May Day greetings to the Jewish workers of America from the Turkestan desert were conveyed today through the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Bill Shatov, once a noted Jewish labor leader in the United States, and now the hero of the day throughout the Soviet Union as the builder of the Turksib Railway, the longest in the world, which was opened yesterday.
Shatov sat down with your correspondent at Ainabulak, which is in the Kazakstan hills near Almaata where Leon Trotsky was once exiled, and gladly chatted about his experiences as a leader of the Anarchist movement in America which he left in 1917 at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. “Hundreds of East Side New Yorkers, and plenty of Jewish workers in Chicago, probably still remember me, just as I remember them here in distant Asia,” Shatov said. “I still get letters from American friends with whom we built strong labor unions, especially in the needle trade, painting and printing trades.
“I think of New York’s East Side and I am reminded of my starvation days when I was not what you see me now but worked quite hard with pick and shovel doing all kinds of unskilled hard labor. Today, on the day of my greatest holiday, I wish you would tell my American Jewish friends that I haven’t forgotten those days when we worked together for the labor cause.” Shatov was greeted by Joseph Stalin and had the Order of the Red Banner, the highest distinction in Soviet Russia, bestowed on him.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
