Listen to why Yuri Sekisov isn`t a communist anymore.
Growing up in the 1930s in this gritty industrial city of 1.2 million in the Ural Mountains, Sekisov often listened to stories from his father about his days fighting in the Russian civil war, thrilling tales of a titanic struggle over the future of the nation between the Red Guard and the White Guard.
He heard how at tremendous cost, men like his father-the Reds-overcame those trying to reverse Lenin`s revolution-the Whites-and how they paved the way for communism in the future workers` paradise.
Those tales and others about his uncle, an early Bolshevik killed by the czar`s army before the revolution, set the course for the next 60 years of Sekisov`s life.
As a boy, his faith in the inevitability of communism grew as he did, year by year, through school days and his time in the Young Pioneer program, a kind of Soviet Boy Scout movement featuring heavy doses of political indoctrination.
By the time he was 11, his belief in communism was strong enough to survive an event that could have shattered the faith of one who had not been masterfully converted.
One night in 1940, when he and his parents were at home, strangers knocked on the door and took his father away. Like millions of other innocent people during Josef Stalin`s purges, a man who had battled for decades to advance the cause of communism was now suspected of being an enemy of the people. No explanations, no goodbyes, just off into the night.
”That was the end of him,” Sekisov said in an interview recently. ”We never saw him again.”
But even his father`s disappearance at the hands of those he had fought to bring to power was not enough to shake Sekisov`s conviction. He went on to become a leader in Komsomol, the party organization for young adults. Nor was it enough to dissuade him from becoming a full party member at age 23.
Sekisov married, had two children and went to work for the large Uralmash heavy-machinery plant here in Sverdlovsk, a government enterprise that produces equipment ranging from railroad cars to military tanks and rocket parts.
He labored there for nearly four decades, forging metal and pounding and lathing it into machinery; as time passed, his wife and later his son and daughter joined him as employees.
Sekisov was an active communist, working as a party organizer and at times as a party representative within the factory. With the production of each new rail car and each turbine casing, Sekisov said, he felt he was building that communist future his father and uncle had fought to make possible.
New ideas
Stalin went and Nikita Khrushchev came. Khrushchev went and Leonid Brezhnev came. At some times the Cold War was a little less chilly than at others; at all times the railroad cars and the turbines to build communism rolled out of Uralmash along with the tanks and the rockets to defend it.
Brezhnev`s 18 years as Soviet leader were followed by the short tenures of two older and more infirm men-Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko-and then, in 1985, by the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev.
When Gorbachev unveiled the first of his planned reforms, Sekisov was almost 56, a little more than four years from retirement. Although skeptical at first about what Gorbachev was saying, Sekisov listened and read, and he discussed the new ideas with his fellow communists.
By 1987, Soviet citizens and the rest of the world were starting to understand the depth of reform Gorbachev had in mind, and that spring, Sekisov recalled, he decided the time had come to take a chance.
After long debates with his fellow workers, Sekisov and some of his colleagues, deciding they would act on one of Gorbachev`s ideas, proposed a deal to the management of Uralmash.
What they planned-as Gorbachev had suggested-was that they, as employees of the factory, would rent the metal-working shop during the times when it was idle. There, at hours when they previously were at home with their families, they intended to take some of the factory`s scrap metal and other waste material and make things, maybe even things that could be exported for much needed hard currency.
”Really, we just wanted to do this ourselves,” Sekisov said, recalling that their plans extended to using their profits to improve the kindergartens, schools and playgrounds the factory already provided.
”We even talked about organizing cheap holidays for workers,” he added. The trouble begins
For a time, all went well, with the factory`s top management eager to find ways to adapt to Gorbachev`s new idea that the nation`s plants had to make a profit.
To make sure that things worked efficiently with their new venture, Sekisov and his fellow workers drew up a plan that eliminated almost all the bureaucracy that usually dominated their work at Uralmash. Those managers that were needed were to be elected by the small group of workers who joined Sekisov in his experiment in economic independence.
All of the ideas of Sekisov and his colleagues were in step with what Gorbachev was saying good communists should be doing. Admitting that the party and its bureaucracy were responsible for most of the country`s economic woes, Gorbachev urged people to take the initiative in solving their problems and improving their lives.
And in one small metal-working shop at the giant Uralmash factory there was a band of men ready to heed Gorbachev`s call. What could be more patriotic, they asked themselves, than to follow Gorbachev`s lead?
It was when word of their plans started to spread through the factory`s administrative and party bureaucracy that the trouble began.
In every major Soviet industrial enterprise there are two layers of bureaucracy, that of management and that of the party. These layers sometimes overlap, sometimes complement one another and sometimes compete with one another. The party maintains formal offices in most large factories, has a full-time staff that oversees what management and labor do, and intervenes to make sure the party`s ideas and plans prevail.
For seven decades this power grew to the point where the preservation of that power and the privileges that came with it became, in the minds of most bureaucrats, paramount.
This was something Sekisov and millions of others were well aware of; it was one of the reasons they were skeptical when Gorbachev told them to throw off the old ways.
”Their privileges,” Sekisov insisted, ”are the most important thing.” A telegram to Gorbachev
In a place like the Uralmash factory, the privileges at stake were formidable: special shops, special housing, special hospitals, all things that were denied average workers, even a lifelong communist like Sekisov.
Despite verbal encouragement from the highest level of the Uralmash management, Sekisov and his band of would-be entrepreneurs found out that three years of Gorbachev`s reforms had done nothing to change the fundamental control the party and the state bureaucracy maintained over the real levers of power.
”Suddenly the party and the management ruled out our project,” Sekisov said. ”They offered no explanations. They just said it was impossible.”
Sekisov and the others decided that if the message of perestroika, Gorbachev`s plan to restructure Soviet society and the economy, had not reached the offices of the party leaders and the mid-level bureaucrats at Uralmash, somebody should know about it.
This, they decided, was where the other pillar of Gorbachev`s reform program needed to be tested. The other pillar was known as glasnost, or openness.
Sekisov dispatched a telegram to Gorbachev himself, telling the Soviet leader of the plight of the entrepreneurs at Uralmash and asking for his help. While awaiting a response, they wrote letters to local and national newspapers and tried to get the local labor papers to focus on their problem.
”Not a single word was written,” Sekisov recalled with resignation.
”Not a single letter of ours was published.”
And they waited in vain for a response from Gorbachev, never receiving any reply from the Kremlin.
”That was how our little experiment with the market economy ended,”
Sekisov said.
While that may have been the end of the Uralmash experiment, it was not the end of the story, for now Sekisov, like his father more than 45 years earlier, was seen as a troublemaker. He was publicly denounced by his fellow communists at local party meetings.
”They accused me of being a member of the Democratic Union,” he said, referring to a radical reformist group that has frequently clashed with the party. ”They even accused me of passing secret documents to the newspapers.” Sekisov said he saw himself being slandered by the very institution that had nurtured him.
”I know what they can do,” he said. ”We have big experts on how to do this.”
On April 22, 1988, the birthday of Vladimir Ilich Lenin and about a year after he started his Gorbachev-inspired experiment, Sekisov handed in his party card, bitterly closing the door on 36 years of his life and on the heritage of his father and uncle.
Less than a year later, Sekisov retired from Uralmash, his pension after nearly 40 years of work fixed at 137 rubles a month. In today`s Soviet Union, a pound of meat can cost up to 50 rubles, a pair of shoes 100 rubles, and prices are rising quickly.
System of privileges
Sekisov`s daughter still lives with him and his wife in their two-room apartment because, still single, she has no chance of getting a place of her own.
Sekisov`s son, along with his wife and child, live in a single room of an apartment they share with three other families. While he waits for a Uralmash- supplied apartment to become available, he and his family share a toilet, bath tub and kitchen with the others and they sleep, eat and relax in one room.
Sekisov`s son has been waiting 10 years for a factory apartment.
The bureaucrats ”saw their power and their privileges being lost,”
Sekisov said. ”You foreigners still don`t understand the strength of this system of privileges.
”They were also terrified by an internal protest because they knew that we knew. We saw the dishonesty, the corruption, the illegalities.
”I`ve read Marx and Lenin. I know that our (Soviet) communism has nothing to do with Marx`s ideas. Our general secretary (Gorbachev) is afraid of real Marxism-Leninism.
”There is more communism in Sweden than there is here. Workers in the United States are treated far better than they are in this country.”
`Someone has to stay`
These day`s Sekisov spends much of his time tending a small garden plot, growing with his own hands most of the vegetables and fruit he and his family eat. He takes groups of school children on tours of local historic sites and to exhibitions like a recent one on how to protect the environment.
”I like to talk to the children about the future,” he said as the warm spring evening turned chilly and he closed the collar of his overcoat.
”Everyone is leaving the country. Someone has to stay.”
So now, at age 62, what does pensioner Yuri Sekisov think about the inevitable demise of capitalism and the evolution of the world`s societies into communist states?
It is an emotional subject for him.
”I still believe in the science of communism, in its social ideals,” he said, his eyes filling with tears.
”But I have to accept that it will never be.”
