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