Today is May Day, which you may associate with vague memories of dancing around a maypole, singing “Ring around the Rosie,” and perhaps little baskets of flowers.
That’s how it was celebrated in the America in which I grew up, anyway. But in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, it was a big deal, their version of Labor Day with a sort of militaristic twist. Everybody got the day off from work or school, and they had those gigantic parades in Red Square, which were supposed to strike fear into our hearts.
Personally, I always secretly felt Communism couldn’t be all that bad if you got another day off from school, especially when the weather was just getting nice. Well, the scary old Soviet Union is just a memory now, and if you are much under age forty, not even that.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last idealist that system ever produced, tried to democratize and fix that basically evil regime in the last 1980s. Instead, it blew up and died, almost without loss of life, like a bankrupt hardware store, something nobody saw coming.
Today, we have Russia instead, an aggressive authoritarian kleptocracy which doesn’t even pretend to inspire a belief in a better future for mankind. We are less afraid of them, though maybe we should be more so. But forget that for now, and consider this:
I have become reluctantly convinced that one of the worst things that could have happened to this country was the Soviet Union’s downfall. As the USSR was collapsing back in the fall of 1991, I had a conversation with the late Dick Wright, a savvy professor and auto writer who spoke Russian and had worked in military intelligence years before.
“This is going to be bad for American workers,” he told me. I was puzzled, especially as Dick was no Communist sympathizer. “How so?” I asked.
“Well, of course it was a failure and a fraud as a workers’ state,” he said. “But as long as it existed and pretended to be, it was some restraint on how the capitalists treated their workers and their unions. They didn’t want Communism to seem an attractive alternative.
“Now, they may feel they can get away with anything, and bring back the sweatshop.” I’ve never forgotten that conversation, or how right Dick Wright was. Dick’s been dead for many years now, and didn’t live to see Michigan become a right-to-work state, or the severe weakening of teachers’ unions in recent years, though I doubt he would have been surprised.
But there’s another way in which I think the Cold War was good for this country. There was indeed a lot of bad connected with it, including the Red Scare of the early 1950s, the huge buildup of our military-industrial complex, and Vietnam.
Yet it also inspired us and our government to try to be the best we could be, to beat the Soviets in the space race, and to make our economy vastly superior to theirs. The government made it possible for millions of middle and working class kids to attend college.
We had a feeling we were all in this together, and we won the Cold War, hands down. Today we no longer worry about nuclear war, though I’m not sure we can afford not to.
Unfortunately, we no longer feel we are all in this together. It would be nice if we could rally our nation around a peacetime goal, like prosperity and a decent career for everyone. But we don’t seem to know how to do that. So yes, I miss Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the desk and saying his system would bury ours. That’s how I got an education, after all.
