Does Lone Car Bomber
On Red Square Bode
Unrest for Russia?
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Many Say No: Discontent
Is Rife, but It Breeds
Apathy as Well as Anger
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'Politics Poisoned His Soul'

PODOLSK, Russia -- Ivan Orlov was a Russian Everyman. He grew up on a collective farm, served in the Soviet army, trained as a mechanic, married, had two children and bought a boxy Moskvich car. And, like many others, he endured a torrent of tribulation. He lost his job; his marriage soured; his pension stopped coming.

Neighbors in this decaying industrial town describe the 65-year-old as unusual only in the tireless attention he lavished on his ancient, canary-yellow car. "He kept it alive long after it should have died," says Vasily Lokolov, his next-door neighbor on Station Street.

Today, the car is a charred carcass.

On a bitterly cold night last month, Mr. Orlov prepared his cherished Moskvich for a final journey. According to police, he loaded in a homemade bomb and attached a crude detonator to a canister of gasoline; he then drove to Red Square and left the car. It exploded near Spassky Gate, the main entrance to the Kremlin, injuring three Kremlin guards.

Was this an isolated act of mad despair or a harbinger of a collective breakdown, the prospect of which has so long spooked the West? Despite an economic crisis that has left nearly a third of the population below the poverty line -- around $30 a month -- Russia shows scant signs of mass unrest. Nonetheless, the fringes are fraying.

"I am a kamikaze for the people," Mr. Orlov wrote in a rage-filled screed mailed to The Wall Street Journal shortly before the bombing. "I am acting as a patriot." In his smoldering Moskvich, police found copies of a virulently anti-Semitic newspaper and a placard protesting against unpaid pensions. Mr. Orlov was arrested on the spot and charged with terrorism. Two days before Christmas, he was found dead in his cell at Moscow's Butyrskaya prison. Authorities said the cause was heart failure.

Russia's extremist fringe has proclaimed Mr. Orlov a hero and plans to put up a plaque in his honor in Moscow. Authorities, meanwhile, portray him as an unhinged misfit. In his hometown of Podolsk, a city of 220,000 south of Moscow, the verdict is more muddled. Few cheer his methods, but many say they share his anger.

The Red Square bombing is just one of several traumas that have ruffled Russia's otherwise calm surface over the past two months. In St. Petersburg, a prominent liberal politician, Galina Staravoitova, was murdered in the stairwell of his apartment. The killers shouted "crush the filth" as they opened fire. In Yaroslav, an arsonist burned down 25 country houses belonging to Russia's nouveaux riches; local residents call him their Robin Hood. In Saratov, police arrested a jobless man for planning a bomb attack on an apartment block that housed officials, In Ulyanov, a teacher died after a hunger strike to protest against unpaid wages. In Moscow, a man who lost his savings in Russia's financial crash took employees of his downtown bank hostage at gunpoint. (He released them unharmed.)

Mr. Orlov's trajectory from banality to bomb maker illuminates the national discontent bubbling below the surface. On the wall of his threadbare apartment hangs a picture of Stalin and a wooden carving with the saying, "Easy to be God, easy to be the Devil." A family photo album recalls happier times: A snapshot shows Mr. Orlov next to his Moskvich, a bouquet of yellow flowers in his hand. Under his desk, he left a briefcase stuffed with wild polemics and a neatly typed manuscript that heaps invective on President Boris Yeltsin.

Mr. Orlov's scribblings reveal a disturbed, feverish mind. Before heading for Red Square, he worte a bitter lament expressing his frustration at not being able "to find, to buy or to invent a bigger bomb" to blow himself and President Yeltsin to a maximum of pieces." If killing Mr. Yeltsin was indeed his goal, however, more explosives wouldn't have helped: The day of the bombing, Nov. 4, the president was on holiday at the Black Sea.

It takes less than two hours to drive to Red Square from Podolsk. But Mr. Orlov's journey there stretched over years. It began more than a decade ago with the hopes unleashed by Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. A Communist Party member, Mr. Orlov cheered the promise of change. In 1991, he transferred his faith to Boris Yeltsin. Then, propelled by a volatile mix of personal and political frustration, he drifted into a squalid underworld of radical revolt.

When perestroika began, Mr. Orlov worked at the Podolsk auto school, teaching mechanics. Former colleagues remember him as conscientious and capable, but they say he annoyed his bosses by constantly complaining about their lack of zeal for reform. "He began fighting with everyone," says Julia Harylneva, the school's veteran bookkeeper. In the late 1980s, after years of squabbling, Mr. Orlov was fired. About the same time, his first marriage fell apart.

"I fell victim to Gorby's appeal. I was mesmerized by him and went astray," Mr. Orlov wrote in the document sent to this newspaper. "Carried away by his slogans, his perestroika, I started to fight actively against all that was defective in our life. I made Gorby portraits, gave them as presents to my friends and acquaintances. I urged people to follow Gorby, to listen to him."

After being fired, Mr. Orlov meandered between odd jobs and ever odder causes. His main source of income became selling newspapers, mostly radical ones, first in the lobby of parliament for Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party and then on the steps of the former Lenin Museum, a favorite meeting point for disgruntled war veterans, neo-Stalinist punks and other disaffected casualties of Russia's stumbling shift from Marxism to the market. To supplement his earnings -- and publicize his fury -- he wrote two rambling tracts for Palaya, a small Moscow publishing house that specializes in incendiary, argumentative pieces. (Its other ventures include leather-bound Russian translations of works by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the late North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung.)

Mr. Orlov's editor was Nikolai Mishin, who runs a clearinghouse for extremist literature in the Union of Writers of Russia. Ragged pensioners and unemployed youths parade through his office scouting for books and pamphlets they can sell on the street. The current bestsellers, Mr. Mishin says, are a Stalinist tome and a collection of ribald jokes about President Yeltsin. Among other things, the president's initials sound in Russian very similar to a vulgar Russian word for sex.

Mr. Orlov's own published output -- a slim volume titled "Yeltsin Country" and a longer work called "Russia's Groan" -- are out of stock. Investigators from the Federal Security Service, successor agency to the KGB, and journalists took the last copies, Mr. Mishin says.

The immediate trigger of Mr. Orlov's trip to Red Square is hard to place. Some friends blame a bitter quarrel with his second wife, Nana, a refugee from the war-ravaged Black Sea region of Abkhazia, over the ownership of the flat on Station Street. Others say the last straw was his unpaid pension. Nana says he began to crack four months ago, just as Moscow's markets buckled, but she blames the overheated political polemics that followed the crash rather than any direct economic impact on him personally.

In recent months, she says, he became a devout reader of, and sometime contributor to, Russkaya Pravda, a rabidly anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-American tabloid. "He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, but he became addicted to anger," she says.

Former Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko says Mr. Orlov was almost certainly mentally ill, but he worries that "frustration and the feeling of defeat" afflict much of the country. Mr. Kiriyenko, who was fired in August only five months after taking office with a mandate to inject energy into Russia's faltering reforms, says people's "ideals have been taken away." A big mistake of post-Soviet reform, he adds, was to "create too great expectations."

In Podolsk, these expectations crumbled with the town's largest employer, a sewing-machine plant once staffed by more than 18,000 workers. Taken over by Semi-Tech Corp. of Canada, the parent company of Singer sewing machines, the factory now employs only 2,000.

Among those fired was Tatyana Alpatikina. After 30 years making sewing machines, she now peddles Vietnamese-made garments from a snow-sprinkled stall. Until this fall, she could support herself and her jobless husband. Now she is desperate: Sales have shriveled while prices for the drugs she needs for a thyroid problem have skyrocketed. She says she understands the anger that drove Mr. Orlov to Red Square. "This was a cry from his soul," she says.

Mr. Orlov's next-door neighbor, Mr. Lokolov, says they never discussed politics, only their bad plumbing and plans by a local businessman to open a beer hall across the road. What shocks neighbors is not Mr. Orlov's violence but his belief that politics can change anything. For them, neither bombs nor ballot boxes offer any solution.

"Protest? Against whom? For what?" asks Mr. Lokolov, 41, a metalworker who hasn't been paid since September, hasn't voted since 1991 and hasn't a smidgen of trust in anyone outside his own family. "It's every man for himself. This is the law of the jungle." Upstairs, unemployed music teacher Galina Myachina frets about finding a job and about rumors that the heating might go off. But she, too, dismisses protest as pointless.

Such attitudes help explain why, rather than increasing, organized protest seems to be declining: A nationwide day of strikes and rallies led by the Communist Party and trade unions in October attracted fewer than a million people, compared with 1.8 million a year before. In Podolsk, only a hundred or so gathered to wave red flags next to a statue of Lenin. Communism's foes have fared no better. The Podolsk branch of Yabloko, a centrist liberal party, has withered to a handful of activists. "People don't believe in anything or anyone," sighs Ludmilla Krasnenkova, Yabloko's local chairman.

But there is a flip side to such indifference. It has created a vacuum in which the boundary between the mainstream and the marginal blurs. Few Russians embrace revolt, but equally few are those who feel invested in the status quo.

"People like Orlov will never take power themselves. But they can help start a fire," says Pyotr Kaznacheyev, head of the Youth Anti-Fascist Action Union, a group that monitors extremist politics. "When the government is weak and the population feels cut off, crazy people can provoke a very harmful process."

Russia's nationalist camp markets Mr. Orlov as an inspirational pin-up. A big fan is Andrei Fevilov, 28, a former engineer turned writer for the far-right newspaper Zavtra. He last saw Mr. Orlov shortly before a visit to Moscow by U.S. President Bill Clinton, in September, when they met to discuss plans for a protest at the U.S. Embassy. He gushes with admiration for the Red Square bombing. "This is the beginning of Russia's intifada," he claims, referring to the uprising of Palestinians on the West Bank.

Vladimir Putin, the director of the Federal Security Service, says Mr. Orlov probably acted alone but "reflected the tense situation in the country." Russia has spawned a plethora of extremist sects, ranging from the pugnacious fanatics of Russian National Unity to the Stalinist zealots of Working Russia.

While none of these groups has attracted a wide following, their violent rhetoric has spread far beyond their own thin ranks. On the day Mr. Orlov drove to Red Square, the Duma, or lower house of parliament, rejected a censure motion against Albert Makashov, a Communist Party legislator who had called for the extermination of Russia's Jews. The head of the Duma's security commission, Viktor Ilyukhin, complains that there are too many Jews in President Yeltsin's inner circle. Nikolai Kondratenko, governor of the southern region of Krasnodar, mutters about "Zionist nests."

Opinion polls suggest that such views have little popular support. Over 80% of those polled in a recent survey said they disapproved of Mr. Makashov's remarks. At the same time, attempts to rally the public against anti-Semitism and extremism have fizzled.

Mr. Orlov's second wife last saw him on the morning of the bombing. He left the house early, saying he was going to collect his sister from a town in southern Russia. Shortly before midnight, Federal Security Service agents arrived to tell her about the blast at Spassky Gate. A bomb-disposal team scoured the apartment for traces of explosives.

Of her husband, Nana says: "Politics poisoned his soul."