VADIM BELOTSERKOVSKY
49
whose comrades and friends are of various nationalities, and who is
long accustomed to all this, will suddenly begin
to
beat his breast and
shout, "We are Russians! Russia for the Russians!" and the like.
There appear to be no serious problems of nationality, then, in the
present factory milieu. The people themselves think very little about it;
it does not concern them, and they have little information. It is
somewhere in the background. Even Jews, both workers and engineers,
seldom complain of anti-Semitism "from the side" or "from below."
As Mandelstam observes, it always comes from above. "I never hid the
fact that I am Jewish," she writes, "and I must say that among the
ordinary people I have yet to encounter any anti -Semitism. In working–
class families and among collective farmers, I was always treated as one
of them."
But whereas the "factory nation" of engineers and workers is an
outright babel, the highest authorities, the petty tyrants and exploiters,
are purebred Russians almost to a man. They are not related to German
emperors, are not Russified emigres from Europe, do not serve foreign
capital, and do not even speak French among themselves-they are past
masters (according to an anecdote) of the "two basic Russian lan–
guages: bureaucratese and obscenity!"
The myth that Russians live poorer than everyone else in the
USSR has little currency in the factory milieu, for the standard of
living of workers in the RSFSR is higher on the whole than in the
republics, especially if one takes into account housing, working
conditions, vacations, availability of goods, opportunities for learning,
medicine, and the degree of arbitrariness among the authorities. And
since people in industry often go on official trips and also talk to newly
arrived workers, they are well informed on conditions in other places.
It is well known around the country that workers generally migrate
from the national periphery
to
major industrial centers of the RSFSR
and not vice versa. This fact is eloquent testimony to the location of
better conditions for living and working.
Of course the workers know that the rural population is poorer in
Russia than in many other republics, but they know that both the soil
and climate of Russia are less favorable for agriculture, as a rule. In
other areas where conditions are bad, the villages drag out an even
more beggarly existence.
The so-called problem of the revival of Russian culture- and the
real problem of the emancipation of culture from totalitarian oppres–
sion, which can be accomplished only under democratic conditions-
