48
PARTISAN REVIEW
reason, Andrei Amalrik is greatly mistaken if he is addressing the
engineers and workers in
Will the Soviet Union Last Unti11984?
when
he writes so scathingly that the Russi an people associate freedom with
anarchy. For engineers and factory workers, anarchy is already firmly
associated with lack of freedom. The engineers and workers appear to
me to be the main mass support for the democratic development of
Russia as well as a number of other republics of the USSR where this
sector is sufficiently large. The facLOry " nation " is drawingcontempo–
rary Russia irrevocably imo industrial democratic Western civilization,
although this does not of course mean complete convergence in their
future development.
The factory seCLOr today is the most healthy morally, having
suffered least from totalitarianism. I quote here the opinion of Na–
dezhda Mandelstam, who knew the factory milieu well, and herself
worked in factories as a weaver after her husband's arrest. With what
warmth she recalls the people who surrounded her there! Although the
"masses" always appear whenever an iron social order is established,
she observes that the factory people, "in their everyday working
lives, .. . remain true to their individual selves ... they live their own
completely human lives, not becoming mechan ized or turning into
'masses.' '' What sets this life apart is that there is no place in it for keen
competition, and solidarity is essemial. Since factory people are tightly
built into the social structure because of their situation, they are
usually disinclined to individualism and groundless utopianism. This
limitation may narrow the horizons of thought, but it cuts down on
extremism for the sake of standing out from the crowd.
The attitude LOwards nationalism in the factory milieu is deter–
mined both by the characteristics described above and by the fact that
the factory " nation" is of many ethni c origins.
In
factory collectives
one will meet people of the most diverse nationa liti es-the result of
forced industrialization and a very difficult war, the compu lsory and
semivoluntary migration of the population in a multinational empire.
These people do not remain isolated. They intermingle, they
intermarry-in a word, they commit "disorderl y hybridization." Ac–
cording to the data available to me, about ha lf the families in major
industrial centers of the RSFSR (Russi an Soviet Federal Social ist
Republic) are already binational. And this process is progressing.
Hence the outcry of the nationalists : " Put an end to disorderly
hybridization! " Indeed, they can hardl y hope tha t a man who is either
half-Russian himself or has a mixed family or halfbreed chi ldren ,
