Red and rising: Eyewitness report of Volgograd's resistance to capitalism

by Scott Marshall

This article was reprinted from the August 17, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

VOLGOGRAD, Russian Federation - This is the heart of what is known as the Red Belt. It is a southern stretch of Russia that voted heavily for Gennady Zyuganov in both the primary and general presidential elections. It is made up of smaller industrial cities and towns and large rural expanses that were once home to thriving collective and state farms. Volgograd is also Stalingrad, where that historic stand against German fascism turned the tide of World War II.

From the very beginning of planning my trip to Russia, we had a clear priority: get to the Volgograd region. We wanted to report on the Communist Party of the Russian Federation at the grassroots. We knew it did very well here in the December Duma elections and had heard that it was growing in size and influence. In particular we wanted to get a view of affairs outside of the big cities - to find out how workers and farmers in the rural areas and in Russia's industrial heartland were responding to the Yeltsin years. And what was happening to Russian industry?

Getting there wasn't easy. Even before I left New York we had to jump through bureaucratic hoops to change my visa to include Volgograd and we worked on arrangements from the first day I arrived in Moscow.

It's really quite complicated - you can't just hop on a plane and hope to get this kind of story. Sure, you can buy an Aeroflot ticket, pay big money for a professional translator, stay at an outrageously expensive hotel and get some interesting street interviews. But we wanted something with a little more focus.

Mike Davidow, the People's Weekly World Moscow correspondent, and his wife Lena, pestered all their Party friends and contacts in the Volgograd region to get something set up. Several times we had a tentative arrangement, only to have it canceled by an important election rally or a "get out the vote" mobilization. Finally, as we roamed the halls of the Duma on July 5, two days after the presidential election runoff, we ran into Alexander Kolikov.

Alexander is the Communist Duma deputy from Volzhski. Volzhski, is the "Youth City" built in the early 1960s by the Young Communist League. Right across the Volga River from Volgograd, Volzhski was built to house young workers and their families during the construction of the huge Volgograd hydroelectric station. We told Alexander what we were looking for and within the hour it was all arranged. The Volzhski Communist Party organization would prepare everything

A day later I was on an Aeroflot jet for the thousand mile flight to Volgograd. Anatoly Shiryaev, the head of the Volzhski party committee, and Svetlana Melikhova, a young volunteer translator, met me at the airport and we were off for what proved to be some of the most interesting days of my Russian trip.

Anatoly had assembled a group of Zyuganov activists from the Volzhski district to meet with me at his office. These were the ground troops - the kind of people who put the campaign together at the grassroots. Let's meet a few of them:

Natalie Believa is a member of the Volzhski party committee. She worked for 23 years in a local chemical plant. In April she was forced to retire at age 43. Why? Because, as she explained, Yeltsin has been devastating for the chemical industry. Yeltsin's policies allow the industry to decay while he opens the doors wide for foreign imports. She says it's not just a question of neglect, but a deliberate, aggressive policy. Yeltsin has created a situation where, by some estimates, as much as 70 percent of the food in Russia is imported from abroad. Thousands and thousands of acres of farm land, once cultivated by thriving collective and state farms, are no longer worked, thus killing the market for fertilizers and insecticides produced in chemical plants.

Natalie told me how the local Communist party organization had to operate in order to explain the situation to shop workers in the plants. "It was very difficult," she said. "The local papers, the TV and the radio were all against us. Yeltsin's campaigners were on the government payroll. We had to get Communists and others to take vacations and other time off to campaign."

What made things even tougher for the Zyuganov workers is anti-communist laws that prohibit in-plant political organizations. These laws are one of the worst holdovers from Gorbachev's "perestroika" days. Several people told me that it will be a priority of the Communists to repeal these laws.

Natalie, like every other Zyuganov activist I met on the trip was full of confidence and optimism for the future. She told me that Communist party membership had grown during the elections. "I have been a Party activist for the five years since we founded the Communist Party of the Russian Federation," she said. "It's been hard work building up after perestroika tore things down. We now have 25 Party organizations operating in the 25 districts of the Volzhski region. We won the region for Zyuganov."

Gennady Golev is a skilled machinist, proud of his plant and fellow workers. While in Volzhski I had several conversations with Gennady. During one of them he pointed out several high rise apartment buildings built with financing provided by his shop.

"Volzhski is a big industrial center," Gennady said. "We" - and we emphasized the 'we' - "have one of the biggest pipemaking shops in Europe. We have a large abrasives plant and we have 11 chemical plants. And we have a large ball bearing plant. All of these have been hurt by the Gorbachev and Yeltsin years. My plant is now down to just a handful of workers," he said.

"We also have three big colleges and a bunch of technical schools, as well as practical schools for the workers to increase their skills," Gennady said. "Not to mention the hydroelectric power station and dam which employs many. This is a big town for workers. It is only 33 years old. Our birthday is July 21."

I asked Gennady how Yeltsin could get any votes at all out of such a working class town, so hard hit by Yeltsin's turning the clock back to capitalism. (While Zyuganov won in the overall district, Yeltsin got 76 more votes than Zyuganov in the city itself. Volzhski has a population of about 30,000.)

"There are eight villages in the district and Zyuganov won them and the countryside overwhelmingly," Gennady said. "One thing in the city and in the big plants is fear. The directors are all Yeltsin men. They tell the workers that if Zyuganov wins, the plants will shut down completely and they will lose their jobs forever."

Gennady is sure the Party will win big in the local elections in October. He points out that the Party's vote total has gone up in each election and fully expects the trend to continue. He feels that winning in the local elections will greatly increase the Party's influence; will strengthen it at the grassroots. He says that too many of Yeltsin's people are still in appointed positions at the local level and that getting rid of that apparatus is necessary for having fair national elections.

Victor Verelenikov is a small businessman - and an ardent Communist - who builds houses and small shops. For the past three years he has worked hard trying to make his business grow. Victor campaigned hard for Zyuganov among other small business people. He says that Yeltsin's public image is that he is for small business, but in truth, he is only for big business and foreign capital.

"The politics of the state towards small business is very hard indeed," Victor said, adding that 20 of them die every month in Volzhski.

Victor said, "They lie about Zyuganov. We don't want to return to the past. Small business would be much better off under a Communist government. Under Yeltsin the big foreign and domestic corporations pay little or no taxes, while we must pay 14 percent There can't be real democracy with big business' concentrations of power and wealth."

Tatiania Gatilova is a journalist with Volzhski's oldest newspaper. It is not a Communist paper and Tatiania said her editor is afraid to print the truth. "He is afraid to print some of my articles," she said laughingly. "He says they'll shut the paper down. We were allowed to print the truth during Soviet times."

Tatiania is "very happy" with what she calls the new Communist Party. "At first Communists were separated and at a loss for what to do," she said. "Now they are united and on the move. They are learning how to be a Communist party in opposition under capitalism. Yeltsin's campaign dealt with the worst of the past, but in Zyuganov's we dealt with the best. We showed them what socialism had accomplished."

Later in the trip Anatoly Shiryaev, my host, took me to a small village about 70 kilometers from Volzhski. There I saw a modern dairy farm standing abandoned - and this despite having the most modern equipment needed to process and package milk, yogurt, cheese and butter. Anatoly explained that it had been one of the biggest concerns in the area, supplying many cities with dairy goods. Its cheese was so good that it was exported. But the four collective farms that supplied it with the basic dairy product are now nearly destroyed.

While there I spent an afternoon with five retired farm women who are friends of Anatoly's family. (Anatoly is from this village and his wife and 6-year-old twin daughters are on the family plot for several weeks to take care of the garden which they depend on for food.)

In talking to them, I could feel the real anger that is simmering in the countryside. All are furious at Yeltsin and Gorbachev for what has happened. One told me that she has not been able to buy any new clothes since the time of perestroika. In Soviet times the state and collective farms helped take care of old folks.They felt useful and could help out on the farms in little ways.

I also learned about how a few farmers are getting rich and gobbling up the land for themselves. "They produce specialty crops for the rich in the cities and use chemicals that we would never have used on the land," I was told.

Although all of them voted for Zyuganov and are determined to return socialism to the countryside, they are also afraid. When I asked their names and if I could take pictures they declined. As in several other instances I encountered a touch of general distrust of Americans.

The Russian people have watched as U.S. corporations ruin whole industries and cart off natural resources and they are well aware of the lies and distortions in the US media. Though Anatoly pleaded with them that I was a Communist journalist, he got nowhere. "It was never like this under Soviet power," he said. "We always knew the difference between U.S. imperialism and the working people of America."

There is much more that could be said about my trip to Volgograd: the woman veteran of the Great Patriotic War and hero of Socialist Labor helped organize women to go to the battle zones of Chechnya and bring their sons home, in public defiance of the military authorities. The Cossack leader who recruited me to his group, gave me a Cossack horse whip, and ordered me to tell the people of the U.S. the truth about Zyuganov and the Communists. "Life is worse now," he said. "Cossacks aren't mostly Communists, but we are patriots. Cossacks will be a part of the Left Patriotic Bloc that will save our country."

I was shown the famous Stalingrad tractor works where the Soviet people fought German fascists hand- to-hand and room-to-room in defense of the plant. I climbed the beautiful and solemn Mother Russia monument hill in Volgograd, deeply moved by the names of those hundreds of thousands of Stalingraders who were killed stopping the fascists in Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-43.

I made many good friends and learned a lot about how the grassroots of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is vibrant and growing. We spoke a common language of struggle against destructive anti-people capitalism and imperialism. I boarded the Aeroflot back to Moscow with a much better understanding of where the confidence and optimism of Zyuganov and the CPRF's leadership comes from. No wonder they're so full of energy and fight.