My first May Day celebration was in 2007. I went alone, and lacking the proper contacts I ended up only catching the rally, not the march. As such, the attendance seemed much smaller than I had expected. Thus I was happy to see on this year’s 1 May far more people in attendance, primarily because this time I showed up ahead of time, where the march began. For this I owe great thanks to Comrade Vijay Singh of India, who kept me up-to-date regarding the march. As I managed to join the demonstration at the beginning of the march, it became apparent that there were several thousand people present, and there were even groups of supporters along the march route. Aside from that, there was another Communist rally on the other side of the city as well, though at this time I have no information regarding the attendance of that gathering.
As usual there were those Russian peculiarities, such as the presence of National Bolsheviks. I believe these were part of the Alexander Dugin faction, judging by their colors. I don’t approach them because from my experience, Nazbols tend to be fiercely and blindly anti-American. Yet the number of Communists and red flags drowned out their black ones. And speaking of Red and Black, there was a contingent of anarchists and Trots at the beginning of the march, though thankfully they did not follow us. All I saw in terms of the anarchists’ activity consisted of the very revolutionary act of playing reggae music from the back of a truck. Surely Putin, Medvedev, and the whole lot of United Russia are shaking in their suits.
Earlier in the week, a friend of mine questioned as to whether the pro-Kremlin group ‘Nashi’(aka The Putinjungend) might show up to disrupt the march. However, during the march and rally there was no opposition whatsoever. I theorize that Nashi wouldn’t dare attack a group with so many elderly Great Patriotic War veterans in its ranks. As years go on, and the veterans die off, we may not be so fortunate. This may very well support my theory that a major cultural-political offensive will be launched by the ruling class in Russia once enough of the veterans and elderly die off. If the youth do not keep the memory alive, if they continue to fail at recognizing the significance of their ancestors’ sacrifices, the ruling party will be able to totally re-write Russian history, and cement their bastardized version of Russian culture in the country.
Speaking with a Russian comrade to whom Vijay had introduced me, I detected a lot of pessimism toward the future. It is not at all without warrant either. Moscow is the epicenter of Russian ultra-capitalism. Here the wealth of the country is concentrated, and here the unquestionable rule of the rich is blatant beyond words. And yet for all this, despite all the Russians and former-Soviet peoples who have been uprooted and forced to eke out a living in this sprawling metropolis, for all the free time and chance for a life of their own that is lost to their job and travel between home and work, for all the insults of the media which encourages them to work themselves ragged to possess a few electronics or fashionable clothes, for all the open corruption, most Muscovites have bought into it. Russia’s humiliating condition has been turned into something “cool”, as though this is part of Moscow “culture”. Degeneracy, corruption, and hedonism are lifted on a pedestal for the masses to worship; they sacrifice their personal identity, relationships, and humanity for a chance to grovel at the feet of the businessmen, with the foolish dream that they too might one day taste a piece of that life.
Put bluntly, as I tend to do, the Muscovite mentality could be described as schizophrenic. It is not that Muscovites are satisfied, and they certainly complain about their conditions, but the version of history which is provided to the youth is one which places before them a false dichotomy. There is a false definition of “Communism” or “socialism”, based on a horridly oversimplified narrative of Soviet history, and the other path is more praise for United Russia and the capitalist system. Many agree that Putin’s faction is indeed corrupt and dictatorial, but they will not even consider socialism as being an alternative. They just want to exchange one set of capitalists for another, forgetting that Putin did precisely that when he kicked out several old oligarchs to replace them with new ones.
For all the young Muscovites’ talk of how satisfied they are, many dream of going to Europe, the UK, or the US. Sadly this greed has led a number of Russian women into sexual slavery or domestic servitude, though in this case it is important to remember that most of the former category tend to come from outside of Moscow or Russia, where they must accept any kind of work available to survive, as there is none at home. Many young Russians I know speak with glowing terms about Europe, particularly Germany, even some that have never been there. They fail to realize that the reason why those countries have better societies is because they refuse to accept a national mythology that tells them they will always be lazy and corrupt as a people. More than this, all these countries have a history of strong labor movements, and for all their failings they tend to have a strong left-wing, though it may consist primarily of social-democrats. Russia doesn’t even have that. And it will not have that until people, particularly Muscovites, start understanding that they have class interests, and they need to start advancing those class interests.
The strangest thing about young Russians’ reaction to socialism today is not simply that it is woefully inaccurate and oversimplified, but how petty and immature it is. One might think with all the anti-Stalin propaganda this country has had going back to 1956, claims of telephone-number sized death tolls would be the first response to a suggestion in favor of socialism. But no, those Russians who were but toddlers during the Soviet time whine about not being able to buy certain things. And yet those things they love so much, the MP3 players, the high-end mobile phones- they did not exist at all in the West. What were they truly missing? There is no doubt that the revisionist system during Perestroika was a mess, but the evil of Perestroika was that every solution to clean up that mess entailed more market, more capitalist reforms. No socialist alternative was presented, and socialist alternatives existed. Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Party of Labor had been trying to tell the Soviet people that for a few decades.
As for illusions the young people had during the Perestroika days, Russian comrade Luba and Vijay seemed to agree that people in that time had come to believe that by allowing the open restoration of capitalism, they would not only have all those wonderful things the Soviet Union gave them, things like free heath care, housing, and education, but they would also have all the things of the west. They believed that people in the west lived like millionaires, and they would be walking out of shops with TVs just as they would with a loaf of bread. Woe unto that foolish generation! Had they looked into their own libraries, where the works of Marx could still be found, they would have been reminded that under capitalism, for a few to succeed, many must lose. And many did lose; they lost their lives, their freedom, their future, and their dignity.
How could it happen this way, that the Soviet people might come to believe such nonsense about having all the social benefits of their nominally socialist state while somehow living like upper-class Americans simultaneously? Aside from a general degeneration of political education going back to Khruschev, comrade Luba pointed out that in many ways the Soviet people had it too good. This might come as a shock to Western ears, but it would not be the first time it was suggested. Prior to his ‘conversion’, Alexander Zinoviev made such suggestions, albeit with some biased distortions and reactionary idealism, in an essay entitled “Homo Sovieticus”. The standard American or Western belief about the collapse of “Communism” is that the people were not satisfied with the system, that they were miserable under it, and thus they overthrew it. Naturally the vast body of evidence of resistance to this event is generally ignored.
Among the books I purchased at the event was one that in some ways explains this paradox which Westerners find so hard to understand. It is in fact a Soviet children’s book entitled ‘Our State’. In the book, several of the Soviet citizens constitutional rights are described. Among them, the Right to Work, the Right to Recreation, the Right to Healthcare, the Right to Education. These may sound strange to Americans who are used to hearing endless, shrill crusades about the “Freedom of Speech” of some rich entertainer who gets flak from the government over using some profanity on the air. Most might insist that they already have a right to recreation, though in reality you have only as much “right” as you can afford. For Soviet citizens, these things were guaranteed. The state funded all kinds of programs, organizations, and facilities to allow every citizen the opportunity to develop their talents, educate themselves, or just plain rest. Contrast that to modern Moscow, where these happy capitalist young professionals spend most of their day riding on the overcrowded metro, crunching numbers in some cubicle, and chatting on ICQ. Western pundits always said that the Soviet Union was a land ruled by fear, fear of that knock at the door at night. Regardless of the accuracy of such a narrative, there was one fear Soviet citizens didn’t live with, one which modern Russian citizens as well as Americans have always had to deal with one way or another, lack of work, lack of money to pay the bills, lack of health care. Indeed, they had it too good. So much so that they became disconnected from the source of what they enjoyed, and thus assumed that open capitalism would be the answer to their grievances, rather than reevaluating their past and correcting the problems of revisionist society along Marxist-Leninist lines.
I cannot help but feel Luba’s pessimism when looking at the situation inside Moscow, the horribly anti-social attitudes which reign here coupled with generally difficult living conditions are crushing indeed. Yet it is important to remember the factor that even the pro-capitalist young Muscovites forget. That is what I like to call ‘The Forgotten’. Those are the millions of Russians and Soviet peoples who were not part of Moscow’s fortunate few. They are the orphans and children of poor parents who cannot buy their sons’ way out of the military, in which they will face nightmarish abuse. They are those that live outside of Moscow, where gangsters control entire cities. They are the children of Russia’s last living heroes, who cannot afford the health care they need nor live on the paltry pensions they get. They are those living in the Central Asian republics, where Islamic fundamentalism rears its ugly head, while corruption and human bondage is a reality. They are in Ukraine, which must wage a two-front war against Russian corruption and Western NATO imperialism. And when the economic crisis that is just now unfolding finally comes to the borders of Russia, even those young professionals in Moscow will soon join the ranks of the forgotten, and they will realize that they never truly clawed their way out of the crisis of the 90s, that they never dealt with the humiliation Russia suffered, that they had neglected their future, and that accounts were not settled. Till then Communists must continue work in Moscow but doubly amongst the forgotten, until Moscow is isolated as the hated island of capitalism besieged by a sea of revolutionaries.
True, the situation now is grim, but capitalists are nothing if not arrogant. None are so arrogant as those of Moscow, who are currently trying to build a new empire on a foundation of sand, a foundation of those who are the most sharply affected by the corrupt system. Even if they manage to crush the revolutionary movement, they will not be able to withstand their imperial rivals, Europe and the United States. Their nationalist rhetoric will ring hollow as they sell off the nation just like their predecessors, and one way or another, they will not escape the wrath of the people.
As Victory Day now approaches, the memory of 27 million dead cries out for justice. They fought not for the Russian tri-color, Putin’s empire, the dictatorship of capital. They fought not so that they may become the victims of inter-ethnic hatred, prostitution and slavery, and the loss of their heritage and culture. They fought under the red banner for socialism, for a homeland that they truly owned in common under the dictatorship of the proletariat, for their own future and the future of other generations, this generation. We must never let that banner fall, we must keep their memory alive, and let it guide our progressive struggle to bring about a new era in human civilization without exploitation.
