By Renfrey Clarke
NOVOSIBIRSK — There's not a great deal of joy in being a worker in Russia, and things are harder still if you are not in the relatively well-off capital, Moscow.
Left-wing activism continues even in some of the most remote corners of Russia. Not that Novosibirsk, where I have spent the past few weeks, is exactly the sticks. With about 1.5 million people, it is the largest city in Siberia and a key centre of education and science.
In Soviet times, Novosibirsk was also one of the hubs of high-tech manufacturing. Near where I have been staying is a defence plant which once turned out 12 fighter planes a month. In 1998, it produced just three aircraft. Wages at the plant have not been paid for two years.
The collapse of the high-tech sector is one of the reasons that, in the 1996 presidential elections, a majority of voters in Novosibirsk province opted for the candidate of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). In both the provincial and city assemblies, Communists hold solid blocs of seats.
With its strong legislative presence in Novosibirsk, and about 4000 paid-up members in the city, the KPRF is in a position to keep the local authorities under heavy pressure on issues such as social services and the payment of "budget sector" wages. But forces to the KPRF's left complain that the party's deputies have long since reconciled themselves to capitalism and are more interested in trading influence within the local administration than in defending workers.
Not all the city's oppositionists have been so readily tamed. Novosibirsk has at least five emphatically anti-capitalist political parties and groups, with a combined membership of perhaps 300.
A significant left presence is the local organisation of the Union of Officers, made up of opposition-minded retired military personnel. A number of small trade unions are also aligned with the left.
Considering how many people in Novosibirsk live barely above starvation level, the size and political impact of the committed left are surprisingly small. The reasons angry workers in Russia do not, for the most part, flock into left-wing parties are diverse and go far back into Soviet times. A major obstacle for the left, however, is simply the poverty that has made workers angry in the first place.
For workers, even the bus fare needed if they are to get to meetings can be hard to find. For the parties they might join, membership dues cannot be a large source of income. Nor can literature sales, since newspapers can only occasionally be sold rather than given away. For expenses such as rent, telephone bills and printing costs, left organisations usually depend on a few supporters who have higher incomes and can make donations.
A further brake on the growth of the left, in Novosibirsk and elsewhere, is the fact that large numbers of workers lack the time for political activity. To keep themselves and their families, they have to hold down two or even three jobs.
But with capitalism discredited and the ruling authorities widely hated, the failure of the left to grow impressively cannot be put down solely to practical difficulties. The decisive reasons are political.
Even in a city as large as Novosibirsk, left political activists remain almost completely isolated from the international left and its debates (something brought home to me by the fact that my presence at various gatherings has been a real event). Few good historical materials are to be had, especially in Russian. Marxism-Leninism to most Novosibirsk leftists therefore remains the skewed, selective version found in Brezhnev-era party primers.
Not surprisingly, the reasons Soviet socialism and the USSR were quickly and deliberately dismantled are baffling to most people on the left. The things that activists cannot understand themselves cannot be explained persuasively to others.
Compared to the perplexities of the 1980s and 1990s, the politics of the Stalin era seem to many leftists to be agreeably straightforward. But if nostalgia for Stalinist times is comforting to the old, it is repellent to the young. And of course, the unrepentant Stalinism of various groups on the Novosibirsk left (including the largest, the Russian Communist Workers Party) is seized upon by liberal propagandists to brand the whole left as totalitarian.
The fact that the main political experience of most Novosibirsk leftists has been in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union shows through in their organisational habits. Among the former military officers in particular, unquestioning submission to orders from above is seen as a political virtue. The result is that the left parties, as well as having a dogmatist cast, tend to be marred by rigid internal hierarchies.
With internal party democracy ill developed and poorly understood, political differences have been expressed in factionalism and recurrent splits.
It is not the case that the post-Soviet left here has achieved nothing. Left-wing news-sheets are published semi-regularly and, though often turgid reading, provide a vehicle for bitter criticism of the new capitalist order. Opposition demonstrations each year on May 1 and November 7, the anniversary of the 1917 revolution, draw about 10,000 participants.
During 1998, Novosibirsk leftists twice organised actions in support of the "rail wars", when unpaid miners and other workers in the nearby Kuzbass region blocked rail lines.
On January 23, activists from Novosibirsk were among more than 150 delegates at a remarkable congress of representatives of labour collectives, strike committees and workers' councils from Siberia and the Urals.
Held under tight police surveillance in the Kuzbass city of Anzhero-Sudzhensk, the congress heard the call for a shift from parliamentarism to active workers' struggle. A Council of Workers of Siberia was elected, and a decision was taken to support only those political parties that joined actively in defending workers' rights.
Even the characteristic failings of the left groups in Novosibirsk are being addressed. Surrounded by piles of books in a run-down apartment, a former research scientist and philosophy teacher chairs meetings of an analytical group. How does the crisis in Russia reflect the evolution of capitalism outside the country's borders? What did the founders of Russian Marxism really think about the internal regime needed in a workers' party? The participants in the group are searching for answers.
Meanwhile, tertiary education lecturer Aleksandr Glazunov is the moving spirit in an Inter-Party Initiative Committee of Communists. Representatives of five left organisations gather weekly, hoping to clarify differences and overcome them.
It is fair to conclude, however, that when rapid growth of the Novosibirsk left begins, it will be led, not by veterans of Soviet socialism, but by younger activists whose political experience dates from the 1990s, and whose sense of the international heritage of the left is keen. In Novosibirsk, such people are grouped in the local Russian Communist Union of Youth, the Komsomol.
With about 70 members in Novosibirsk province, and 40 or so in the city itself, the Komsomol is among the larger of the local left organisations. It has one deputy in the provincial legislature.
Linked in earlier times to the KPRF, the Komsomol now insists bluntly on its independence.
According to Yevgenia Polinovskaya, a Novosibirsk history lecturer who coordinates the Komsomol's work in Siberia, the falling-out with the KPRF reflected disagreement by young radicals with the party's right-wing course, opposition to its growing nationalist bent and anger at KPRF interference in the Komsomol's internal affairs. When Polinovskaya ran as a Komsomol candidate in elections for the provincial legislature in December 1997, the KPRF refused to back her campaign, running a non-party factory director against her.
Much of the activity of Novosibirsk Komsomol members centres on their paper, Novosibirsky Komsomolets, which appears four or five times a year. Interesting and well produced, the paper is by far the best of the local left.
With about a third of its members students, the Komsomol also works to develop the student movement and to defend education. It conducts its own political education work, including discussion camps and debates with other political tendencies.
Alone on the Novosibirsk left, the Komsomol searches for lessons and examples outside the Soviet and Russian experiences, carried out largely through the internet, where it has a web page (.
Leftists in Siberia are not short of courage or devotion. To pack into a decrepit Moskvich car and drive hundreds of kilometres in -30° temperatures, and then to spend a day conferring in an unheated cinema beset by police, would test the mettle of most western radicals.
The shortcomings which hold the Siberian left back are rooted in the areas of program and method. Until now, the authorities have been able to assume the left's errors rule it out as a potential mass opposition. That assumption may yet prove false.