• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 907 0

on it, they could feel the “intensity” of his effort to “draw his listeners into understanding with him.” On the eighth day of their Soviet trip, and one day before they were to depart for Leningrad, where Genora wanted to visit the Hermitage, she again suffered heart failure. A physician, nurse, and medical technician rushed to her hotel room and administered emergency treatment. Then she was ordered to the main hospital in Moscow, a twenty-minute ride from the hotel. Genora explained their disillusionment: “We were prepared to see a clinic without modern Western equipment, but were totally unprepared for the ancient buildings and furnishings and the unclean facilities. A patient must bring his own gown, towel, washcloth, and toilet tissue! This was Moscow—what must the other hospitals of the USSR be like! No wonder that life expectancy is 10 years lower than ours.”40

Genora came home in a wheel chair, disappointed but not bitter—she felt “very fortunate to have been able to see and learn about this most intriguing country and its courageous people.” She was happy that a “new fresh wind” was blowing through the USSR “after 70 long years, and people are no longer afraid to talk to outsiders. . . . What an experience!—even if it was, sadly, cut short!”41 One reason Genora was so happy about the Russian trip derived from the partial rehabilitation of Leon Trotsky’s reputation in Soviet history. For sixty years Trotsky had been a “virtual curse” in Soviet orthodoxy. Prominent Soviet historian Dmitri Volkogonov wrote of Trotsky’s warning that Josef Stalin would be a dictator and shared “the long-held Western belief that Trotsky was murdered in Mexico by a Soviet agent acting on Kremlin orders.”42 Events in the USSR developed rapidly: “We feel quite sure that the floodgates of the real Soviet history will now be open. Who would have thought it would happen this fast? Gorbachev deserves our support for making this possible.”43 Many people in the Soviet Union, Genora claimed, were for the first time hearing about Trotsky. Surprised when told that she and Sol were Trotskyists, some of their guides wanted to know everything about him. Strange, Genora mused, for Russians to learn about one of their major historical figures from foreigners.

With her usual routines of life, Genora continued to write letters to all sorts of people. She told a friend that “building socialism is far more complicated than we thought possible. When we were young and energetic we thought it would all be accomplished in our lifetime.”44 To Victor Navasky, she claimed still to be a Socialist, “albeit an unaffiliated one for the past 32 years.”45 One reason she left the Socialist Party was its almost constant endorsements of the Democratic Party, becoming, as it were, “the tail of the Democratic Party kite.”46 She wrote to Navasky on a matter that greatly troubled her: union and corporate collaborations, or tuxedo unionism, as she frequently called it. There was a “headlong plunge” into the “swamp of company unionism.” She wanted Navasky and others to join her in preventing the “complete emasculation” of the American labor movement. Not the least of these efforts was for workers to “mount some resistance to the course of their present leadership.”47 Even foremen had been put on salary after the war and were required to wear ties and white shirts and given special parking privileges. These were additional reasons why the unions had been weakened because, among other things, stewards had now become “referral agents” and, consequently, had lost most of the power and influence they had exercised during World War II.48

She “sounded off” when Searchlight editor Larry Jones asked her for an article to commemorate the UAW victory in 1937. Titled “UAW Revolutions in California,” it attacked Bruce Lee, western regional director of the UAW. Probably for this reason, the UAW board of directors overrode editor Jones, censored the article, and did not allow its publication. Lee gave “high praise” to the “joint Japanese, General Motors, and UAW collaborations and heralded