A Lifelong Communist Surveys the Tatters of Her World

Rebecca Yakovlevna Gaysinskaya was a child of the revolution, born with the Communist regime in 1917 and raised on its ideals. Now she has lived to see its end. And it hurts.

After 52 years in the Communist Party and 55 years of laboring overtime for the sake of the bright future her leaders had promised, Gaysinskaya has seen the system that she worked for fall apart and the ideas she believed in lose credence.

“I lived in hope,” she says. “I always had hope, that’s how we were. No matter how bad things were, those tough years and the war, we always lived with hope that everything would turn out well. And now you see how everything has turned out. It’s painful and insulting.

“When we old people talk to each other now, we get indignant. . . . We don’t know whom to believe and even how to believe. You understand, we lost belief. That’s the most terrible thing. When you believe in something, that’s the essence of life. And when you stop believing. . . .”

Millions of party members of Gaysinskaya’s generation sincerely revered Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin and understood communism as noble self-sacrifice aimed at building a new nation and a new form of society. Now a wave of anti-communism is sweeping the country in the wake of last month’s failed coup. Party members are denounced as cynical apparatchiks or duped stooges.

“I feel like they’re spitting in my face,” Gaysinskaya says. “And for what?

“I have no idea,” she answers herself. “The people who say this are not worthy of the services and labor I contributed.

“I want to say,” she adds in the deep voice that still carries the ring of her authority as a factory director, City Council deputy and party official, “that the majority (of party members) are healthy people with healthy minds and wills--I mean the old generation especially--and inside we’re suffering in a way you can’t begin to know.”

Born on the very day that Czar Nicholas II was overthrown, Gaysinskaya grew up when the Bolshevik regime was still young, and its propaganda, fresh and powerful, penetrated every aspect of her life.

When she was 7, she recalls, “I was walking along the street and heard that Lenin had died, and I just fell down from shock. That’s how we were raised.”

She joined the Pioneers, a Communist children’s group, at age 10, and the Communist Youth League, or Komsomol, at 14.

“These were the years after 1917; the country was being built, and we were very civic-minded,” she says. “I still have my Komsomol card. Most of all, we had a feeling of responsibility, that we had to be first, that we couldn’t be second. At the factory, in studies and in society we were supposed to be the vanguard.”

Communism then, she said, meant “honesty, decency, responsibility--that’s how we were, do you understand?”

At 22, she joined the party. Though it was 1939, and it was clear that “all was not in order” under dictator Josef Stalin, she did not blame the party itself but a few of its leaders.

Gaysinskaya was evacuated from her hometown of Odessa to Siberia during World War II and moved twice with her officer husband and two children after that, to Chita and the Georgian port of Batumi, ending up in Moscow. In each city, she worked hard at her job and played an active role in local and party affairs.

Now, she said, although the Communist Party is effectively closed down and its property is being nationalized, she has no plans to throw away her party card.

“I’ve been in the party 52 years, and I haven’t given my party card up to anyone, and I don’t plan to,” she says. “It’s a life, after all, it’s no trifle.”

Still, for all her attachment to the past, the coup attempt was the final blow to Gaysinskaya’s faith in communism.

“I suffered terribly during those days of the putsch,” she says. “I suffered horribly. For me, it was a tragedy. It was frightening because--how could it be that the people you believed in, you pinned your hopes on. . . .” She drifted off with a heavy sigh.

“We trusted a party leadership that ruined everything and threw us to the wolves, too,” she says, holding her snowy head in her hands as she sits at the dining table in her suburban apartment.

Gaysinskaya is also disturbed by the anti-Communist fervor--particularly the occasional calls for revenge against party members--after the coup. She makes no apologies for her own activism.

“And that’s what they’re denouncing me for now and saying, ‘Hang them, shoot them, all in a row.’ For what? I contributed everything that I could, I contributed it to the future of our motherland.”

She watched churches demolished after the Bolshevik Revolution. She saw statues of Stalin destroyed in the 1950s. She regards what is happening now--for example, the Moscow government’s decision to evict the Lenin collection from the museum on Red Square--as an attempt to erase the history she lived.

“It happened,” Gaysinskaya says. “It happened! You can delete from morning to night and you won’t cross it out. Let future generations condemn it, let them curse it, but they should know history and the truth.”

She continues: “Sometimes I have such contradictions in my soul that I want to--I don’t know--to go away somewhere, to run away.”

Her daughter recently emigrated to Israel and wants her to follow. But Gaysinskaya has hesitated, held back in part by her party ties.

“I thought, ‘How can I go to the party organization and say I’m leaving and lay down my party card?’ I couldn’t. . . . The children said, ‘Mama, come on.’ But I’ll tell you again: I dedicated my life to this. How can I turn history back? You can’t turn it.”

A simple comparison of Western and Soviet standards of living is enough to force anyone to admit that the Soviet Union was led down the wrong road, Gaysinskaya admits.

“It seems the structure was wrong,” she acknowledges. “Something was wrong, there was a mistake--enormous errors, terrible errors. First of all, there were the years of repression, the losses, and people who might have created everything differently. And Lenin died early, of course, in 1924.”

If there is blame, she says, it lies with the leaders, not the rank and file. “What are the Communists guilty of? The Communists were ruled by authorities, by a leadership that didn’t have the right to use Communists for such goals. They didn’t know how to use them.”

Gaysinskaya is still paying for the system she helped build. She regrets that her children could not have had a richer life. As for herself, Moscow neighborhood officials are refusing to let her register in the two-room apartment she shares with her grandson and his wife.

Because she is not registered, she cannot go to the local clinic. Instead, she has to cross town for all kinds of errands, not easy for a 74-year-old woman who has already survived one heart attack.

“The system is guilty, of course,” she says. “The system. Or maybe it was not implemented right.”

Yet the Communist Party remains the measure by which she judges her life as a good mother to two children and a good friend and neighbor to countless others.

“My life, despite everything, did not pass without a trace,” she says. “I brought some good. The scale was not the Central Committee, but at least within the city and region where I lived.”