Allentown, Pa. -- THE RUSSIAN government has given the people a holiday present.
On Jan. 1, the minimum wage will rise to a paltry $14 a month. The government's promise du jour is that the country will be back on the economic track in three years.
No wonder an opinion poll last month showed that 73 percent of the people do not trust the government -- indeed, are afraid of it.
And no wonder an apparent death wish, signified by a rise in suicides, is spreading across Russia -- a macabre indicator that the economic revolution has taken a terrible turn.
According to recent statistics, which seem trustworthy, in the past two years 100,000 Russians have killed themselves. The suicide rate in 1993 reached 38 per 100,000 people, up from 26.5 in 1991.
The rate in the United States is 12 for every 100,000.
Over all, 2.2 million Russians died in 1993 -- 360,000 more than in 1992. Deaths exceeded births by nearly 800,000 in 1993, a time when there was no war, plague or famine.
Life expectancy during the final years of the Soviet period was 64.5 years for men, 74 for women. Today's figures are 58.5 for men, 68.5 for women. By contrast, life expectancy for American white males is 72.7 years, for white women 79.4.
What's going on?
Ella A. Pamfilova, the former minister of social security, becomes emotional when she talks about fathers committing suicide because they cannot provide their children with food and shelter.
Many families can no longer afford to set aside money for funerals. Some bereaved families rent coffins, which have to be returned the day after the burial.
While the death rate is soaring, the birth rate is plummeting. In 1987, 2.5 million babies were born in the Russian Federation; in 1993, the number was 1.4 million.
NTC This is not due to better access to birth control. The current drop in Russia is because children are becoming a luxury many families simply cannot afford.
To combat this growing sense of desperation and despair, the country needs to replace President Boris Yeltsin and his promises with the Russian equivalents of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal.
Many of the most outspoken supporters of economic reform question the efficacy of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" that regulates the free market. Rather, they wonder if a helping hand of the kind provided during Roosevelt's early administrations wouldn't be preferable.
The two need not be mutually exclusive. They certainly are not in the United States, which has combined free enterprise with federal and state safety nets.
Post-Communist Russia is being built with the bricks of capitalism -- free enterprise, private property, convertible currency. But we have neglected the mortar of social programs that help hold the bricks together. The resulting structure is shaky and in danger of collapse.
To keep the new Russia together, we must supplement market reform with a kind of New Deal to soften the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. If we don't, the birth pangs of reform will become a death rattle.
We need a type of Works Progress Administration to put people to work building roads and otherwise redeveloping our antiquated infrastructure.
We need a Civilian Conservation Corps to save many regions from ecological disaster. We need a Home Owners Loan Corporation to ease crowded living conditions.
Although the U.S. economy had hit bottom during the Depression, FDR found the money to finance these programs. In Russia, the state owned everything, and even today much of its wealth -- in land, natural resources, military industry convertible to civilian use -- can yield rubles to finance social reforms.
In addition, it is time to finally establish honest rules of the game -- to stabilize our erratic legal system and tax codes and make our laws more rational and enforceable.
For example, the state collects only 60 percent of the taxes it imposes. This is intentional, I suspect. It helps the elite add money to power.
Like his model, a Russian Roosevelt would be a committed capitalist who is not blind to the pain of the electorate.
The precedent is there: Russia has long experimented with new ideas -- from Peter the Great to Lenin to Gorbachev to Yeltsin.
The irony of history is that to succeed with capitalism, Russia must borrow a little "socialism" from the United States.
Gennadi I. Gerasimov, spokesman for Mikhail S. Gorbachev when he was president of the former Soviet Union, is a visiting professor of political science at Muhlenberg College. He wrote this for the New York Times.