Silent suffering in Russia: as Russian companies were privatized, usually given to "former communists" who stripped them of valuables, the bulk of Russians received merely empty promises.

"People in Russia were conditioned to worry about family problems and the global situation, particularly the struggle for peace, but not about crime, accidents, or the struggle to make a living," reported David Satter, a correspondent who covered Russia, in his book Darkness at Dawn. "When these problems began to intrude on them, the reaction was often fear and hysteria. Many people wanted to commit suicide because they were overcome with fear."

According to Satter, Russians as a people do not handle change very well; they have been trained all their lives to serve the Soviet State, to be used as raw material in the building of the state. Service to the state was where they derived both their worth and well-being. Then in January 1992 post-Soviet reforms thrust them almost overnight from a lifestyle of being treated like valued government mules--given adequate shelter, guided constantly in their daily lives, and made reliant on government as master to care for their daily needs--to utter abandonment. They now had to fend for themselves in business conditions that could be likened to a drought. Government contracts, the lifeblood of many companies, dried up; then predators in the form of gangsters or former Soviet officials moved in and took charge of any remaining fertile property. Meanwhile, the population as a whole lived in the margins in a constant daily struggle to subsist and live.

The problems faced by the workers at the Yaroslavl Heating Equipment Factory, as related by Satter, were endemic throughout Russia. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Satter wrote,

   orders and supplies declined sharply,
   causing production to fall by more
   than half. At the same time, hyperinflation
   destroyed the life savings
   of the workers, causing mass demoralization.
   In some cases the savings
   were as much as 15,000 rubles, which
   had previously been enough to buy a
   three-room apartment. Within a few
   months, it sufficed to pay for a pair
   of boots....

      As delays in paying salaries
   reached one month and began to be
   regular, many workers started to raise
   their own food....

      The delays in paying salaries soon
   reached two months, and the factories
   began to give workers part of their pay
   in the form of meals in the factory buffet.
   The food was of prison quality, but
   the workers accepted it eagerly, often
   bringing it home for their children
   without eating anything themselves.

      After the factory was privatized,
   conditions became worse. Part of the
   production as well as truckloads of
   spare parts disappeared. Metal cutting
   machines were removed and
   sold on the side. Materials were taken
   from the construction site of a future
   sports complex and used to build
   three- and four-story dachas for the
   factory management.

      By mid-1994, malnutrition and financial
   uncertainty had led to deep
   social crisis. Families broke up as
   men found it impossible to support
   their children. Workers who became
   ill could not afford medical care and
   died prematurely. These were the first
   suicides.

In factories throughout the country, workers went for months without pay as ruthless plant managers skimmed every available dollar and exploited every means of putting as much money as possible in their own pockets. The workers usually didn't quit their jobs because they did occasionally get some pay, and something was better than nothing. Although, technically, boards of directors controlled the newly privatized business entities, the boards had no way to enforce their will, and besides, anyone who caused too much trouble could simply be killed.

For a joke, a reporter put an ad in a newspaper offering himself as a contract killer; he received a steady stream of calls to enlist his services. Killing was commonplace, and might come about for almost any reason--but usually avarice. According to Satter "in the years 1992-1997 in Moscow alone, 20,000 people sold their housing and then disappeared.... A significant percentage, if not the vast majority, of these people were believed to have been murdered for their apartments.... Apartment gangs formed in cities all over the country." They forced residents "to sign over their apartments, and then killed them," Satter reported.

"In 1993 there were 45,060 murders in Russia compared with 26,254 in the United States [Russia's population is just under half of that of the United States at about 142 million], and the Russian figure did not include an estimated 22,000 persons who disappeared or the many Russian murder victims whose deaths were disguised as accidents."

Russians, by and large, cannot count on police to come to their aid. Satter explains that the police still have the Soviet mentality that it is their job to work against citizens, not to protect and serve them. Police routinely arrest people on bogus charges with the intention of letting them go in return for a bribe. Dereliction of duty is so rampant that even murders often go largely uninvestigated. The problem is made worse, according to Satter, because most of the competent investigators in post-Soviet Russia resigned from the police and started their own security companies.

At the same time, people wishing to open businesses in Russia find that they are usually obligated to purchase a "roof"--gang "protection."

By and large, the people are helpless, and their helplessness fueled, and in return was fueled by, suicide and other self-destructive behavior, such as a national love of alcohol--namely vodka--rampant drug use, and involvement in the sex trades.

Suicides climbed dramatically, "from 26,796 in 1988 to 46,016 in 1993." The death rate among working-age adults was also exacerbated by other causes: "In 1992-1996 there were three million work-related accidents, 63,500 of them fatal." Adding to the death toll were those deaths caused by alcoholism. In her book Betrayal of Trust, Laurie Garrett, a journalist covering medically related issues, states: "Alter the fall of the USSR per capita consumption jumped by 600 percent and incidences of alcohol-related deaths followed suit. Government figures from 1995 showed a rate approaching 500 per 100,000, in contrast to an American alcohol-associated death rate in 1995 of just 77."

She elaborated: "It's not just that consumption is high, although it is ...; it's the way they consume. It's chug-a-lug vodka drinking that starts at the office during the morning coffee break and goes right into the nighttime." Individually, they drink massive amounts: "In the fall of 1998 Russia's President Yeltsin announced that Russia's population-wide average had reached more than 25 liters of pure ethanol equivalent a year. Adjusting for age, that implied that Russian adults were--on average--consuming an astonishing three bottles of high-proof vodka a week."

Going hand in hand with mass alcoholism was rampant drug use, as people tried to blot out the reality of their lives. A survey of Moscow's colleges indicated that "a startling 100 percent of the students have tried drugs; all drank hard liquor, and half of them said that they use heroin, other narcotics, or amphetamines regularly.... The young Muscovites said they saw no other alternative--no other way to face each day--except inebriated or stoned." Throughout Russia "drug use estimates from the [Russian] Ministry of Interior say there are about two million IV drug users."

The consequences of the breakdown in societal norms and the absence of personal responsibility led parents to "child abuse and abandonment" and women and children to become involved, voluntarily and involuntarily, in the sex trade. "In 1997 the Moscow Human Rights Research Center estimated there were a million homeless children in Russia; the government said 700,000. No one knew how many more children had parents in homes but were left largely to survive on their own because of their parents' alcoholism," Garrett related.

Women and girls often turned to prostitution to support themselves. According to Garrett, prostitution for girls is such a widely considered option that "some seven- and eight-year-olds even worked during school recesses doing what they called 'hot sex'--quickies performed with adult men behind food kiosks for about two dollars." Other women were forced into sex-slave operations. According to The World Factbook: "Russia is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for various purposes; it remains a significant source of women trafficked to over 50 countries for commercial sexual exploitation." Women trafficked from Russia follow the promise of jobs. When they reach a destination country, traffickers take their passports and money and then gang rape or beat them to force the traffickers' will on them. "Internal trafficking remains a problem in Russia with women trafficked from rural areas to urban centers for commercial sexual exploitation ...; debt bondage is common among trafficking victims, and child sex tourism remains a concern."

Rampant sex and drug use have led to widespread disease. "As of the end of December 1997, 7 percent of the Russian military tested positive for HIV infection. That was roughly 105,000 men," according to Garrett. Making problems worse are large numbers of cases of hepatitis and drug-resistant tuberculosis (the latter from improper use of medications society-wide, and cramped conditions and poor healthcare in prisons).

All told, "in the period 1992-1995, deaths exceeded births by 2 million, a demographic catastrophe not experienced in peacetime except during the famine of 1932-33 and the Stalinist terror of 1937-38," asserted Satter. A 2006 estimate from The World Factbook showed that the population rate of Russia (which includes deaths, births, and migration) is now declining by 0.37 percent a year--or by about a half million a year. This despite the fact that Russia is experiencing a net migration gain as Russians return from former Soviet satellite countries and Chinese move into Siberia to escape China's restrictive one-child law.

Life in Russia has been grim for much of the citizenry. In April of 2005, according to Pravda.Ru, average monthly earnings reached an all-time high of $303 per month--a wage that is above the official poverty line, but "is very close to a subsistence wage." Yet, even with this low poverty line, a 2004 estimate in The World Factbook placed 17.8 percent of the population below the poverty line.

The relative poverty of the populace of Russia leaves the people, who have been trained to believe newspapers and other public media, susceptible to the get-rich-quick schemes and bank fraud that are commonplace. And the constant difficulties faced by the masses aren't likely to abate soon. Russia's infrastructure is dilapidated, inflation remains high, and, as The World Factbook says, "Most fundamentally, Russia has made little progress in building the rule of law, the bedrock of a modern market economy."