Commentary: The Surprising Wisdom Of Ordinary Russians

The little old lady looked just the sort to oppose President Boris Yeltsin. She sat on a bench outside her apartment building in the grimy city of Magnitogorsk in Russia's industrial heartland. Surely, I thought, this was a pensioner fed up with high prices, crime, and excesses of the new capitalism thrust upon Russians in 1992.

But Serafima Ivanova Kyzovleva, 90, surprised me. "I can't complain. I get 300,000 rubles [$60] a month as a pension. I buy milk, bread, sour cream. I don't deny myself."