Anton, 10, and Sasha, 13, later told me they simply wanted to support their father, and the family had no other option. They lasted a few days. When they became dizzy, the miners sent them home. The men continued fasting. One miner said, "Why don't we hang ourselves on the seventh day?" A union leader talked him out of it. On the eighth day, the mine promised to pay some back wages through March for Gennady and his comrades. The rest of the workers could wait.

The situation for Partizansk miners has only changed for the worse since last spring: three mines have shut down, Central Mine produces only a small amount of coal to heat Partizansk homes, and as of this November most workers were still unpaid. It is the same all over Russia. As many as one in four workers - some 20 million men and women - are surviving for periods of two months, six months, a year, two years without pay. (My own employer, a Russian newspaper, has been as much as three months late in paying my wages, but then I have other sources of income by freelancing for Western newspapers, and the job provides free phones, computers, Internet, and a visa to work in Russia.) Foreign correspondents have grown tired of filing stories on workers paid in coffins or bras or shoes or moonshine vodka that had been seized by customs officials. How do these workers survive, particularly in the wake of the August 17 ruble crisis that has devalued their unpaid wages by almost two thirds? Why don't workers rebel in a country whose conditions would cause other peoples - say, Indonesians - to take to the streets?

Just two months ago, some Western journalists were predicting a mass uprising during an October 7 Nationwide Action of Protest called by unions to decry unpaid wages. Instead, a few hundred thousand protesters listened to angry speeches in city squares, burned Boris Yeltsin in effigy, and went home. One Moscow-based newsman I work with even asked whether Russians, who were freed from serfdom only in 1861, have a "slave mentality" that prevents effective political action. Many Russians I talked to are even harsher on themselves. "We are more stupid than Indonesians," Vladimir Yushkevich, 54, a teacher at the Vladivostok Technical University whose employer is months late on his salary of $70 per month, told me. "What other people would tolerate this kind of abuse? Russians are not a people for action." A woman selling fish in downtown Vladivostok said, "I wish they would give us all Kalashnikovs [assault rifles] so we can overthrow the regional administration." That she wanted the government to hand out weapons aimed at its destruction suggested to me an almost pathological attitude of dependency. But the answer to why Russians don't take action is more complex than that, and says something about their capacity for endurance, and their fears of change in a century in which tsarist repression was followed by a regime that controlled its people through secret police, Gulags, and the starvation of entire populations.

Perhaps a look at three families - the Kharins, the Mazurs, and the Molchanovs - can shed light on how Russians survive without wages, and on their curious combination of anger, despair, political apathy, and economic adaptability. I could have selected almost anyone from among the hundreds of unpaid workers I have interviewed in one setting or another since I arrived in Russia in January of last year. I chose these three families both because of the variety of their professions, because of the actions they have taken (or not taken) in protest, and because their lives indicate just how people survive in an intolerable situation.

Rain gutters

Valery Kharin is a foreman at Metal Factory No. 156, a Defense Ministry's plant that sits on a dirt road in Vladivostok, a far eastern port city of 650,000 on the Sea of Japan and home of Russia's Pacific Fleet. The factory - a compound of prefab concrete buildings surrounded by immobile cranes and coils of rusty scrap metal - fashions ventilation pipes for the military and metal insulating for the hot water pipes that snake throughout the region's towns and hop over alleys and streets. The factory's staff is an eighth what it was a decade ago, when it was filled with civilian and military employees. But its director says the income isn't sufficient to make up back wages, and as of November, employees had not been paid in 10 months.

Valery is a cheerful, square-jawed man of 48, and his wife, Olga Kharina, 43, is a radiologist and general practitioner who herself has often gone without her salary, though when I talked to her last in November she was paid up. Doctors, who are federal employees, are often among the ranks of the unpaid, and Olga once received an Indian rug in lieu of her month's wages. The regional administration, which runs her hospital, had received a shipment of shoes, clothing and rugs from India and Vietnam - barter paid to cover Soviet-era debts; unfortunately the rug was worth more than her back wages, and in order to get the rug, she had to pay $28.58 to cover the surplus value. The couple live in a two-room, 1930s-era apartment, and until the cold weather hit in October their table was always decorated with a vase of geraniums cut from the flowerbed. Their daughter attends medical school in Vladivostok - most of the cost is paid by the state - and their shelves are crowded with books ranging from "Human Anatomy" to "Cuisine of the Peoples of Russia." Their rent and utilities total $21.32 in devaluated rubles. By working three jobs, Olga earns $103 a month, higher than the typical doctor's salary of $36.58.

While some food is cheaper in Vladivostok than the United States, imported food is not, and until the ruble crisis made foreign food prohibitive, the Russian Far East, unable to feed itself, relied heavily on American chicken, Australian milk, and South Korean noodles. Even domestic goods are not commensurately cheaper than imports, when compared to wages. A loaf of bread costs 30 cents. Cheese sells for about $1.30 a pound. A bottle of beer costs 61 cents. The Kharins spend $152.35 a month on food for themselves and their daughter.

What makes the difference for them, even when they go unpaid, is an under-the-table salary for Valery. Over the years, Valery and a fellow employee, Alexander Kozenkov, 25, have noticed a strange phenomenon. While the bosses wrung their hands and said they didn't have enough money to pay staff, the factory continued to fill orders, albeit at a drastically reduced level and often for barter. So without quitting their jobs, the men went into business competing with their own employer.

Using sheet metal taken from the company stocks (they would eschew the term stealing; they are receiving compensation in lieu of wages), they fashion rain gutters for dacha owners. Russians are a nation of dachniki - those who grow their own vegetables on small plots of land out in the countryside (another means of survival for the unpaid) - and people are always building on their dachas, a term that can refer to anything from a plot of dirt to a large country home. A steady stream of customers drop by Metal Factory No. 156 seeking business from Valery, rather than ordering through the front office. When you don't have to pay for materials and overhead, it is easy to undercut your bosses' prices. The two charge more if the customer arrives in a fancy car, wears rich clothes, and looks like a "new Russian" - a member of the often criminal class of nouveau riche. Valery refuses to disclose the sum, but the family was able to buy a used Toyota last summer, allowing Olga to travel between the hospitals and clinics where she works.

I asked Valery why he continues to show up for work when he hasn't been paid. Why not simply quit and form his own sheet metal business? His answer is discouraging for those who hope Russia will round the corner into Western-style stability: the cost of starting a business are prohibitive, and those who try are often taxed out of existence before they turn a profit. Besides, he said, if he quit he would lose all his back wages, which he still hopes his company will pay someday. This is a recurrent theme among unpaid workers.

Neither Valery nor Olga has any intention of taking to the streets. While some doctors have declared hunger strikes or "actions of protest," Olga said she couldn't protest if she wanted to. "We have the only cancer clinic in the region," she said, "and people come to us from all over for treatment. We can't leave them. Sometimes they have to sleep in the train station, they're so poor. These people are very sick - some of them are doomed - and I cannot express how angry they are."

The roots of Kharin's political apathy are more complex. He is surviving due to his business with Kozenkov, and he doesn't attend protests for unpaid workers. The major trade unions didn't even bother to invite workers from small factories, and even if they had, Kharin wouldn't have gone.

"We can't leave our jobs or we'll be fired," Valery said. "It takes so much time to make a Russian really, really mad. We're patient people. For a long, long time we never had troubles like this. We never thought we'd end up this way."

The asylum protest

Valentina Mazur, a 63-year-old Vladivostok psychiatric nurse, has spent a career dealing with the mentally ill, but because of a cyst in her head that gave her blinding headaches, she retired several years ago on a pension then worth $72.58 per month (in Russia, workers receive a pension after 30 years on the job or at age 55, whether or not they quit working). But hard times in her family forced her to go back to work, and last summer she returned to her job in Vladivostok Psychiatric Hospital. At her age and in a depressed economy, she had no other career options, but it was not the most promising source of income. The Psychiatric Hospital was more than a year late in paying its staff. Nevertheless, Valentina's decision to work at the Psychiatric Hospital wasn't without rationale; the mayor was offering to "loan" the city's own hospital enough money to pay back wages.

Mayor Viktor Cherepkov had said in 1997 that a state medical insurance fund, not the city, should fund hospitals, and this left the mayor free to store up money for road-building projects and to fund his reelection campaign. Cherepkov cut off money to the city's orphanage, its children's hospitals, its maternity homes, its psychiatric hospital, and other institutions. Cherepkov is a self-described clairvoyant who once claimed he had used mental telepathy to escape from kidnappers, whose squabbles with a boiler house left 1,500 people without heat for four months last winter in a region where the sea freezes, who canceled funding for rat extermination during a strike by unpaid garbage workers, who curried favor by doling out awards from the city's closed budget: $900,000 to the professional soccer team, $1,000 to the winner at a casino's bodybuilding contest, free buses to away games for the city's soccer fans.

The psychiatric hospital comprises two floors of a Khrushchev-era building - women on the ground floor, men on the second - and Valentina works among patients who shuffle about in their bathrobes or lie twitching in the fetal position on their beds or surround visitors desperately explaining urgent matters the doctors are failing to address. On a wall near the visiting area, a sign reads, ""Dear Relatives: Because of the difficult state of the hospital, please help with money for food and meals if you can." The hospital cannot afford to feed its patients or buy their medicine, and sometimes you see a mother, a father, or a sister lugging in bags of potatoes from the dacha, faces stony from exertion and grief.

Valentina's husband Yevgeny Mazur, an instructor in a driving school, receives a monthly pension equal to hers (post-devaluation, it is worth $27.41), and their 36-year-old daughter Natalia, who is widowed and lives at home, works in a corner grocery store. The Mazurs were barely scraping by on their wages, however, and so Yevgeny keeps working at his job as a driving instructor. Without Valentina's unpaid wages, the family income varies from $127.94 to $146.23 a month, depending on how many students Yevgeny has. He occasionally earns a little pocket money - he says it's enough to buy cigarettes and lunch - through a method similar to Kharin's: he personally tutors students on the side. He used to try to make money acting as a gypsy cab driver, but twice his fares refused to pay. Yevgeny is an elderly man, unable to wrestle a man to the pavement and demand payment. "What could I do?" he said. "I don't know how to respond to such a person." He gave up transporting people.

In November I interviewed the Mazurs at their home in one of the vast prefab concrete apartment blocks in the Pervaya Rechka district of Vladivostok. I had simply wanted to talk, but in an act of generosity that is both moving and typically Russian, the Mazurs, who often cannot afford meat and cheese, had laid out a feast: Georgian soup, bread, sauerkraut, mushrooms, salo (a kind of raw fat popular in Russia and the Ukraine), an Uzbek rice and meat dish, and a bottle of sweet Moldavian wine. They discussed their woes in matter-of-fact tones - wage nonpayment, Valentina's illness, Yevgeny's inability to afford a new winter coat. What truly animated them was a chance to urge food and wine on a foreign guest, to ask about life in Santa Barbara, California, to inquire about whether the rumors are true that an unemployed man in America earns more than a skilled worker in Russia. (In general, it's true, I said.)

I asked why Russians don't rebel in such a situation.

"That's difficult to answer this question because I keep thinking about it myself all the time," Yevgeny said. "I thought about it so hard, I even started writing poems about it."

Their pet parrot, Kesha, called, "Vanya! Vanya!"

The Mazurs glanced at each other.

"Vanya's our late son-in-law," Valentina said. "He was born with a heart disease, but the army sent him to the Far North, and he came back with holes in his lungs. He spent six years lying here in this room. He was 33 years old when he died."

"Let's kiss each other," Kesha suggested. "Would you like a drink? Let's go eat some grass. Kesha is cunning. Vanya! Vanya!"

Several months after Valentina started at the Vladivostok Psychiatric Hospital, Mayor Cherepkov's loan came through. But it wasn't enough to cover all the back wages, and Valentina received nothing, anyway: she hadn't worked there long enough.. In response, she did more than write poems. She organized.

At Valentina's instigation, hospital staff and patients began demonstrating for two hours a day in front of the regional administration building while Primoyre's bureaucratic elite hurried past. It wasn't their problem. The patients were not necessarily the most presentable. There was Volodya, a 29-year-old patient in a T-shirt and filthy suit with a rip in the armpit, who kept moving his hands as if shaping an invisible water balloon; he was under the impression that he had protested because one of his friends died of starvation, coughing up blood (doctors said this was a delusion). And Alexander, 34, a painfully shy schizophrenic, said he simply wanted to support his doctors. Occasionally someone bought lunch for the patients in the nearby outdoor market: pancakes, bread, a can of Coke, he said. When the regional Duma promised to investigate, the demonstrators declared victory and went home.

Since then, nothing has happened.

Hunger artist

In November I visited Partizansk again, and Nonna Chernyakova, a Russian colleague, and I dropped by the Central Mine office, where we learned that Gennady Molchanov was still employed but was months behind on his monthly salary of $70.59. I knew that, like most miners, he had a garden, that his wife Svetlana had a low-paying job in a school, and that Central Mine had a company store where workers can buy on credit. But I wanted more detail on how he survived - whether he poached fish from the streams, like the unpaid workers I interviewed in the Kuril Islands, or stole cabbages from his neighbor's garden, like a desperate miner I talked to in Sakhalin. I headed out to the Molchanovs' neighborhood. (Our driver, fittingly, was Alexander Kulikov, a physicist who had quit his job at the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Science because he wasn't being paid.)

The home sits in a neighborhood of wooden barracks and tin-roofed cottages whose plaster walls are flaking away in chunks, revealing a crosshatch of slats underneath. Just up the dirt road from Molchanov's, a stripped MiG 21 fighter jet lay outside the gate of a scrap metal dealer's shop.

Gennady has no phone, and so we could not warn him in advance that we wanted to talk, but when we showed up late one morning, he was cooking pancakes over a wood-burning stove. He looked even worse than he had last time we spoke: gaunt, shirtless despite the cold, his ribs bandaged from a fall at the mine, his skin daubed green with the "zelyonka" medicine Russians use on cuts - this, along with a tattoo of St. Basil's Cathedral on his back, gave him a Queequeg-like appearance: etched, scrawny, primative.

His wife and sons were all smiles at the sight of reporters, but Gennady exploded.

"What are you doing here?" he shouted. "You're not making my life any easier. You're just earning money off me."

I began a lame explanation - that I just wanted to let people know what the miners were going through, and besides, I was an unpaid worker myself - but it seemed hollow in this context. After all, he was right. I said I would leave.

"Oh, come on, Gena," Svetlana interceded. "Why don't we talk to him, since he's here."

"What's the point? Motherfuckers! Get out of here."

"Don't you talk like that in front of the children."

Anton, the 10-year-old hunger artist, followed us out onto the porch, and he watched shyly as we laced up our boots. On the other side of the door, Gennady and Svetlana were quarreling. Raging at the top of their lungs. Nonna and I said good-bye to the boy and headed back to the car, where Alexander Kulikov -- academician, physicist, chauffeur -- was repairing his headlights. For ten or fifteen minutes, as we drove off down the road, I was irrationally heartened: finally, an outburst of anger.

The drive through Partizansk cured all that. There were the same old men with black lung gasping in the grassless park downtown, the same women applying to work in as seamstresses in a South Korean clothing factory downtown. There were no angry workers, no students marching on city hall, no one gathering by the busload to descend on Vladivostok and block the streets and demand the resignation of the president, the prime minister, the governor, every Duma deputy, every mayor, every mummified Communist trade union leader in Primorye.

Winter has set in, and the temperature in Partizansk had already fallen to 0 degrees Fahrenheit. If this year is like last, workers won't turn out in mass again until May. This, after all, is Russia. You work without pay. You struggle through the winter. And if life becomes intolerable, you can always stop eating.