#43 | July 16 - 30, 1998  

By Dar Zhitayev

I had a lot of trouble thinking of an opening sentence to this story. And getting it published means a lot to me mostly for pecuniary reasons. Having graduated in 1992 from the Moscow Linguistic University with a "red diploma" in English, I could have made an easy living of it, but I was romantic (or plain damn stupid) enough to embark on a scholarly career instead. I forgot that it is the fucking Fuehrer Boris capitalist bullshit shitstem we are living in, not the late lamented Stalin's empire.

Back in, say, 1952, you could have a complete Turkish Runic typecast specially for your book if you were so inclined, or, if you were a physicist, you could have the floor of your laboratory tiled with platinum for some goofball precision experiment (both actual occurrences). Now, unlike those days, the Fuhrer, when asked his opinion about the Institute of Oriental Studies (the academic institution I have the honor to belong to), wonders why it should be located in Moscow, not Tashkent, and an oceanographer I've heard about ... That guy was a real committed scientist and an international luminary in his field, and all he cared about in life were his marvelous basins with rare samples of ocean water and underwater life. Democracy came and they first stopped paying salaries to his assistants. All of them dropped one by one until the professor was left alone with his fish tanks and then they stopped paying him his salary. Undaunted, he continued his research until one day the director of his Institute informed him that his tanks were too expensive to maintain and had to be poured out. The oceanographer, horrified, actually offered to pay for their maintenance from his own pocket, but the authorities were adamant. So the fish and seaweed went down the drain and the unlucky professor had no other option but to choose freedom and leave for the States. Talk about brain drain. Such are the fates of basic researchers in contemporary Russia and here I am, stranded with my Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit religious texts, a wife and child, and a monthly salary of 226R (barely covering the expenses for said wife's tampons). Talk about a reason to be a Communist. Talk about why I needed that opening sentence real bad. Unfortunately, however, a night of alternating coffee and cigarettes before my blank computer screen (386, 2MB RAM, black-and-white VGA display, to be sure) yielded nothing interesting, so I gave it up. This here text is going to do without an opening sentence.

As a matter of fact, the organization I belong to, the VLKSM (the remnants of the old Komsomol), is the only genuine Communist, Marxist-Leninist, and politically correct one to be found in this fucking quagmire of social-chauvinists, right-wing, left-wing and right-and-left-at-the-same-time-wing deviationists, anarcho-primitivists, crypto-Trotskyists, et al., et al., but just for classificatory purposes.

There are basically two kinds of Communists in post-Soviet Russia: radical and shitkicker. The shitkicker variety is represented by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) led by Gennady Zyuganov, born in 1943 and irrefutably demonstrated in the radical Bumbarash-2017 newspaper to be the illegitimate son of an occupying German soldier. It's not just that they're opportunistic, the "pocket opposition," and ever-willing to lick every orifice of the powers that be. It's not just that they mostly consist of stale ex-CPSU apparatchiks too lazy and stupid to have joined the victors in 1991 and eager to impose a new and worse Sovok on the long-suffering population. As if all that wasn't enough, they also have style. Those anti-Semitic, homophobic, priggish bastards have a meanness all their own. A friend of mine, a dedicated young KPRF activist who, in order to dodge the draft, refuses to have his gynecomastia operated on and looks mighty funny as a consequence, has the misfortune of being a Jew. As a result of this handicap he-in all other respects a model Party member-is very much frowned upon by his fellow Zyuganovites. My friend's local Party branch secretary suggested he undergo a racial examination and have his skull measured on a race-ometer, a gadget for measuring people's skulls and determining the degree of their ozhidovleniye ["kike-ness"]. Those guys are quite scientific in their approach, you see. So my poor friend had to comply and underwent the procedure. To his huge relief, his degree of his ozhidovleniye turned out to be quite small, so now he happily continues to serve his party's cause.

Radical communists also come in two varieties. These varieties cut across party lines-the Russian far left is teeming with small yet belligerent parties whose abbreviated names combine the letters R (for Russian) K (for Kommunist) and P (for Party) in various ingenious ways. These are the more psycho-physiological-sexual types here.

With the first species of radical Communist, the back-to-Stone-Age (or General-Lee-might-have-surrendered-but-I-ain't) variety, we enter the tragic and pathetic world of broken hearts, shattered aspirations, bad poetry, and the Small Penis Complex (or its feminine counterpart, the Broad Vagina Complex, invented by my wife who is always willing to oblige with some fresh development of Freudian theory). Their men smoke cheap cigarettes, their girls are (and will forever remain) virgins, their old ladies are hysterical. However, there is a cardinal point separating them from KPRF-niks: they are not pigs. Far from it. They are extremely valuable members of the community-honest, reliable, altruistic-relegated by the new masters and the order of things brought about by them to the a position with the status of shit. Having enough spunk to rebel but way too stereotyped to think for themselves, these backyard Stalinists look upon the Sunny Soviet Union of yesteryear and le Phantome de Staline as salvation-something to write bad poetry about, spend most of their money and time on, and, as often as not, risk life and limb for. What these people want and are all about was, in my opinion, best expressed by a colleague of mine at the Institute (one of the leading Russian experts in Old Egyptian and a member of Anpilov's party, his skull was fractured by OMON pigs during the May 1, 1993 demonstration) who once appeared on TV saying "I lived, am living, and will always live in the Soviet Union!" There's an example of wishful thinking if there ever was one!

The position of the other school of radical communists was summarized with Wildean wit by my friend and Komsomol cohort Denis Seliverstov as "The Soviet Union is dead-so fuck it!" Denis is a fat longhair who fools around on the internet a lot and, when drunk, has a tendency to race round the room with a wild look on his face shouting "Red Brigades! Red Brigades!" Sartre, Mao, and Ulrike Meinhof are his heroes. Radical Communists of the second variety at least perceive the Soviet Union as non-existent and the grim Yeltsinoid reality around us as far too existent. They are relatively young, mostly with urban backgrounds, more or less educated, and, to varying degrees, Westernized. They tend to look to different schools of Western (and Eastern-Maoism, for example) Leftist thought for solutions to the Russian problem.

Denis and I chair a small Komsomol organization in our home town of Obninsk, once the pride of the Soviet Union with its nuclear power plant (the first ever in the world!) built under the personal supervision of Beria and a lot of scientific institutions exploring the mysteries of the atomic nucleus. It (the Komsomol organization) consists mainly of glue-sniffin' ex-punks who are apt to desert us for Zhirinovsky's party because we are way too intellectual for them. Which brings us to the main subject of the present article: the young Communist movement in present-day Russia.

The abbreviated name of our organization, VLKSM, stands for the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League. Pre-1991, that was the name of the mammoth shite conglomeration every Soviet citizen of a certain age had to be a member of and which served as a fucking hotbed of anti-Communist propaganda and a fucking hornets' nest of future New Russian motherfuckers in the perestroika years. Inherent in the purified VLKSM of today is a certain organizational disproportion. The guys who drink (some are even so hip as to take barbiturates with their alcohol) and, in general, are fun to spend time with and hold the most bizarre and reactionary views, whereas the true Marxist-Leninists are teetotalers, don't smoke, and, frankly, I don't understand how they propagate. Parthenogenesis? Therefore Denis (the Red Brigades buff) and I have to drink with the right-wingers and think with the left-wingers, which is kind of embarrassing and not entirely politically correct, if you ask me.

The new VLKSM has nothing in common with the old one except the name and the fact that it is still represented in several CIS nations. The organization was born in spring 1992 through the titanic efforts of a few selfless enthusiasts-Andrei Yezersky, Slava Skvortsov, Lena Putivtseva, and others. The top guy, Yezersky, 39, is a kind of Hamlet of the Komsomol, ever torn apart by some dilemma or other. However, it is invariably the nobler (and/or more impractical) side of him that gets the upper hand. You should have seen him back in '92, during the preparations for the VLKSM restoration congress. He was at the airport, meeting the American Communist Party representative, Jason Rabinovich. As the two men didn't know each other, Andrei decided to take with him something that would unmistakably identify him to the guest. He chose a red banner. So he stood there waving his banner in that hostile crowd-remember, it was early 1992, the height of the anti-Communist hysteria. It's a wonder he wasn't lynched on the spot. And it's hard to imagine what makes Lena Putivtseva, a girl in her mid-20s, with a figure and looks that would more than enable her to publish all kinds of fascinating ads in eXile, and knowing several European languages-actually as smart and Westernized a Muscovite as any of your bourgeois conformist chicks-go visit the miners' pickets at the White House day in and day out, talk to them, launch agitation and propaganda amongst them, and coming home at the end of the day talk about it as if it were some marvelous romantic experience. Then there is this Slava Skvortsov guy, an ex-commando lieutenant and a Euro-Communist, after about a month of indoctrination by whom your brainless teenager girl crazy about techno music will rattle off her Marx and class struggle and the dialectic of production forces and production relations with a speed and confidence that would just blow your mind.

Next, there is the notorious RKSM(b), a radical group formed last summer and recently admitted into VLKSM as an associate member. The secret police have been trying (with little success) to connect RKSM(b)'s activities with last year's notorious bombings: the Czar Nicholas II monument, mining of that Zurab Tsereteli pagan idol supposed to represent Peter the Great, etc. Some of those jailed and accused of "terrorism," most notably Igor Gubkin and Andrei Sokolov, are indeed members or close allies of the organization. The big letters in the group's name stand for the Revolutionary (not Russian) Young Communist League and the small "b" may, depending on how you look at it, denote the Russian word for majority (the organization once won a majority at some Young Communist gathering or other), Bolshevik, or the last name of RKSM(b) leader, Pasha Bylevsky. Pasha, 34, and his close co-worker, ex-anarchist Dima Kostenko, 30, can boast an army of some 200 scattered throughout Russia, and they have been editing that pain in everybody's ass-the newspaper Bumbarash-2017-for years now.

Bumbarash is a character in a 1930s novel by the heroic Arkady Gaidar (grandfather of pig Yegor Gaidar)-a brave Red Army soldier with a somewhat naive, primeval perception of things around him, a kind of Commie Holden Caulfield. "We are all Bumbarashes now," said Pasha when launching the newspaper some years ago, correctly implying that nobody in the far Left now really understands what the fuck the situation in this country is all about. 2017, on the other hand, is the tentative date for which the next Great October Socialist Revolution is scheduled. Bumbarash is the hip Communist publication, featuring stuff such as a picture of Pol Pot with the caption "The Greatest Humanist of the 20th Century," ads reading "A Molotov Cocktail Will Help You Get Through The Day" or "The Magical World of Class Struggle-Discover It for Yourself!", instructions on how to "break OMON chains using trucks with the tires set on fire," and praise for Lavrenty Beria's spotless ethics and conjugal fidelity. That's postmodernism for you.

Both guys, Pasha and Dima, are well qualified for this kind of work. Pasha, father of three children, is a professional philosopher, a Candidate of Sciences (Ph.D.) in his field, and quite a scholar. In the 1980s, he was engaged in sorting out the archives of Mikhail Lifshits, a late Marxist theoretician of the 1920s. Lifshits's widow, a chain-smoking elderly Jewish lady, told him upon shaking hands, "Pavel, would you be so kind as to smell my toilet? You see, three days ago a mouse died there." So you can take it from me that Pasha knows all about Marxist aesthetics...firsthand. Later Pasha also sang backing vocals in a punk band called Tupiye [The Blockheads] and still continues his musical career with a collection of songs, a specimen of which is prefixed to this publication. Dima Kostenko was a past master of "orange" politics already in his Anarchist years. Orange politics was the politics of empty, meaningless sloganeering, sort of like the eXile's asinine Sub-Tropical Liberation Army. Then, for instance, Kosenko organized a mass crawling on bellies across Lubyanka Square to protest the liberalization of prices. Now he is engaged in the violent and indiscriminate propaganda of Third World revolutionary ideologies, wearing a Kim Il Sung badge and publishing articles in Bumbarash under all manner of what he thinks are funny pen-names, like the one about the Cultural Revolution in China signed Vyn Su-him ("pull it out dry" in Russian) which everybody in Moscow thought was written by me, so I had to make a round of visits and disappoint each of my friends personally.

The RKSM(b) rank-and-file are not so postmodern or brilliant as their leaders. They rather tend to belong to my first, nostalgic, species of Radical Communist. Igor Gubkin and Andrei Sokolov, for instance, shared a 100-percent Soviet mentality until they awoke one day to find themselves in this accursed brave new world and so had to work in the context of that. This they did... and don't let us forget that they are and have always been outright rebels, pure and simple. Postmodernists or no postmodernists, one good thing can be said about Pasha and Dima and the whole RKSM(b) bunch: they are loyal comrades. They have launched a huge campaign of support for Igor and Andrei (the two accused of bombing the statues), as well as other prisoners, including psychological war in the media, rock concerts, petitions, raising the enormous amounts of money needed to pay for their lawyers, etc. An RKSM(b) chick of my acquaintance, a specialist in English who earns a handsome salary, even goes so far as to spend 90 percent of her salary to support the political prisoners. Things really suck for the Russian far left today. We don't get 1 percent of the publicity (and funding) the Zyuganovite sonofabitches get. Our ranks are small and dwindling, we are disorientated, frustrated, and divided. The working class thinks us a joke. However, what the hell. Let the ruling classes tremble at the thought of a Communist revolution. The proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains. They have a world to win.

Working men of all countries, unite!