An Unexpected Audience

Yet again, I find it is about a week since I wrote my blog. Looking at the statistics regarding the countries where my blog is being read, I note that Russia has scored highly this month.

This makes me unashamedly wish to speak to those that live in that country, one that I have never visited, though one that has played a constant presence in my life. Perhaps never as a major player, but there in the background nevertheless.

The first time Russia came in to my experience was when I was at university, at University College London. I was reading to a blind Iranian student, simply as a volunteer, and the kind of blindness that she suffered might have been improved by an operation that could have taken place in what was then of course the Soviet Union.

Iran and Russia clearly had closer ties at that time, and I remember making a visit to the Russian Embassy in London, to assist my friend attend a meeting with the Science Attache.

It seems strange to think of it now, but it felt like an extraordinary journey into another world. The thing I have an abiding memory of is the telephones within the embassy, which were smaller than a typical British telephone, and much rounder in shape or design.

This would have been in about 1980, at the height of the Cold War, and may well have been sufficient for me to have been noticed by our own security services as someone with sympathies towards the East.

In my late 20s, I visited Czechoslovakia, in about 1986. The organization for which I worked hosted an East-West workcamp through International Voluntary Service, in which young people from across the Soviet Bloc attended.

Apparently, this was the first time that Russian citizens had been granted permission to attend an IVS workcamp in the United Kingdom, and as well as a group of five members of a Ukrainian Construction Brigade, we had attendees from Poland, Yugoslavia as it was then, East Germany and from Czechoslovakia.

The project I worked for occupied a substantial house and grounds on the edge of Leeds in Yorkshire, part of which included a walled garden extending to about one acre in size.

The workcamp was a means by which we could develop this overgrown garden which we wished to turn into an organic herb garden.

The house could accommodate 40 people for residential weekends and conferences, mainly in shared rooms. We operated as a co-operative, and in fact the origins of the house as a centre for the promotion of co-operative working linked what we were doing directly to the concepts behind communism. But certainly with a peculiarly English slant.

The house had been built in the early 19th century, and was built from wealth generated through the manufacture of fine carriage cloth. In fact, works from the Company that being exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851.

The current owner was a direct descendant of those capitalist entrepreneurs, but he was an architect by profession, and certainly not a capitalist in the traditional sense. He was wealthy, no doubt, but he had chosen to make his capital available to the development of employee owned businesses structured as cooperatives.

The original vision for the house that we had use of literally for the payment of a peppercorn each year was that it should be used as a College for the teaching of the skills needed to run such ventures.

The English Parliament had passed in 1976 an Act Of Parliament that gave three years of funding to an organisation called the Industrial Common Ownership Movement, which was concerned with the promotion and development of legal constitutions that could be used as the legal basis for such business ventures.

In effect, this was giving practical meaning to clause 4 of the Labour Party manifesto, which was concerned with the common ownership of the means of production.

This was of course famously removed from the Labour Party manifesto by Tony Blair as part of his modernization of the Labour Party. Some would say his dismantling of it.

So in effect we ran a small but successful co-operative business from premises that had been built from the product of capitalist wealth. The house itself was in immediate grounds of about 15 acres, surrounded by 150 acres of farmland. This was rented permanently to a local farmer.

Thus I lived for almost 10 years as if part of the landed gentry, just on the edge of one of the great industrial towns of England, but to all intents and purposes living in a rural location.

There were about seven of us in our co-operative, not all of whom lived on site. We were all paid the same minimal weekly salary, and in effect shared in the profits of our labour. which were not substantial.

Our customers were exclusively not for profit organisations, most of whom were concerned with positive social issues. In other words, the kind of conferences that we hosted in this fine location were concerned with people rather than making money.

The owner of the property, Tom Lupton, was closely connected through his friends to a peculiarly English brand of Christian Socialism, and in some respects, this made an East-West work camp of particular poignancy to us.

When I travelled to Czechoslovakia, it was to attend a workcamp hosted on a co-operative farm and led by the two Czech doctors that had attended our workcamp. Thus, two years before the major upheavals in that country, I had the opportunity to see for myself how communism had shaped that country.

It was an interesting experience.

To facilitate my journey to Czechoslovakia, I had tried to learn Russian, attending an evening class for six months or so before I travelled.

What I failed to realise was that although in theory Russian was spoken as the second language in Czechoslovakia, it was the language imposed by the oppressor.

So that when I tried to use my limited Russian, I was virtually ignored, and it was not helpful to me at all.

Perhaps I was fortunate in that I became friendly with an English teacher at the workcamp, so in fact for my three weeks in Czechoslovakia, two weeks working on the farm, and a week travelling in the country, I had the services of my own interpreter.

In fact I stayed at the home of my interpreter and her husband, and became good friends with them. I was given a privileged insight into the life they lead, and the impact of communism on them.

This was particularly fascinating because my interpreter was an English teacher in a Czechoslovakian School, but she was also a committed Christian, a fact that she had to keep private as it would have been inconceivable for a teacher in a Czech school to have been a Christian.

In the course of my three-week stay in Czechoslovakia, my interpreter was careful to introduce me to a wide range of people, from Communist officials to small local farmers. my most abiding memory is of the way in which the two young men that were spray-painting the enormous grain silo on the farm to which the workcamp was attached, work which in Czechoslovakia at the time would have been highly paid because it was dangerous manual labour, and they used their experience of mountain climbing and abseiling to move up and down the outside of the anonymous grain silo.

They were undertaking this work so that they could fund a project they were working on, and which they proudly showed me.

They were building a concrete hulled ocean going yacht, the plans for which they had obtained from Australia, and which was at the stage of being fitted out. The most expensive stage.

Czechoslovakia of course is a landlocked country, but they had the confidence that if they completed this project, the authorities could not fail to give them permission to sail it, which would mean permission to leave Czechoslovakia.

Given the events of 1989, I am sure that they managed to achieve their dream.

I was not impressed with the reality of communism in Czechoslovakia.

It placed into high relief the experiment that I had been engaged in for the best part of 10 years of my life. Co-operative development in Britain was simply my youthful zeal for political equality, but one in which few people could have experienced it within a commonest state.

Strangely, my abiding memory of the East-West workcamp was a day trip that we made to Blackpool, which I suppose I had the privilege of organizing. I will always remember how everyone from the workcamp experienced the extraordinary delights of Blackpool, a city in Britain that is perhaps like no other, and that compared to any Communist regime, must have seemed so unlike daily life. As it did to me, even though I was a resident of England.

Thus my abiding fascination with Russia, experienced only at one remove through my contact with a Ukrainian construction brigade. Perhaps I have been fortunate to have lived how I have lived, and to have met the people I have met.

Strangely, it is those experiences of people directly that have done most to make me feel as if I have understood something of the psyche of the eastern European. Films like Dr Zhivago, and the novels of Chekhov or Tolstoy have been my only other opportunity. But I have seen so much more than so many of my generation.