-->For what it's worth, my one and only visit to Russia happened to take in the 1994 May Day celebrations (it was a work-related trip, with a colleague who is a devoted Stalinist).
CD: Hey! You were here in the days of Big Mafia. You'll be happy to know there are far fewer bullet-proof cars with sirens on them being driven around.
-->After the Moscow Trades Council event in the morning we went on to the CP-based event in the afternoon (with some trepidation; the year before someone had got shot (dead) on this demo, and of course the liberal press were busy talking up the alleged "red-brown" nature of the event).
CD: Yeah, any time anybody said anything against Yeltsin he/she got slammed as a "red-brown." Like Yavlinsky, who is half-Jewish and about as radical as Clinton, is a "red-brown." Reading the US press, one would have thought Russia was just swarming with neo-Nazi Stalinoids, which is horseshit. There are probably more Nazis in the US than in Russia.
As it turned out the demo was entirely peaceful (and huge -- as my mate put it, referring to the super-wide Moscow streets, we'd been on demos shorter than this one was wide..)
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?
-->But the point which bears particularly on Chris's comment is that (we concluded) the youngster's lack of English suggested that they came from working-class backgrounds rather than the intelligentsia.
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.
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. 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.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal