Society Without a Present

Abstract

My first taste of working-class life in the West came in the Montreal flat of Boris Sklyarsky, a sewing-machine mechanic who had emigrated from Leningrad. He invited me to visit him because I had only just arrived from Moscow, to talk about the old days in Russia and explain a few things about this world so new and unfamiliar for a Soviet emigre.

Recently, the Soviet Union saw the publication of a work by one Yury Zhukov, a well-known journalist, party member and student of the international scene, about the life of the working class in the West. The author, who had never lived in the West, called his book Society Without a Future and based it entirely on quotations from newspaper articles. This chapter on the working class in the Soviet Union is based on conclusions reached from the study of experienced facts, which bear irrefutable witness to the claim that Soviet society, in the form in which it has been existing for more than sixty–three years, is a society without a present.