Vladimir Zernin (1934-2024)

Our comrade Dimir died on July 27, shortly before his 90th birthday. A member of the Spartacist League/U.S. for over 50 years, he dedicated his life to the emancipation of the working class. He was one of our most educated and cultured party cadre. Many of us learned from him, benefitting from his language and translation skills and his broad knowledge of history, literature, music and many other subjects. Dimir was on the editorial board of the German-language edition of Spartacist early on until almost the end of his life.

Dimir’s father, whom Dimir described as an “imperial Russian aristocrat,” fled after the Russian Revolution and settled in the U.S., where he became a ship’s captain. His mother was mostly responsible for raising their brilliant and precocious child, at times homeschooling Dimir while his father was away at sea. Dimir graduated high school early and went on to study at Yale University and in Germany. He got his PhD in comparative literature and taught German at Princeton, Rutgers and Florida State University (FSU).

At FSU, he fell in love with his student Tweet Carter (1943-2012), who later became his wife. Tweet was in a leftist SDS branch in Tallahassee, Florida, and she recruited him to the SL. As a comrade of our New York branch remarked: “You could say their relationship was a unity of opposites! Comrade Tweet came to revolutionary politics through experience, and Dimir through books and theory.” Most importantly, it was his serious study of Marxist classics like Friedrich Engels’ Anti-Dühring that made him a lifelong communist.

From the start of our political work in Austria and Germany in the early 1970s, he played a key role in getting out the first issues of German Spartacist, as the only comrade who could translate our documents. If the articles in these early issues read somewhat curiously, it’s because Dimir was steeped in 18th-century German literature. This sometimes led to amusing disputes. Once, when questioned over the use of a particular archaic word, he appealed to the Goethe Dictionary.

In addition to his work for German Spartacist and as proofreader for Workers Vanguard and Spartacist, Dimir tutored a number of comrades in German. He was generous with his time, kind and always ready to intersperse his language lessons with history and culture. He also worked for years in the office of the International Secretariat, then located in New York City, where he worked especially on translations and research.

Among the papers he wrote was the outstanding article “Architecture as a Tool of Social Transformation” (Women and Revolution No. 11, Spring 1976) on the efforts in the early Soviet Union to replace the oppressive bourgeois family by forms of collective living, as part of the socialist rebuilding of the entire society.

Over the years, Dimir acquired an extensive library on the international workers movement (particularly in Germany), history, archaeology, language, literary criticism and music history. An accomplished musician, he almost finished building a large harpsichord by himself and had a huge collection of classical music recordings.

Dimir was a true intellectual, not of the ivory tower type, but dedicated to the political and cultural education and enrichment of his comrades and the working class. He was a shy person with a great sense of humor. He was always thrilled when he came up with yet another pun or amusing rhyme. He was deeply committed to Marxism, and almost until the end he was eager to hear about the party’s work. One comrade fondly recalled how delighted he was to hear about our articles in Workers Hammer about the Spartacist League/Britain’s “Down with the Monarchy!” campaign.

We salute his friends, his two main caregivers and the comrades who took very good care of Dimir during the last few years when he suffered from dementia. He still experienced moments of happiness and died at home, which was his wish. We will sorely miss him.