A conversation with a Russian Worker

At 10AM we sit around the tailgates of our trucks and hurriedly eat our sandwiches. For a few minutes we get to remove our safety gear and hard hats and mix in some conversation.

Sergei, a Russian immigrant is a towering figure, 6ft-4, with huge, wide hands. He jokingly boasts with his arms outstretched that his arm-span should be 76 inches, the same as his height, but his span is 82 inches.

He arrived in 1989 as a Baptist from the old Soviet Union. He is a hard worker and a fair man. When we talk about history he sometimes opens a sentence, ‘before the Revolution,’ a very unusual reference. Of his own immigration he says, under Perestroika, the Jews, the Christians and the Tolstoyans (!) were allowed to leave the regime.

One stereotype of construction workers would be that we get together and talk about beer. Stereotypes can sometimes have a material base.

During one conversation on beer: warm, cold, chilled, bottled or on tap, Sergei mentioned how a vodka in a beer is 10-times as potent as its component parts drunk separately.

“We say in Russia, as we toast with this drink, we hope we die sooner!” Sergei bellowed to us mimicking downing such a drink. . . . . Wow. He mentions that most people he knew in the old Soviet Union were alcoholics and that he personally knew “many, many” people who drank themselves to death. He elaborated, “Yes, they kept drinking and drinking, and gave up eating food. And then they are gone.”

Since that conversation it has become an ongoing jobsite joke, whenever someone mentions a renowned Russian to Sergei, he confirms that they too were alcoholics, or were, “really alcoholic.” This didn’t go on for long as the list of Russians known over here is short and there was something very sad about it too. For all of us.

The old Soviet Union had its positive sides. The original revolution, overthrown itself within a few short years, inspired hundreds of millions of poor people world-wide that capitalism and slavery could be overthrown. The Soviet Union, practically single-handed, defeated the most racist regime in world history, the Nazi regime in Europe. Millions who were previously hungry and illiterate were freed from these chains.

However, the great depressed soul of Russia was not lifted. The cynicism of its population was deepened by the monstrous dictatorial bureaucracy that rose over the revolution, smothering it and seeping deep into Russia’s pores.

When I am in a fight with some bureaucrat in the Carpenters Union, who puts the union’s “machine” first, and hence himself first, and the members last, I think of how much worse the world would be with people like this in power in the US. This is what we had in the Soviet Union’s totalitarian regime.

Capitalism’s colorful inequality was replaced with the grey bureaucratic and perhaps more subtle inequality. The moral bludgeon of defending the Revolution was routinely brought out whenever dissent reared its head. Not too different to most Left groups today.

As to the lessons of the past: the Leninist model of organizing, regardless of the correctness of your ideas, will, in a jam, always revert back to centralization in the face of dissent. And any good healthy activist will need to be cleansed of their inclination towards the weakness of democracy.

After thirty years as a working class fighter I am ready to revisit all that I thought I knew to be right. Not in terms of political ideas, but in terms of organizational methods and in particular, the rotten internal regimes of leftist ‘Leninist’ groups.