Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Time of the Whirlwind." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 351-354). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2014. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Our house hosted a Soviet guest, a sculptor, during the Goodwill Games in August, and what a juicy tidbit that proved to be for dinner table conversation and talk show chatter.
Seattle was agog over the thousands of locals who opened their homes to the vast influx of Soviet athletes, artists and intellectuals, officials, experts, trade negotiators, and just plain workers whom Aeroflot deposited on our freshly scrubbed doorsteps.
We didn’t need to go to the USSR—it came to us. Moscow-on-Puget Sound was a moveable cultural feast: the Bolshoi Ballet’s Ivan the Terrible; Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace; Chekhov’s The Three Sisters; Eugenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind, performed by Moscow’s Sovremenik theatre and depicting the plight of women prisoners and their male jailers in the darkness-at-noon decades of Stalin’s purges; exhibits of centuries of Russian art climaxed by the Constructivists and their “Art Into Life” creations.
All art flourished in the welcoming climate encouraged by Lenin and Trotsky after the revolution, before Lenin died.
Before the invading armies of U.S. and European capitalists drained the land.
Before the civil war provoked by imperialism exhausted the people and drowned a huge sector of young leaders in blood.
Before the defeat of the German revolution, which the Bolsheviks utterly depended on for economic and political help.
Before the crystallizing of a caste of bureaucrats, grouped around Stalin, who exploited the ravaged country as they scrambled for power positions. (You always need functionaries to run the food banks, employment agencies, housing departments, and all the rest.)
Before Trotsky’s Left Opposition to Stalin was dirty tricked by officials intoxicated with their vodka-soaked privileges.
And before Trotsky’s protest against Stalin’s abandonment of revolution abroad, and democratic, commonsensical measures at home, was silenced, by exile and later by the assassin’s ax.
Not only Trotsky died. The counterrevolutionary hatchet men of Stalinism executed the entire remaining leadership of the October Revolution and killed or imprisoned millions who refused to surrender principles and humaneness. The prime products of the bureaucracy were corpses, the death of art (suffocated in the one-size-fits-all shroud of “socialist realism”), and the cynical perversion of Marx and Lenin’s ideas.
So how did my discussions go with the artists and actors?
With extreme difficulty. Language differences are an impenetrable, nationalistic barrier to an exchange of thinking, and what the Goodwill Games gurus neglected—or refused? or were forced into failing to provide?—were translators. Our lives centered on competitive hunts for Russian-English translators.
You may be sure that visitors who came to talk about trade and capital investment were accompanied by a decent contingent of translators, as were the pampered athletes. It was the artists and journalists and just-folks who suffered. Of course.
Happily we discovered that pantomime, sound effects and pictures are incredible lubricants to communication. The Soviets were delighted and amazed to find socialists and lower-case “c” communists in this bucolic corner of Yankeeville.
They hated Stalin and knew little about Trotsky; what they did know about Trotsky was wrong and untrue, hardly surprising when Gorbachev, the new Bonaparte, stalls over “rehabilitating” him.
They were puzzled and divided over feminism and lesbian/gay rights, though the 1917 Soviet Constitution was the first in history to legitimize these paramount social and human interests.
Comfortable with all races and my Jewish heritage, they were as yet unscathed by recent eruptions of Soviet anti-Semitism.
They love their country, feel free to criticize it, hope for the best, fear the future, were thrilled to be here and partake of our bounty. But they deplored the seamy slums of paradise that we showed them. These people are not going to trade off their own and their children’s birthrights—insured jobs, housing, education, medical care, abortion—for the terrible risks inherent in an unbridled profit system.
The Soviet Union can never go whole-hog capitalist without a century of convulsions and turmoil. And we of the West, which fattened off the plunder and cheap labor of the world, will never find tranquility either until we merge our wealth and know-how with the socialist concern for all people. Then, together, we will replace the free