Kremlin's Cash Crunch Prompts A Winter of Discontent for Retirees

RAISA ALEXANDROVNA has overcome the strong objections of her husband to lift her family's circumstances in central Russia. She collects an average pension, and her husband earns about the average Russian salary. The family once had saved nearly $100,000 in rubles, she says, but after buying a daughter a two-bedroom apartment in St. Petersburg they lost the rest to inflation - like almost everyone else.

Once a week, she drives with a son to Moscow's outdoor markets and buys cheap Chinese clothes and shoes to sell back in her hometown a hundred miles away. She makes more than her husband's salary and her pension together.

Her husband, she says, "prefers to live in poverty and not have people be able to point at him [in ridicule] as a shuttle trader."

But for her part, she explains, "I'm not accustomed to being poor."

In the provinces surrounding Moscow, pensions are hand-delivered in cash once a month. They are running two weeks late on average. But not in Khimki, a district just outside the Moscow city boundary. Lyudmila Tarasova, head of the local branch of the Russian pension fund, says she manages to collect just enough money every day for the scheduled pension payments.

"Every day begins with looking for money to pay the pensions," she says. She runs one of the few computerized pension departments in the country.

Each morning, her staff checks the e-mail from the 254 banks in the district for payments to the fund. Every enterprise must pay 28 percent of its payroll to the pension fund. Ms. Tarasova keeps track of each payment from each enterprise and prods them constantly. She monitors the banks so that the money transfers to her office are immediate. She calls the corporate directors. She uses the tax police and local prosecutors to help threaten reluctant companies. She uses local TV and newspapers to shame them into paying. She just arranged a bank loan to one enterprise so they could pay their pension debt.

"I believe it is only because of our enthusiasm that we pay our pensions," she says.

Ironically, Russian pensions are more uniform from person to person now than they were in the latter days of the Soviet Union. Those with the most generous pensions get far less now, but the poorest are faring better. Most pension officials feel that the standard of living for people on pensions is roughly the same as five or 10 years ago, or only slightly worse.

The main question that greets the pension deliverymen (most are men) is whether the amount has been increased. It hasn't since last May. Still, lately the pensioners have become more cheerful, says deliveryman Nikolai Ivanov, although he is not sure why. "It's our national character," says his colleague Gennady Kasyanov. "We have hope for the future."

But far from the bustle of Moscow, in the Arctic near Murmansk, the Ruds admit to no remaining hope. Says Mrs. Rud: "We worked all our lives and now we're almost doomed."

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