IVANOVO, Russia -- One of Russia's futures begins here, in this old cotton mill town that has run out of cotton on one end and out of customers on the other.
This future, the Ivanovo variant, is one where there aren't any jobs. In general, the threat of disastrously widespread unemployment hangs over Russia like a pall. In a country with thousands of outdated factories, joblessness may pose the biggest threat to Russian stability.
Officially, the jobless rate in Ivanovo is 8 percent, but that doesn't count those who haven't bothered to register for the $7.88-a-month benefits, or the thousands of textile workers who are on unpaid, rotating layoffs. The lack of work and pay has demolished the local economy.
Unemployment in Ivanovo is not an anonymous force. The Soviets liked to think in terms of the masses, but joblessness in the new, free-market Russia has many distinct and individual faces.
There's Galina Toropova, who quit her job selling insurance when she couldn't find anyone to buy it, and whose husband was laid off in March from the city fire department. She's anxious, living day to day, afraid of what tomorrow will bring.
There's Sergei Ilyichov, a 24-year-old former Army officer who moved here with his wife and 3-year-old son from the Arctic city of Norilsk in search of better weather, if nothing else. His military training left him ill-prepared for civilian work, but he's young and full of confidence, and refuses to feel sorry for himself.
There's Nina Smirnova, trained as a nurse but unable to hold a steady job, estranged from both her mother and her son, looking decades older than her age of 47.
"I'm so hungry," she said, "I have to beg for food. The drunks give me wine, though I don't want it. And then the police take me. I'm hungry, not drunk. But they've broken my life."
Fear, optimism, alcohol. Think of them as the primary colors of joblessness. Yet for most out-of-work people here, life falls somewhere in between, among the gradations, in the shadings.
If the Ivanovo region with its 64 textile mills is a harbinger of things to come in Russia -- a place where the dinosaur industries of the Soviet era, inefficient and heedless of customers' needs, are shutting down with nothing to replace them -- it is worth paying attention to what happens here.
Numb and bewildered
There is little anger, and less militancy. People are numb, bewildered, depressed. Health problems are up, hunger is not -- although nutrition is poor. Hopes have been --ed, but compared to the 20th-century ravages of civil war, famine, Stalinism, and World War II, the current troubles seem bearable to many.
Valentina Ulyanova, a 43-year-old former construction engineer, talks about life on the unemployment line.
Mrs. Ulyanova is not about to throw a brick through a window or support a Communist or fascist backlash. She's hurting and confused. In this she's typical of the several million jobless people of Russia -- with their numbers soon to grow, perhaps, to many millions more.
She has spent all but five years of her life in Ivanovo, a city of 400,000, about 180 miles northeast of Moscow. Her mother's first husband was killed fighting the Germans. Her father was a prisoner of war. She grew up hearing over and over how lucky she was to have escaped the misery that her parents and grandparents endured.
"We were sure, and we were quiet, and we believed we lived in a great power," she said. But her expectations were simple.
"As a girl, I may have had beautiful dreams, but, really, you couldn't dream about what you didn't know about. We couldn't jump over our own heads."
Her father was a driver; her mother worked in a meat factory. Yet Mrs. Ulyanova had a chance to go to the construction institute in Ivanovo, where she met her husband, Vladimir.
In 1976, after graduation, the two were assigned to a small village about 75 miles away. They spent the next five years overseeing construction at a prison camp there, and in some ways those were the happiest years of her life.
They were young and away from home, raising their son, Volodya, and she found she enjoyed talking to the prisoners -- who in those days were among the few people who had the freedom to talk openly about their feelings and beliefs.
In 1981 they came back to Ivanovo. Both got jobs through "blat," or connections, with Aeroflot, handling construction projects at the airport. They moved into a new three-room apartment in a prefabricated high-rise, built on the edge of town among piles of sand and mud and rutted lanes that have only grown drearier since then.
They acquired a dacha -- a little country cottage with a plot of land -- and a car. They could view the future with certainty.
Yet Mrs. Ulyanova, a woman who is not given to reflection and prefers to keep her head down, found herself increasingly unhappy with the political restrictions of the Soviet Union. Maybe it was those years among the prisoners.
"We had to be hypocritical all the time," she said. "It was a constant masquerade."
She was not alone. Across the Soviet Union, more and more people chafed, more and more realized that things had gone profoundly wrong. But what people began realizing only later, after the Soviet Union had been swept away, was how much had been hidden behind that hypocrisy and masquerade -- how the mills in a city like Ivanovo kept going only because the Soviet leaders refused to face the facts of their dying economy.
A year ago Mrs. Ulyanova and her husband lost their jobs, which paid about $54 a month, because hardly anyone was flying to Ivanovo anymore. She seemed surprised recently at the suggestion that her own plight might be connected to the shutdown of the local textile industry. She hadn't made that link before.
Her husband went to work for a municipal welfare support bureau, but, as she noted, someone forgot to support the bureau, and he has never received his $40-a-month salary. She's been looking for work. Their son, now 23, lost his job at an #F aircraft modeling plant early this year.
One day recently, Mrs. Ulyanova stopped by the Federal Employment Service office, as she must do at least twice a month to receive her $7.88 benefit.
The clerk, Yelena Golofast, had a job referral for her. The local office of the Interior Ministry needed a construction engineer. They were paying $46 a month.
That afternoon Mrs. Ulyanova trekked out to the ministry building. She waited three hours for the chief engineer to show up. When he did, he told her he needed someone with training in economics.
"It was what I expected," she said later. "I didn't have much hope. It was a mistake for the bureau to send me out there."
When she got home she was stricken with such a severe headache that she called an ambulance. Ambulance service is free, and it includes a doctor. He gave her some medicine to take at home, and left.
The incident made her realize how vulnerable she is -- to sickness, to catastrophe.
Mrs. Ulyanova's father lives with them, and he gets a pension of $42 a month. Fortunately, their expenses are negligible. Rent and utilities amount to just $8 a month, slightly more than her unemployment benefit. At the dacha they grow tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, cabbages, carrots and berries. They use the car only to go to the dacha. They do without meat.
Mrs. Ulyanova has a hard time seeing how she fits in with the larger changes sweeping Russia. She doesn't quite understand
that the pain in Ivanovo grows out of reforms launched in Moscow.
"I can't connect my personal life with anything they do in Moscow," she said. "We take care of ourselves."
In August 1991 she was firmly in the camp of President Boris N. Yeltsin as he faced down the conservative putschists. In last December's elections, she didn't bother to vote.
"I'm sick of all of them," she said.
The disillusionment?
"It wasn't sudden," she said. "I couldn't foresee that I would find myself in such a situation.
"The big moment was when I had to leave the job. At first, I just didn't realize what was happening to me. I thought, 'Well, I'm going, so I'll go.' It's only hitting me now. My head is always turning the same idea inside.
"It's like a nail in my brain, thinking, how will we live in the future?"
She thinks Volodya, who hopes for a career as an industrial designer, will probably have to leave Ivanovo. But she grows agitated, visibly distressed, when she is asked if he might think ,, of leaving Russia altogether. She's never thought of that. It's too much to consider.
Her apartment is neat, well cared for. (She has plenty of time for that now.) She feels that her family needs her, and that gives her strength. It's not the hardship, it's the worry that besets her.
"I built my life with my own hands. Maybe I made mistakes. I don't have any regrets. Even now I want something good for the future.
"But when you're out of a job," she said, "you just don't see any way out."