He's A Commie!

I spent yesterday in Brighton Beach covering the endorsement of Alex Brook-Krasny by Cole Ettman, a former rival for the Democratic nomination for the 46th State Assembly seat which Krasny is now contesting with Ari Kagan in a one on one contest between the two Russian-American candidates that will take place next Tuesday, September 12. Then I ambled around Brighton Beach talking to residents to get a better sense of the mood in the community.

During the month I was away, the big news in the campaign were two debates between the candidates held respectively on RTVI and RTN. Viewers of the RTVI affair voted 60-40 that Kagan ‘won’ the debate. In the second debate, Krasny, who had been strongly criticized by Kagan and surrogates for months for past efforts to strengthen ties between the Russian community here and the Russian government, made an issue of the fact that as a young man Kagan attended an elite military and political institute in Lvov and joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Ari calls the attacks a below the belt smear campaign, contending that he had no alternative if he was going to make a career as a journalist, and that by 1990 he was writing articles exposing abusive practices in the army and that he resigned from the party in 1991 to protest Soviet army actions in the Baltics.

During the second debate, moderator Mark Golub chastised Krasny, comparing his attacks on Kagan to Mc Carthyism and in the process educating his listeners as to what had taken place in that regard in America in the 1950’s. But when I spoke to Krasny in Coney Island yesterday, he was unrepentant for having launched the attack. When I asked him whether Kagan was not simply one of millions who had found it politic to join the party and whether, when attacking Kagan, he was not therefore attacking many others in the 46th District, Krasny replied, “There is a difference between joining the Party in the 1960’s or 1970’s and joining the Party in 1989 like Kagan did. Clearly, he joined in order to build a career in the Soviet Army. It shows he is an opportunist.…Besides, not everyone joined the Party.” As for Golub’s rebuke, he said, “I would have expected Mark Golub would know the difference between membership in the (tiny and ineffectual) American Communist Party and the Soviet Communist Party, which killed 30 million Soviet citizens and sent an additional 20 million to concentration camps.” (check out Kagan’s campaign web site here to see that he neglects to mention either the military school or his CPSU membership in his brief bio) http://www.arikagan.com/biography.htm

Brook-Krasny’s attack on Kagan’s past has obviously been a great way to neutralize the issue of his own much more recent support for efforts to strengthen ties with the dictatorial Putin regime—efforts that have been more explicitly supported by many of his closest supporters—but it clearly has offended many voters in the Russian-Jewish community. As I walked around Brighton yesterday, it was the issue everyone was talking about, and most people I spoke to were Kagan supporters who said the charge had only strengthened their support for the man they called “The People’s Choice”. “We were all in Komsmol or in the Party. That was the system, the way to survive,” said one woman in her early 70’s originally from Kiev. “Krasny is insulting all of us when he goes after Kagan in that way.” The woman was one of many people I spoke to as I strolled the neighborhood who extolled Kagan, saying he is much closer to the people; that he is constantly seen on Brighton Beach Ave or on the Boardwalk campaigning whereas Krasny is a more distant presence; that as a journalist and grass roots activist, Kagan showed a great interest in solving the problems of the narod (simple people), including the high cost of housing and citizenship problems.

But one retired couple from St. Petersburg said the revelations concerning Kagan’s past had convinced them to vote for Krasny. “Look, everyone knows a Jew normally could not have gained admittance to such an institute,” the woman said. “Our own kids were prevented from attending medical institute because of their Jewishness. If Kagan was able to attend that school and thrive there, it must have been because he had KGB ties. I don’t want someone with such a past representing us.”

My tour of the neighborhood confirmed for me a supposition that Kagan, buoyed by strong support from the all important elderly bloc which dislikes the idea of being dictated to by Krasny’s “establishment” support; the Democratic machine, politicians like Nadler and Recchia and by the so-called “Russian leadership” (read multi-millionaries like Frenkel, Sapir and Shiglich), may be within striking distance of securing a majority of the Russian vote. That would be a considerable coup for Kagan, running against the whole establishment, and that sense of momentum for Kagan may have been what impelled Krasny to launch his ‘Communist attack.’ Still, my anecdotal sense is that if Kagan captures the Russian vote it will be by a relatively thin margin—60-40 would be the outside limit—whereas Krasny is likely to capture the non-Russian vote (American Jews, blacks, Pakistanis, Italian-Americans and others) by a much wider margin. Since the Russian vote is potentially no more than half the district and probably considerably less, Krasny still has to be the favorite going into the final days of the campaign.

The Democratic machine’s support will be critical in tying up the non-Russian vote for Krasny, though the question remains whether the machine can ensure a reasonable turnout of non-Russian voters, given a probable tendency by some voters—especially elderly American-Jews who resent the Russians for having taken over their community--to be turned off by an election between two Russians and therefore not to vote.

So my guesstimate of the final vote will be something like 55-45 for Brook-Krasny, but if so that would be quite an impressive showing for Kagan, who nearly everyone assumed was out of his mind for staying in the race after Nadler, Markowitz, Recchia etc endorsed Krasny, and might well leave him as a viable candidate for the next political opening in the area. Could Krasny and Kagan make peace and work together after this massive bloodletting? Sure they could. Krasny eventually made peace with the likes of Adele Cohen and Domenic Recchia who vanquished him electorally, in Cohen’s case by less than kosher means, so certainly such an outcome is possible. In my next, posting I’ll ruminate a bit on the charges and counter-charges concerning Krasny’s alleged ties to the Putin regime and Kagan’s complicated Soviet past, and elucidate some of my own thoughts on what it all means.