Making Do : What Happens When the Stores Are Bare? Ingenious Soviets Build Cars in Their Apartments and Sew Clothes From Flags

MOSCOW — Anatoly Kvasov was dying to own a car, but he knew he could never afford one on his salary as a Soviet truck driver. So he built one himself over the course of seven years, doing much of the molding and welding in his family’s two-room apartment.

Laser physicist Masha Stepanova is proudest of her recipe for making ersatz chocolate truffles: She starts with widely available baby-food formula, then adds chocolate powder and condensed milk.

And when surgeon Edward Danilyants could not get hold of the machine he needed for suctioning fluids out of his patients’ respiratory tracts, he converted an aquarium pump into a handy little aspirator.

The Soviets have a saying about their knack for making do: “Beggars are smart inventors”--a colorful twist on “Necessity is the mother of invention.” But they are quoting it grimly these days, with less do-it-yourself pride and more desperation as production plummets and empty store shelves gather dust.

“Things were always difficult, but now it’s become a question of survival,” said Zoya Krylova, editor in chief of the monthly magazine Rabotnitsa, or Woman Worker, commenting on the Soviet brilliance at improvisation, which far exceeds even the most ingenious American “Hints from Heloise.”

Take the traditional Soviet dacha , Krylova said. Once, urban residents used their small country houses mainly for taking the fresh air and pursuing outdoor hobbies. Now, that small plot of land where berries and vegetables can be grown “has turned into a way of making it through these hungry times,” according to Krylova.

From May through September, Masha Stepanova and her husband, Andrei Sebrant, get all their produce from their family dacha, cultivating cucumbers, potatoes, tomatoes, beets, carrots, apples, cherries, raspberries and strawberries. They do the canning and preserving themselves, enough to last through the winter.

When Stepanova, like many Muscovites, cannot find cottage cheese in the stores--and lately that is more often than not--she makes it at home by mixing milk with kefir, a loose yogurt, then warming it until it begins to separate. She hangs it in gauze over the kitchen sink to drain.

That she can buy yogurt and milk but not cottage cheese highlights the peculiar nature of Soviet poverty. Despite the stock phrase, “There is nothing in the stores,” the fact is that many products can still be bought--if sporadically--at relatively low state prices.

The genius comes in turning what can be bought into what is needed.

This spring, salespeople in the city of Rostov-on-the-Don noticed that, at a time when patriotism is in decline, Soviet flags made of a satiny synthetic material were being snatched up at a surprising rate. It turned out they were being used to make handbags and women’s clothing. Why? Because fabric stores had no satin and nylon.

Anatoly Kvasov could not buy a car, but he could obtain Plasticine to model his own vehicle and the fiberglass-type material and epoxy resin to build its body. He assembled his Kvant (for KVasov, ANaToly) in his apartment and at a friend’s dacha, powering it with an old motor that he found in a secondhand store and rebuilt.

Now, for all the funny looks he gets on the streets, he wouldn’t drive anything else. “I feel very confident in this car because I made it,” he said. “I know it, and I trust it.”

Andrei Ivanov, an engineer in a research institute who asked that his real last name not be used, is putting together his own basic computer out of circuit boards and other components he can get through quasi-legal means.

By frequenting a large hall in a Moscow suburb where would-be buyers and sellers of largely stolen computer parts mill around together making deals, he has managed to gather all but one chip for the 64-kilobyte computer he and four co-workers are constructing.

How do they know how to do it? That was the cheapest part of the deal--a photocopied diagram, selling at the market for five rubles, roughly less than an American quarter.

Parts that he cannot find on the market he, well, “borrows” from computers sitting unused at work. A tape recorder will serve as the equivalent of a floppy disk drive; a television will be the video display terminal.

“It’s in our blood,” he said, “that when you need something, you take what’s at hand and make it into what you need.”

Some handymen point to the traditional Soviet village as the wellspring of their resourcefulness. The village was an isolated world unto itself, they say, and residents had to know how to fill all their needs.

These days, self-sufficiency means know-how, such as the advice in a recent issue of Radio magazine--a mass-circulation publication aimed at millions of amateur ham radio operators--telling frustrated Soviets who could not find dry cells how to power their sets using a “sandwich” of metal plates, tissue paper and lemon juice.

Danilyants, the surgeon, said his hospital’s trauma specialists routinely resort to using everyday bolts and crampons to piece together the complex apparatus they use to set broken limbs. Why? Because they cannot obtain custom-made medical components.

But he insisted that no makeshift contraptions are ever used “inside the organism.”

His fellow surgeons must use the same scalpels over and over again. Sometimes they even have a hard time getting them sharpened. (Soviet hospitals regularly reuse hypodermic needles despite the spread of AIDS here, primarily through unsterilized medical equipment.)

Danilyants said he visited the United States last fall and found himself sorely envious of American surgeons. “To work and think only about the operation and the patient--that’s a dream,” he said. “We spend half the time trying to invent or think up what we need, and that doesn’t make medicine better.”

When Muscovites Stepanova and Sebrant needed top-quality backpacks, jackets and tents for their outdoor adventures in the Soviet wilderness, they bought baggage straps in a store and turned to the black market for parachute silk and waterproofing material. Stepanova filled her down coat with feathers that a worker had stolen from a pillow factory and sold.

“To live without these small, practical shortcuts is simply impossible,” Sebrant said.

Yuri Khramov, a deputy of the Moscow City Council, shared his family recipe for ceiling whitewash when the real thing was not for sale: Mix milk with tooth powder and paint on several coats.

Khramov also knew a variety of simple methods for making “bathtub gin”--not that he would ever violate the law that way, of course--but millions of his compatriots do, setting up simple homemade stills, known as coils, to furnish cheap, ever-available alcohol.

For apartment dwellers who want to pretty up their kitchens but cannot obtain ceramic tiles, Rabotnitsa recommends covering the walls with cheap plastic plates and ashtrays that lie unwanted in many stores.

Liubov Yershova, editor of Rabotnitsa magazine’s Household Kaleidoscope section of helpful hints, said she feels a responsibility to provide readers with necessities, like sewing patterns for the millions of women who have a hard time finding and affording store-bought clothes for their families. But her section also aims at helping the nation’s harried women exploit the little at their disposal to add some beauty and special moments to their lives.

In a recent contest, she was most impressed by a Siberian recipe for jam, made from pumpkins and a bright orange Russian berry that approximates the flavor of pineapples--an exceedingly rare treat for this northern climate. “They swear it tastes just like pineapple,” she said, “although I’m sure they’ve never tasted pineapple.”

Other ingenious substitutions Yershova encountered were baking powder made out of flour, soda and sour lemon powder; false red caviar made of semolina, herring and tomato paste and cakes crafted with carrot flour.

“It’s one thing to just take meat and cheese and make something,” she said with a glint of pride. “When you have nothing, you have to turn on your fantasies.”

One of the most prosaic of Soviet foods-- sukhari, tough little toasts made by drying bread--also came back into fashion over the past year as consumers expecting bread prices to rise tried to stock up.

When heightened demand before the April 2 price increases brought long lines and shortages in the bread stores, even the most resourceful of Soviets had to ask themselves what they would do if the central staple of their diet ended up in short supply like everything else.

“We would bake it ourselves,” Masha Stepanova said.

And if there were no flour either?

Not to worry, Yershova said. You can make great bread from semolina as well. All you do is. . . .