I'm going to stop sending stuff on this thread to the list, as it probably has little interest to anyone but my interlocuter.
Well, if they had spoken good English, that would certainly have made them part of the educated class. But the converse doesn't hold. That they didn't speak English well doesn't mean that they weren't. You can very easily be part of the elite in Russia and not know a word of the language. Russians are required to study English in school, but that doesn't mean they actually speak it. If I may be allowed to use the place I work as a microcosm -- it's an English-language newspaper whuch, obviously, favors English-speakers in hiring policy. Nevertheless, I would estimate that of the 60-70% of the staff who are native Russian speakers -- all of whom have higher educations -- only 20-30% speak English with sufficient fluency to hold a basic conversation. Of the 10-12 journalists here who speak Russian as a first language, only 4 know English, one of whom lived in the US for 10 years, two of whom were in the US for years on journalist-training programs and one of whom is actually a young American guy who grew up here because his father defected to the Soviet Union.
Add to this the fact that you were here in 1994, just three years after the USSR fell apart. English was not a commonly studied subject in the Soviet Union -- hell, Bulgarian or Moldovan was more useful than English. Moreover, though Soviet education in general was superb (and Russian education still is; I have never seen a more highly educated group of people in my life -- the hatboy at the local bar reads Fichte for fun) its foreign-language training sucked. These people could very easily have been very highly educated.
(Speaking of classes, one thing I like about Russia is that, outside of some ritsy apartment complexes, cities aren't divided into working class/middle class/poor neighborhoods. Factory workers/teachers/lawyers/managers/the unemployed all share the same buildings. Russia doesn't ghettoize its poor, at least not yet.)
I agree that the equation in the common mind of workers' movements with Stalinism is very harmful for leftwing movements in the FSU, though some interesting stuff has been going on with the quasi-Trotskyist Zashchita Truda (Defense of Labor) labor union headed by Oleg Shein, who at least a couple of years ago was the youngest member of the Duma. I believe they've been making great gains, relatively speaking. We'll see if they survive the new union-killing Labor Code.
As to Makhno, I will confess to knowing nothing about him. I asked a Ukrainian co-worker in her early 30s and she said she remembers being taught in high school that he was some vicious killer, but that in post-USSR Ukraine he has become somewhat popular.
I'm not sure if the building you refer to is the House on the Embankment or the House of Socialism (having problems reconstructing my mental map of that part of town). The latter is gorgeous, and they have blacked out about half the windows of the apartments as a memory to the residents there Stalin had purged.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ---------------------------
P.J. Wells said:
Chris,
Doesn't your comment
>nah... you're thinking maybe Russia is in Western Europe.
>Nobody in Russia
>knows English.
>
>Well, maybe 5% of the population speaks English with some degree of
>passibility.
in fact tend to bear out my suggestion that
>the youngster's lack of English suggested that they
>came from
>working-class backgrounds rather than the intelligentsia.
How big is the Russian intelligentsia? (and since time has passed, is this a different to the size of the intelligentsia in the Soviet era?)
Certainly other members of the E. European intelligentsia I have had contact with (Bulgarians in the UK) seem to take it for granted that any educated person will have workable conversational knowledge of English and/or German.
>CD: As I said before, nobody in Russia knows English, except
>for a sliver of
>people with higher educations who work in managerial positions
>with Western
>companies. The international language of the CIS is Russian.
>Moreover, how
>many English-speakers are you going to come across is Nizhny
>Novgorod, or
>Moscow for that matter? I meet people all the time who say I'm
>the first
>American they've ever met in their lives.
I can well believe it -- but meeting native speakers is not the same thing as having some knowledge of a given language. Come to that, learning a language is not the same thing as being able to hold a conversation in it.
One is put in mind the anecdote about Lenin's first trip to the West. He had, of course, read extensively in German -- but was astonished to find that actual German-speakers found him completely unintelligible, thanks to the fact that he had learnt the language as a purely literary enterprise, and had no idea of the pronunciation.
>CD: Moscow streets are ENORMOUS. I get the impression everybody in the
>Soviet Union was 20 meters tall. You could move a brontosaurus
>through the
>metro. Where was the demo, by the way?
I disremember the starting point (I found Moscow's geography surprisingly hard to get a grip off), but it was across the river from the centre, past that 20s/30s block of flats once reserved for Party high-ups and other pets of the regime.
After a *very* long walk it wound up in the Lenin Hills by Moscow State University (undoubtedly one of the ugliest buildings I have ever seen).
>As to class background and its correlation with political
>allegiances, as I
>stated in a previous post, the working class tends to be
>Stalinist, but it's
>a murky, woozy-headed Stalinism. Working-class kids
>mythologize the Soviet
>Union and think it was this great, wonderful state, that did
>everything for
>the workers, and that Brezhnev was a god.
Hmmm ...they do say that distance lends enchantment.
I suspect that this kind of thinking will handicap the Russian working-class in exactly the same way that Peronist nostalgia has (to my mind) vitiated the workers' movement in Argentina.
As to older people, the only
>systems they've lived under are Stalinism, Perestroika and
>Yeltsinism. I
>certainly don't blame some guy who works in a factory for
>pining for the
>late 70s, when his standard of living was probably an order of
>magnitude
>higher.
Absolutely.
However, I'm still puzzled by anarchists who revere both Makhno and Lenin. As I suggested, one would think that anyone who knew enough to know about Makhno would also know about his "difficult" relationship with the Bolsheviks...
Julian