By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — In the first warm days of spring, workers in the capital took the chance offered by the May Day holiday to head for the countryside — the lucky ones to stay in their cottages or dig their garden plots, others to go hiking or to search for mushrooms.
Overwhelmingly, workers have met the collapse of production and the savage blundering of their government with an air of resigned hopelessness, while trying to live a normal life despite the slow physical degradation that results from an inadequate diet.
People could protest, but what would they call for? A return to the past? The great majority of Russians have the sense to see that Brezhnev-style "developed socialism" long ago exhausted whatever potential it possessed.
Some radical "third path", then? But who is putting up such a program? And what cause is there to think it might ever be implemented?
On May 1 leaders of the Moscow Federation of Trade Unions (MFP), along with other left activists, were trying to present answers to these questions. But despite a vigorous postering campaign, the MFP's rally was small even by comparison with the neo-Brezhnevite Trudovaya Rossiya action the same day.
The government's defenders still will not strain their credibility when they brand all of their opponents as petty Stalins trying to win back their power and privileges.
Why is the Russian left still dominated heavily by its most discredited elements?
It is a basic axiom that no current with an obvious link to the old apparatus will ever become a genuine mass force. The Communist Party was too widely hated. Those who had a particular contempt for it included younger workers and the better-organised sections of the working class.
But although the neo-Communist parties have little long-term potential, they have inherited a ready-made base — hundreds of thousands of former small-time potentates from the now dissolved workplace committees and lower-level party organs. Bodies like the Russian Communist Workers Party have loomed large as a result.
The labour movement has failed to throw up large numbers of young left activists free of ties to the old system. Where such activists exist, their rise is often blocked by the existing leaderships, which in most cases are unabashedly pro-Yeltsin.
Most union officials have never been labour movement activists. Under the old regime they were apparatus functionaries who happened to work in the unions. Just as they once represented the ruling apparatus to the workers, they now loyally represent the pro-capitalist government. Even where relatively progressive elements have won top-level posts — as in the Moscow labour movement — the second-rank leadership is often dominated by old-style apparatchiks.
This may be one of the reasons behind the passivity of the MFP during the past six months. May Day was the first time the MFP has called its members onto the streets since a successful demonstration last October.
Even in the midst of economic catastrophe, rank and file pressures on union leaderships generally remain rather weak. The rich tradition of independent organisation that developed in the first decades of this century has long since been smashed. Russian workers today have little grasp of the real situation of workers in the capitalist West, and often regard socialist ideas with intense suspicion.
Against these odds, rebuilding healthy mass left-wing forces is not a job that will be accomplished in one or two years. It will be to the enormous credit of Russian leftists if it is achieved within the decade.