THE LIFE OF GRIGORY ISAYEV
A Word from Translator
Below is my translation of the 1996 interview with Grigory Isayev by a
journalist from a Samara newspaper. Isayev is the leader of the Party of
Proletarian Dictatorship based in the city of Samara (former Kuibyshev).
Last spring, as the Chairman of the City Stachkom (Strike Committee), he led
the two-month long strike which
paralized the center of the city and included the lockout of the plant
administration. This interview is interesting in a number of ways. PPD is
the only known grass-roots party of the Soviet proletariat.
Its ideology was formed in undeground, in complete isolation from the
Marxist thought outside the country and in the opposition to the official
Marxism of Brezhnev's era. I've read by now most of Razlatsky's writings and
have my doubts about some of his ideas, but his clear understanding of the
coming catastrophe was indeed unique at that time.
He was not only the last revolutionary thinker of the late Soviet period,
but the last revolutionary intellectual who indeed went over to the side of
the proletariat once and for all. The workers of Samara paid him back with
their love and continue to revere his memory. His followers were not many,
but he succeeded in bringing up a vanguard for the future. Now it begins to
bear fruit.
Isayev's own story is still in the making. He and his friends are presently
in Moscow talking to the miners who have been picketing the government
offices since June. In his last letter to me he promised to organize the
All-Russian Strike Committee. They sleep on the ground, together with the
miners. You can recognize the men from Samara by two banners: "All Power to
Strike Committees" and "Down With All Bosses!"
This is an abridged translation. I left out the details of Isayev's arrest,
his life in the camp, and smaller things that would be difficult to
understand for foreign audience. I welcome any editorial suggestions since I
plan to publish this piece in a number of sites.
Vladimir Bilenkin Interview with Grigory Isayev I was 10 when Stalin died.
Back then we lived in barracks. There was a "plate" hanging in the
corridor--a radio speaker. One morning I ran out of our room, rushing to the
communal bathroom, and at once noticed that something was wrong. There was
an unusual silence. There were people sitting silently in the kitchen. Some
one was crying in the neighbor's room. "What's the matter?"-I asked. Nobody
responded to a mere kid. Only later I heard: Stalin. I remember that my
soul, the soul of
a boy, felt empty at these words.
In this prison camp I asked inmates--among them were Vlasov's men, [General
Vlasov was a Ukrainian(?) officer whose army fought with the Nazis against
the Motherland during WWII] nationalists and pure
dissidents--whether they went to battle during the war in the name of
Motherland or Stalin. They would answer:
"Rather for Stalin than for Motherland."
No, it's not that simple with [the question of] Stalin. Nowadays they often
say: "The country lived in fear under him." This is not true.
The war became a test of this. People, who lived in fear of the monster,
would not have died with his name on their lips. Nor would they have won the
war.
Our losses aand sacrifices--this is a different question. But what is
history about if not for us to learn from it?
A common man, i.e., a Philistine, believes everything but does not reflect
on anything. We believed that Stalin was much more than simply a leader.
Years had passed before we began to reflect on this and, naturally, our
attitude to Stalin changed. But anyway one cannot indiscriminately blame
everything on him. Now we prefer white over red, now red over white, but
life consists of more than two colors.
-Did you realize this under Khrushchev?
-I realized this as I was growing older. We Russians believed in God, in
Tsar, in Generalissimos and, under Khrushchev especially, in his lofty
slogan: "We shall build our new world." Back then, in the early sixties, I
served in the Soviet Army Group in Germany, Western Saxony, 15 kilometers
from the border. In case of emergency, we would clash head to head with the
US Seventh Army within twenty minutes.
The Berlin Wall was just built. Our men sat in their tanks for three days,
with engines running and shells loaded. Like during the war. We served
faithfully.
-By the way, in my three years in the army, I got a good sense of the German
character since we had to interact with the local population.
The main things for Germans are order and discipline. For Russians--
selflessness and slothfulness. Yes, this is so. We ought not flatter
ourselves.
-I've seen a few things in life. In the late sixties, when I studied in the
Politech school, I worked for three years as a commander of the regional
construction brigade. It was called "Commune," by the way. We laid the
foundation for the Volga Auto Works and the city of Togliatti in the bare
steppe. After that I came to work in the ZiM (the Plant named after
Maslennikov was the site of the strike led by Isayev last spring--V.B.) as a
foreman in the foundry shop. Then I switched to becom a metal craftsman.
Why? Because of the (system's) cretinism: engineers were paid little and I
had a family to feed. My wife, Galina, was about to have our second son,
Vanya. Just think, how little education was valued back then!
What a stupid system!
-And so I built, toiled, supported with my back the feudal state and saw
stupid bungling and waste everywhere. There were mountains of clothes in
stores but nothing worth buying--all of it junk. Or take our foundry shop.
We had state of the art equipment there. Once we received a rush order. It
required extreme precision from us. So we did the job well.
The details were crafted so nicely--you would want to put them on your
Christmas tree. Our morale was high: we roved ourselves! And then suddenly
we saw our details, already painted, thrown back into the melt box for the
crucible.
-Can you imagine the feelings of a worker! It turned out that some draftsman
made a mistake in the size parameters. And this was not an isolated case but
a norm. Mountains of invaluable labor were wasted.
Or take the BAM (the Baikal-Amur Railroad--V.B.). No, I thought, something
was going wrong.
-Did you think so alone?
-Every one saw this. The press wrote about this too. But all the blame was
always put on the lower level bureaucracy. As for the people, let them not
worry: they have sausage, vodka on every corner, so--
"we are moving in the right direction, comrades." However, as our saying
goes: what the pastor is, so is his parish, and this raised the questions:
What about the Council of Ministers, the Supreme Soviet, and what about the
Central Committee?
-And then I met with Alexei Borisovich Razlatsky. It happened by accident,
on one family occasion.
- He was the head of a scientific group at the research institute
Giprovostokneft' (the State Research Institute of Eastern Oil--V.B.).
But he was not a member of the CPSU. Strange, isn't it? He should've been
because of his position. Yet, think what you like, he did not join the
Party. He was much valued for his powerful intellect. He would, jokingly,
suggest to the higher-ups ideas for their doctoral dissertations (Doctor of
Sciences was the next scholarly rank after Ph.D.--V.B.). Many owed him a lot
in this respect. By the way, the Rector of the Moscow State University was
not a Communist either. But the feudal system intuitively clung to people
like them.
-People were drawn to Razlatsky as to a magnet. I also began to frequent his
place. I noticed at once that empty people did (? - did not?) stay for long
there. We played a bit of chess, but mostly it was conversation. Whatever
subjects were discussed one could feel how much above the rest of us
Razlatsky was in his understanding of the world. The kind of conversations
we had before him were the usual ones: our women, dachas, our cars. With
Razlatsky, our mundane chat turned into a conversation "about life." And
every timeit ended with the question: "Why?"
-He had a sharp analytical mind, I would say, a dialectical mind. He created
us. His grandeur, I am not afraid to apply this word to him, was felt by
everybody, though, unfortunately, only few were able to understand him
completely. Especially so, when the recurring question, "Who's guilty?",
made him get involved with Marxism seriously.
-By the way, Grigory, why did not you become a party member?
-When I became a worker, they begged me to. I refused. What for ? To pay
more dues? 1% to the union, 2% --to them? I was up to my head in this life,
in the foundry shop, in the very midst of the working class.
I played the role of a catalyst in our group. Razlatsky generated ideas.
-In the mid seventies, Razlatsky began writing his works for us and for
himself. I read them right away, with ink still wet: "Who Is to Answer?",
"The Second Communist Manifesto," "What Our Intelligentsia Does Not Want to
Know" and others. We distributed these works among workers with great
caution. Instead of printing them,
we asked readers to rewrite what they read. Later on, the chekists (KGB
operatives--V.B.) confirmed that it was a good security practice. Indeed,
who would pay attention to some secondary-school notebooks with clumsy
handwriting and ink blots all over them, eh?
- In our foundry shop we tested our strike methods. Reasons for strikes were
simple: the administration did not give us special work clothes, like boots.
So we stopped working for 2-3 hours. Two days was our record.
And we taught the administration a good lesson! The whole plant would come
to the shop to drink milk and soda. And this was in the 1970s.
-We held on in the underground for five years, thanks to Razlatsky.
-Did you know what you were facing if they caught you?
-We did. We fought against the State, after all.
-So what did you count on?
-It may sound strange, but we hoped THEY would understand us.
Those were utopian hopes. We would say: "They put a red cloth on the eyes of
society." This notwithstanding, we held it to be a great banner! Weren't we
too fighting under it? Didn't we share the same goal: to build a classless
society? One had only to throw away the wrong methods.
-But no! We did not fall in love with each other. They banged our heads
against the pavement. "Only the ruling party can be right!"
-When did you become aware that they were following you?
- They spied on us from 1979 to 1981. A friend of mine was arrested.
His neighbor informed on him and they got him under the pretext that he was
drunk. They frisked him and found one of those secondary-school notebooks.
Somehow he was able to get himself out, but they put him
undersurveillance. That was it.
Soon after I noticed that I was followed.
-So your arrest did not come unexpected for you?
-We had set up several secret caches beforehand and hid our literature
there.
-As to my arrest, it looked very routine. On 13 December 1981 Jaruzelsky
introduced martial law in Poland. It "rang the bell" across the entire
Socialist camp. Arrests took place everywhere.
Razlatsky and myself were arrested on December 15
-The investigation took a year and a half. During that period I had to spend
some time in the Serbsky Institute (the central psychiatric facility,
involved in the repression of political dissidence in the SU--V.B.) where
they placed us. I was there for 35 days, Razlatsky--for seventy. But unlike
the others, they didn't "treat" us.
Why not? They made idiots only of isolated individuals, but we were agroup.
Our case was special. Too many people knew that we were sane.
Nobody would have believed that idiots could organize as we did.
- Shortly after Brezhnev's death, Razlatsky and I were sentenced under
Article 70 and sent to the camps. Razlatsky got 7 years of camps and 5 of
exile. He served his sentence in Mordovia. I was sent to the Perm
camp, with 5 and 5 (5 years of camps and 5 of exile-V.B.).
-And what exactly was the difference between regular and political camps?
-It matters little in which camp one is deprived from one's freedom. Of
course, Andropov's times did not stand a comparison with those of Imperial
Russia. We had no privileges, like those enjoyed by Katya Maslova (a
character from Leo Tolstoy's novel--V.B.). Still, they addressed us by using
the polite form of "you." We could write two letters a month and have our
relatives visit us.
-As in a regular camp, we had informers among us, about 10% of prisoners.
You could get their number quickly because of the kind of questions they
asked, the way they listened. In a way, we even "made friends" with them.
You would say something to him, he would inform on you, the administration
would reward him with a pack of cut tea, and we would drink it together
afterwards.
-What were political prisoners guilty of?
-60-70% of us "sat" under the same Article as myself. The rest sat mainly
under Article 94--"high treason." Those were the "runners" who tried to
escape from the country by highjacking the means of transportation. But the
majority sat for "ideas," they were intellectuals.
-They were sentenced under the same article, but their motives were
different. There were many nationalists, Bandera's people, Vlasov's
followers, the "forest brothers" (i.e., the anti-communist partisans
from the Baltic--V.B.).
-Each of them fought for the freedom of his Motherland. Every one was
against the system, against this kind of life. I also went against the new
feudalism created by the CPSU. But only a few supported the slogan:
"Glory to October of 1917! Long Live the New October!" So be it.
-Was it Gorbachev who set you and Razlatsky free?
-Yeah, and thanks to him for this, of course. However, I came back to the
kind of life of which Razlatsky warned us as early as in the 1970s. I
foresaw and was prepared for it.
-It was clear to us all along that the feudal-serf order was coming to an
end. This was something we already new from history. Who was Gorbachev? A
liberal bourgeois, a Kerensky. Who was Yeltsin? A radical bourgeois. In
short, they were bourgeois by their nature and fought between themselves
just because both were larger than life.
Ligachev? these types never learn anything.
-The redistribution of property is going on. But in whose interest?
-Grigory, whom did you "root" for when they were bombing the White House
(the Supreme Soviet in 1993--V.B.)?
-For no one. It was a fight between masters, they were at each other's
throats: the nascent bourgeoisie and the old feudalism. On the radio, they
were screaming: "The fate of Russia is at stake! Come here and help!"
Yet, babushkas kept walking their grandchildren in courtyards and lovers
kept kissing. The people did not care. Because on both sides, right and
left, the working class saw its exploiters.
-All this mess will go on until the new proletarian revolution. It is
inevitable. Razlatsky died, we march on.
* * *
The journalist continues.
Isayev was recently invited to read lectures on philosophy at one college.
The students listened to him attentively, did not rush out of the class at
sound of the the bell.
When he is free from lectures, meetings and family affairs, Isayev works as
a yard-keeper or stays in his "bunker"--the former bomb shelter in the
vicinity of the Ravine of Underground Revolutionaries. There, on the door of
a residential building, you will see the sign "Stachkom" (strike committee).
Downstairs, ten steps below, you willfind a spacious room without windows. A
table, chairs, hot tea.
On the walls there hang Vysotsky's portrait, pictures of workers'
demonstrations and--slogans: "One must be hungry himself in order to lead
the hungry!", "Without the intelligentsia, the working class is like a blind
man without a guide," "The party of the proletariat should not be the ruling
party!"
People flow to this bunker uninterruptedly. They are different, mostly
workers. They come to talk. The other day came the first secretary of the
VKPB of Mordovia (the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks led by
Nina Andreyeva--V.B.). He hotly debated with Grigory for two days.
By the end of the second day Isayev branded him: "A counter-revolutionary!"
One must be hungry himself in order to lead the hungry!
I also went against the new feudalism created by the CPSU.
The party of the proletariat should not be the ruling party!
Long Live Revolution!
All Power to Strike Committees!
The Party of Proletarian Dictatorship.
The Strike Commitee of Samara (Stachkom).
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E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://proletarism.org/ http://stachkom.org/
http://www.samara.ru/~stachkom/ ICQ# 42743890
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