Olga Konstantinova, Melbourne
1992 is the year that my family immigrated from Moscow to Melbourne, driven to the South-Eastern suburbs by the call of spotty groups of friends who had made the earlier journey.
Growing up, ‘easy’ was never the term I heard to describe what those first 10 to 15 years were like. In Moscow, my grandfather was a civil engineer, top of his class in university, and even now he still proudly shows me the medals he was awarded for his work on the stadiums in the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Yet, he seems to despise the Soviet Union. As a child, this was a fact I simply accepted and moved on with, Communism was bad. Yet fairly recently, I brought myself to read a little bit of political theory and it shook me to my core. From the ashes of my previous assumptions grew an intensely uncomfortable and confusing relationship with the Soviet Union.
This has led me to an examination of why post-soviet (In my case, Russian) households have such a strong hatred of the Soviet Union. I should start by acknowledging the first bias, immigrant households clearly left for a reason, so of course my experiences would be tainted by more individuals that disliked the soviet union than not. Although the part that confused me was that this dislike was never all-consuming, I spent a lot of time when I was younger sitting and eating with my grandmother, and through the broken Russian-English, I uncovered her admiration for key figures such as Alexadra Kollontai, and the equal opportunity that was so prevalent in the Soviet Union. I was even shocked to hear harsh criticisms of the west’s ‘self-centred’ culture. Yet, underpinning it all would be discussions of standard of living. My mother would always discuss the multiple families living in one room in their khrushchevka-style apartment building, the queues for food that stretched around block after block, and the poverty that was experienced by everyone around her before perestroika. My grandfather would often chime in, arguing how wonderful it was that the west provided such opportunity to advance your place in society, a capability to go beyond the ‘same-wage for everyone’ system.
So, it seems, Russia was culturally rich and literally poor, and the west seems to be culturally poor and literally rich. It is my belief that from this exploration of the past’s influence on post-soviet immigrant household ideals, that we can understand how to properly import communism ideas into the broader population. It seems from my observations, the west lacks an appreciation for the people, and thus our agit-prop would be most effective in targeting living-standards. It is more effective to argue that a commitment to Communism would bring about greater access to goods and services, because that is what the west has been hard-wired to want. It is only after that point, that we can start pulling upon traditional ideas of improving the living standard of the soul.
PARTISAN! 