought from a news-vendor near the cultured soprano carried an advertisement for skiing holidays in the Trentino region of Italy.