They call this region south of Moscow the Red Belt, because of its fealty to Communist leadership. But these days when talk turns to Russia's newly warm relations with the US, dollar signs seem to glow in people's eyes and words like "credits, investment, joint ventures" spill off their tongues.
"We need the money," said a woman who gave only her first name, Tamara, and her age, 53, as she sold hats and gloves at an outdoor bazaar just off Leninsky Prospekt, hoping to supplement the US$100 a month her husband earns at a factory making hunting guns. "Putin promised that soon we'll live a happy life here. We've been waiting a long time."
As Russian President Vladimir Putin heads to President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas, for what some here call a "summit without ties," military topics will be high on the agenda. But for most people here, the US matters much more as an economic superpower than as a military one.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
Not everyone likes the US, or welcomes the US war on terrorism and the presence of US troops in former Soviet republics like Uzbekistan, or, for that matter, the invasion of US culture. But everyone seems to agree that, economically at least, Russia needs all the US goodwill it can get.
"Just look around and you will see -- Russia is lagging behind," said Anatoly Ivanovich, 51, a jewelry vendor who left a factory job because it did not pay enough to live.
Or, as Anatoly Gololabenkov, a 60-year-old businessman, put it: "We're not as rich as we used to be."
For good or ill, the US influence is felt most here as a producer of the goods, like Nike and Adidas, advertised almost everywhere; as a creator of employment through joint ventures like the one Procter & Gamble has in a nearby town; even as a source of unemployment, when managers at a local steel factory blamed US quotas for laying off 1,500 workers.
Negotiations on the missile treaty are weighed here largely for their economic repercussions.
Sergei G. Volkov, a former policeman who now manages the city's municipal markets, said if the USwent ahead with a missile shield, Russia -- which he called a "country of paupers" -- would have to compete. "We're not afraid of attack," he said, "but of another spiral of the arms race that could make us even poorer."
Tula was once a famous center of gunsmithing -- Peter the Great put a small arms factory here in 1712 -- and a pinion of Russia's defense industry. But in the 1990s, with falloffs in state orders and failed attempts to privatize, the industry, and thus the local economy, plummeted. Only one factory, which managed to get permission to sell arms abroad independently, continued to prosper.
Even the city's production of samovars, or Russian tea urns, suffered badly -- and most of those made now are for export, too expensive for local residents. Official unemployment in this city of 575,000 is put at 9,000, but it is much higher in the surrounding region, where huge collective farms have struggled to modernize.
Things have improved since Putin took office almost two years ago. In an effort to consolidate the defense industry, he announced this month that Tula would become a center for manufacturing small missiles, which means guaranteed state orders. And then there are the joint ventures that have come in the last few years -- Procter & Gamble, which manufactures soaps and detergents, and Knopf, a German company producing construction materials. They pay well by Tula standards -- US$300 to US$400 a month.
"These two enterprises play the role of the defense industry in old times," said Alexander G. Yermakov, the editor of Molody Kommunar, an independent local newspaper. "They are the engines of our economy."
But Stanislav P. Kupriyanov, the Communist Party's regional secretary and a local deputy in the state Duma, criticized the Procter & Gamble plant for streamlining production so much that workers had been laid off. America's attempt to dominate Russia economically, he said, had replaced the effort to dominate it militarily.
That sentiment has plenty of currency in a place where the Communist mayor is expected to be re-elected with 80 percent of the vote, and the region's Communist governor is equally entrenched. ("Those democrats know nothing but demagoguery," Kupriyanov said in explaining the party's continued popularity. Besides, he said, they had ruined the economy.)
A few weeks ago, Yermakov said, during the World Economic Forum in Moscow, what appeared to be a small, staged protest in Tula against globalization by a group of disinterested young men suddenly swelled when old people joined it, drawn largely by slogans against the US.
"What kind of anti-globalists are these that Tula has?" he wondered.
They represent this city's aging population, which sometimes still sees the US as the enemy. One woman, who would not give her name, said sarcastically that the US had already "helped" Russia -- by disarming and therefore weakening it.
Among the young, attitudes are considerably more nuanced, shaped by the lack of Communist propaganda against the US, personal contacts formed through exchanges or business deals, or by the Internet or television. They don't see the US as the enemy, but they don't see it as Utopia, either. They bristle at the suggestion that they should ape the West, and say US imports corrode their culture.
"I think after perestroika, when we opened to Western culture, after such a long period of being closed, we absorbed too much of it," said a student at Tula State University, Ileana Glinsteva, 18.
Another student, Daniel Medvedev, 18, praised Russian support for the anti-terror coalition, but said the US still interfered too much with other countries' interests. He did not like how the US took sides in the conflict between Kosovo and Russia, or how it had judged Russia for fighting a war in Chechnya.
The US official attitude toward the Chechen war has been considerably softer since Sept. 11, and that perceived hypocrisy grates on some here. "When we're fighting terrorists, we're doing something wrong," Volkov said. "But now, well, fighting terrorists is right."
But a trio of policemen, celebrating National Policemen's Holiday with on-the-house shots of vodka in a Tula cafe, said they were delighted that the US was joining Russia in a fight against terrorism. They had wept when the World Trade Center collapsed, they said, and now included its victims in their toasts.
"We are ready to fight terrorism with the people of the United States," said Sergei Tsyastus, 43. "Chechnya and their leaders for us is what bin Laden is for the United States." He even praised the multinational corporations in the region. "What our governor cannot do for people," he said, "these companies can do."
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