In autumn 1991, while on assignment with the FT, Neil Buckley returned to the city of Voronezh, where he had studied three years earlier. His previously unpublished report describes the weary confusion of provincial Russians just weeks after the abortive coup by hardline members of the Communist party that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union a few months later

The night was dark, but surprisingly warm for late October. In a wood cottage in the village of Podgornoye, Masha was feeding her baby. "You know what the real effect of the coup has been?" she reflected. "It made us lose faith in all politicians." She got up to pour the tea. We were, in traditional Russian fashion, discussing politics around the kitchen table.

"The hardliners discredited themselves with the coup, but we're fed up with Yeltsin and his lot - they've failed to achieve anything. We just think 'to hell with it'. We have nothing left to believe in." Masha, a dark-eyed language student, smiled at her 11-month daughter, who was sucking determinedly on a bottle of warmed yoghurt. The remains of supper - black bread, salted lard, pickled tomatoes, strawberry jam and a few shrivelled apples - were spread across the table. That month's ration of vodka had also been brought out.

"Everything's just so difficult, so stupid. They won't sell me baby food in the city, because I live here in the village. But the shops here don't have it." As a tram rumbled past on the far side of the trees, we drank a toast to Russia's bright future, though without conviction. We were outside Voronezh, 300 miles south of Moscow, on the banks of an artifical lake fed by a tributary of the Don. Built three centuries ago on the site of a military garrison by Peter the Great (he also built 200 galleons for his Sea of Azov fleet there), it was a frontier town on the edge of the Russian empire. It has since grown, almost unknown to the outside world, into a million-strong city and the administrative centre of a region about the size of Holland. Virgin birch forest, where wild boars roam, covers some of the region; elsewhere, seemingly boundless fields of the rich, dark soil that gives the area its name - the Black Earth region - are punctuated by isolated villages of dirt tracks, water pumps and painted wooden houses.

The city has known hardship. Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the poet Osip, who dared to write a satirical verse about Stalin in the 1930s and spent three years in exile in Voronezh, wrote that it was a "grim place, badly off for food". Some things have not changed.

But little remains of the Voronezh Mandelstam knew. More than 90 per cent of the city was levelled during the second world war, when for 200 days it was again a frontier - this time of the German Reich. A third of the region's inhabitants perished.

More recently, Voronezh briefly entered the world's consciousness in 1989, when post-glasnost TASS issued a deadly serious report that a flying saucer had landed in one of the city's parks, and that eight-foot aliens had chatted with schoolchildren.

But a visit from extra-terrestrials has had little visible impact on this isolated city. The fug of low-octane petrol fumes and nutty-smelling Soviet cigarette smoke still hangs over street scenes that seem to have had the colour drained out of them. Buildings are poorly-lit and shabby, the crooked fittings unchanged for years. Streets and even the interiors of shops turn into a muddy morass at the hint of rain. The shops are still staffed by fat old women in dirty white coats who treat customers as an irritation. There is nowhere to socialise in the evenings except a couple of dingy ice cream parlours which close at 9.30pm.

Attitudes, however, have changed - but not in the way you might expect. Gone is the buzz of optimism and excitement so tangible three years ago, after the first wave of real glasnost and semi-free parliamentary elections. Voronezh today is a sadder, gloomier place. There is little sense that the country has just undergone a "second revolution", as the August coup has been portrayed in the west.

Slava, a Voronezh lorry driver in his 30s whom I met on a train, was typically dismissive of the whole affair. "What did the coup mean to us? That was all in Moscow, miles away. It wouldn't really affect us either way."

The 12-hour train journey to the capital, the slowness of the postal service and a telephone system that makes phoning Moscow a stressful chore, make the 300-mile distance seem far indeed. The tiny minority of Russians who defended the barricades around the White House might have been in a different country. They were certainly a different breed from many in the provinces. A resident of Novovoronezh, a new town built next to a huge nuclear power station 20-odd miles south of Voronezh, tells of how people waiting at the bus station on August 19, the first day of the coup, cheered as they listened to the coup leaders' decrees on a radio. "They've got Gorbachev then," said one man. "Let's hope they've shot the bastard."

It is not difficult to see why such attitudes exist, why a budding Novovoronezh journalist who surveyed her apartment block found not one person prepared to condemn the coup. Five years of perestroika and glasnost have brought little but hardship and near-chaos to cities like Voronezh. While the recent imposition of food rationing in Moscow was front-page news in the west, it is nothing new in Voronezh. Shoppers hand over ration coupons not just for sugar and soap, as they already did three years ago, but for sausage, meat, poultry, butter, eggs, pasta, porridge oats, and - most galling for the Russians - vodka.

In every conversation, with TV producers and politicians, teachers and lorry drivers, the same anxious question creeps in: how can we feed and clothe our families?

Tanya and Vlad Chernyavksy, actors with Voronezh's prestigious puppet theatre, live in a typically cramped apartment in a block overlooking Voronezh lake. Their apartment is comfortable, with much of the furniture made by Vlad himself (there are waiting lists for state-produced furniture). They previously enjoyed a high standard of living, but even they find it difficult to make ends meet. "We earn a few hundred roubles each month," said Tanya, a slight woman with large, bewitching eyes. "But shoes cost more than 300 roubles, and the kids go through them in weeks."

Her normally laconic husband interjects: "We went to the department store yesterday. We couldn't believe our eyes. They were selling umbrellas for 200 roubles."

Average wages are still less than 400 roubles. But the inflation that has started to burst into the open in recent months means a kilo of kolbasa, the sausage that is a staple of Russian life, can cost 40 roubles, a coat 800 roubles, western shoes 1,500. Life is simply too hard for middle Russians to summon up much enthusiasm for change and the brave new world.

**

The collapse of communist ideals left people groping for something to believe in. Many talk of the lack of ideals, the growth of petty crime, of an increasing nihilism among adolescents. Always a superstitious, spiritual people, some Russians are turning to the church.

Off Revolution Street, on a low hill overlooking the Pioneer Palace and a jumble of old private houses stretching down towards the lake, stands Voronezh's Poktrovsky church. A few years ago, only little old women ever went there, struggling up the hill at dusk. On holidays, members of the Communist Youth League would stand outside, trying to dissuade worshippers from entering.

When I returned last month for the wedding of some friends, the church bells, silent for decades, were ringing proudly. The building was freshly-whitewashed, the doors flung open, the priests standing outside with their Rasputin beards and golden robes. The muddy square in front was thronged, as newly-weds hurried to get their marriages blessed, several of the brides trying to hide the bulge of pregnancy beneath their white dresses, and families flocked to christen their children.

Bibles and religious calendars were sold from a trestle table, while only yards away a row of shrunken old women begged for kopecks, wrapped in dirty shawls and headscarves, with imploring, bird-like eyes. A war veteran with no legs rolled around on wooden platform on castors, forced into mendicancy despite the row of medals he still proudly wore.

For a moment, it was as if the Soviet Union had never happened. Here was the New Russia, still poor, still searching for something to believe in, still struggling to feed its people.

I had seen more evidence of the reawakening of religion the day before, as I watched the bridegroom's mother give the couple a bible. She revealed a simple, peasant's faith. "This is our present. Read it. All of it. It has lots of interesting things in about where we came from, and where we are going."

But for many New Russians, the only ideal is money. Those who don't make it, dream about it. The lack of goods in the shops has, paradoxically, fostered an even greater materialism in many Voronezhites, an unhealthy fascination with how much better people live in the west. As I travelled late at night in a dirty yellow Volga taxi, the two youths in the front promised to reduce the fare if I told them about the west. The standard questions assailed me. "What is the average wage in Britain? How much is a video recorder? A car?" It was the fourth time in two days I had had the same conversation.

Some people are, however, becoming rich in the New Russia. Often, like Vladimir Oshevnev, they are the same people who did well under the old system. Oshevnev did not look like the director of a commodities exchange. His heavy frame was squeezed into a shiny grey suit, the pink, glistening circle of his face squashed between two telephone receivers. Seated beneath a portrait of Lenin, talking brusquely with a cigarette bobbing dangerously in the corner of his mouth, he looked every inch the provincial Communist party boss. Which, until last November, is what he was. The former vice-president of the Voronezh regional government, a classic nomenklatura post, is now the director of one of Voronezh's first experiments in capitalism.

"One share now costs 350,000 roubles - up from 100,000. That gives you the right to trade. Expensive? Not really. Broking can be a very profitable business…We do 12m roubles' worth of trade every day." Oshevnev reeled off the figures proudly, as if talking about factories that had over-fulfilled their production quota.

There is, of course, no law against former Communist bosses running businesses, but many Russians are deeply suspicious of them. "The same old faces, but in different chairs," one democratic deputy remarked darkly.

In the case of the Commodities Exchange, not even the chairs are that different. The building was previously the city committee of the Communist Party. Popular wisdom holds that large sums of party money went into the exchange.

Apart from old communists trying their hand at business, there is a new business culture. Radio and even TV adverts - themselves a new thing - are full of talk of dollars and joint ventures. But the new class of entrepreneurs suffer from associations, both perceived and sometimes real, with the black market and the mafia, and from lack of proper legislation and intrastructure.

"None of them actually makes anything," said Olga Zastrozhnaya, Voronezh's deputy mayor. "Many of them don't want to increase the production of goods, because they profit from the very fact that things are in short supply.

A handful of people do manage to rise about the daily grind and try to build a new future. These are people like Boris Kuznetsov or Anton Germann. A philosophy lecturer and a physics lecturer respectively, they are typical of the new democrats; energetic, but inexperienced, studying the theory of market economics from sought-after western textbooks at night, as the revolutionaries once studied Marx. They talk quickly, intensely, aware they may have only a moment of your time.

"We're still optimistic about the future. If we weren't, we wouldn't spend so much of our time trying to bring it about," said Germann breathlessly. "We're eager to learn. What we really need is people in the west to train us, so we can do things for ourselves."

Their numbers are small - only 35 out of 178 city deputies, and 20 out of 215 regional deputies are members of the four main democratic parties that have developed in the last two years. A third of local deputies are still communists. They also face daunting tasks: building democracy among a people who have no experience of it, and are not convinced it is such a good thing; repairing a shattered economy where shops and factories have been left in no-man's land, without ministries and planners to tell them their every move, but without the basic infrastructure of a market system; privatising enterprises when few understand what the term means, and no one even knows who the enterprises belong to any more.

All that most people understood about the region's one attempt at privatisation, of a sausage factory, was that the eight cars which used to be the property of the state conveniently passed into ownership of the factory managers.

Overriding everything is a fear of short-term disaster. While the threat of famine was much exaggerated last year, this year there is the possibility at least that old people, struggling on a hopelessly inadequate state pension, might start dying of hunger. Voronezh already has contingency plans for soup kitchens.

There is also a genuine fear of popular uprisings, a "coup from below". That in turn could lead to what Voronezh's democrats call the "brown danger", and their biggest fear: the growth of some kind of fascism. Some of the conditions are there, they say: a people in crisis who have lost faith with ineffective politicians, a people accustomed to firm rule, where many are cyring out for the restoration of "order". "Out of the ruins of Bolshevism and economic crisis could grow National Socialism," warned Boris Kuznetsov, drawing parallels between Russia today and the Weimar Republic.

Tanya Chernyavskaya looked down from her ninth-floor window to where children were playing in the yard. "They say many people will leave," she said. "But even when there is nothing left at all in the shops I won't go. My mother was born here, and her mother. I couldn't go. I still believe that Russia will be reborn."

-- Voronezh, October 1991