Russian Ward Boss and Old-time Boston Skulduggery

Naakh Vysoky is 83. He spent three years as an infantry man during World War II. He had a successful career back in the Soviet Union. Here, in America, he could have spent time mindlessly watching TV . Instead he never gave up an active approach to life. In the early nineties, he helped many of his neighbors learn English and pass the US citizenship exam. It was hard, hard work, but the work brought results.

The Boston Globe reports:

In recent elections, something peculiar has happened in Ward 21, Precinct 13. In that little Brighton neighborhood, voters have turned out in the hundreds, when their neighbors in most nearby precincts have shown up in much smaller numbers.

The heart of that miniature electoral powerhouse is the Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly on Wallingford Road, a complex of brown brick buildings that house about 1,000 Russian immigrants.

And the unofficial head of that powerhouse is Naakh Vysoky, an 83-year-old Ukrainian with white hair and a shrugging modesty who has become a kind of old-time ward boss, corralling and delivering his people for the right candidate. He coaches them into US citizenship, registers them to vote, and makes it clear when he likes a politician. Where Vysoky goes, hundreds of Russian immigrant voters on Wallingford Road follow.

''This is the old-fashioned way," said state Representative Kevin G. Honan, a Brighton Democrat. ''This is the way our neighborhoods used to be. His credibility in that community is extraordinary. You'd be hard-pressed to find another man like him in Boston."

But no good deed goes unpunished, and jealousy and mud slinging are not foreign to political campaigns:

In recent weeks, lawyers from the US Department of Justice have been calling former candidates in the district and asking questions about whether non-English-speaking voters were given adequate translation services in the precinct, as required by law.

A spokesman for the Department of Justice said the Civil Rights Division is ''looking into the matter," but that an investigation has not been launched. City officials have not been contacted by the department, and several city sources suggested that the Department of Justice had been urged to make calls on the matter by one of the camps contesting the special election, in the interests of depressing turnout on March 15. Old-time skulduggery, they called it.

 

Vysoky dismissed the allegations. Nobody made anybody vote for anyone, he said. No literature was stolen. And his influence only goes so far, he said.

''You cannot dictate to the people," he said. ''You cannot say, 'Go vote for this one.' People like me. I work very hard for them, but I am not a dictator. I am a simple man."

Still, there is plenty of the traditional ward boss about Vysoky. The man who describes himself as ''just a simple immigrant" has a lot of powerful friends. His small apartment is jammed with pictures of him palling around with all manner of prominent politician: Governor Mitt Romney; Menino, former House speaker Thomas M. Finneran, and current House Speaker Salvatore F. DiMasi, to name a few.

''All of them, they are my friends," Vysoky said. [link] $$

We, at the Jewish Russian Telegraph, can say: Dr. Naakh, you are our pride and role model. Abi gezunt!

 

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posted by: jrtelegraph

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