Trends in Soviet Literature—Part 1

[p026] Trends in Soviet Literature Part 1 By Jean Simon THE CHANGES WHICH have taken place in the USSR since the death of Stalin concern in differing degrees the various fields of political, economic, social and cultural life. Nowhere are they so deep as in the literary field. It is here that the changes, their consequences and their nature are reflected most amply, if not violently. The Soviet intelligentsia constitutes a highly diversified social layer. At the bottom of the scale schoolteachers, college teachers and even faculty lecturers* are both overwhelmed with work and poorly paid. The ‘artists’! on the other hand form a privileged group, especially the writers. Once admitted to the Writers’ Union, the Soviet writer receives an honorary monthly salary, author’s rights and a comfortable flat (a particularly important advantage in the USSR where numerous families still live in a single room). In general, only the author’s royalties on his works published abroad, which are taken over by the Soviet government, escape him. Obviously admission to a section of the Writers’ Union is limited as far as possible by those beneficiaries who are already inside. This is especi- ally so in the large towns.2 Despite all this the Union comprises several thousands of writers who constitute a real ‘social élite’. Besides their enormous social advantages the writers benefit from highly- prized favours such as being able to travel abroad.3 All these privileges together are apparently only counterbalanced by two inconveniencies: firstly, the work of the writer is fairly strictly controlled, each work being published under the surveillance and responsibility of a publishing board usually of five members and, secondly, and most important, the writer can lose all his privileges if he is excluded from the Writers’ Union. This does not necessarily mean that the debarred writer is denied any possi- bility of getting his works published. All he has to do is find a provincial magazine or publishing house far enough away from Moscow or Leningrad. But socially he is truly struck off the rolls. Whilst the writer, who is officially recognised as * ‘Assistants de faculté’ [ed.] 1. In Russian the term ‘artist’ takes in writers, painters, musicians, etc. The average salary of a practitioner of the arts, as of a doctor, is from 30 to 35 pounds sterling a month. Moreover the Soviet government decided at the end of 1963 to increase the salaries of both these categories to some extent. 2. At the beginning of 1962, out of 1,300 members of the Writers’ Union in Moscow, only 18 were under 30 and only ONE under 25. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964

[p027] ANDREI ZHDANOV Trends in Soviet Literature Part 1 By Jean Simon THE CHANGES WHICH have taken place in the USSR since the death of Stalin concern in differing degrees the various fields of political, economic, social and cultural life. Nowhere are they so deep as in the literary field. It is here that the changes, their consequences and their nature are reflected most amply, if not violently. The Soviet intelligentsia constitutes a highly diversified social layer. At the bottom of the scale schoolteachers, college teachers and even faculty lecturers* are both overwhelmed with work and poorly paid. The ‘artists’! on the other hand form a privileged group, especially the writers. Once admitted to the Writers’ Union, the Soviet writer receives an honorary monthly salary, author’s rights and a comfortable flat (a particularly important advantage in the USSR where numerous families still live in a single room). In general, only the author’s royalties on his works published abroad, which are taken over by the Soviet government, escap2 him. Obviously admission to a section of the Writers’ Union is limited as far as possible by those beneficiaries who are already inside. This is especi- ally so in the large towns.2 Despite all this the Union comprises several thousands of writers who constitute a real ‘social élite’. Besides their enormous social advantages the writers benefit from highly- prized favours such as being able to travel abroad.3 All these privileges together are apparently only counterbalanced by two inconveniencies: firstly, the work of the writer is fairly strictly controlled, each work being published under the surveillance and responsibility of a publishing board usually of five members and, secondly, and most important, the writer can lose all his privileges if he is excluded from the Writers’ Union. This does not necessarily mean that the debarred writer is denied any possi- bility of getting his works published. All he has to do is find a provincial magazine or publishing house far enough away from Moscow or Leningrad. But socially he is truly struck off the rolls. Whilst the writer, who is officially recognised as * ‘Assistants de faculté’ [ed.] 1. In Russian the term ‘artist’ takes in writers, painters, musicians, etc. The average salary of a practitioner of the arts, as of a doctor, is from 30 to 35 pounds sterling a month. Moreover the Soviet government decided at the end of 1963 to increase the salaries of both these categories to some extent. 2. At the beginning of 1962, out of 1,300 members of the Writers’ Union in Moscow, only 18 were under 30 and only ONE under 25. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964

[p028] HERITAGE OF ZHDANOVISM such through his admission to the Union, is privi- leged, he does not participate directly in the function- ing of the bureaucratic apparatus. ‘Socialist realism’ only requires him to justify and embellish its functioning. Moreover, unless he is to be strictly a literary lackey, in order to practise his craft the writer needs a certain amount of freedom of expression, choice of subject, and criticism which can only be ensured by a minimum degree of personal, legal security. Without that, literature— whatever its artistic level—dies away, as it did in the 1950s in the USSR. If one adds to this that Russian 23 literature has (traditionally) always been much more closely linked with social movements than has western literature, one can easily understand how the Soviet writers have used the concessions which the régime afforded them (as it did to other social layers) with a wideness and strength which rapidly changed each concession they received into a new demand. This is why Soviet literature has for ten years been the field in which the tensions between the Stalinist heritage, “‘Khrushchevite liberalism’ and the desire for emancipation have been publicly revealed in their liveliest and most explosive form. — The heritage of socialist realism and Zhdanovism It was in the years 1934-35 that the necessity of conforming to the canons of ‘socialist realism’ was imposed upon Soviet literature. This term acquired an increasingly restrictive meaning until it placed in question the very existence of a literature in the USSR. The expression of Stalinism in the field of art, ‘socialist realism’, cannot easily be defined, although it is one of the fundamental components of the so-called ‘Soviet’ system of bureaucratic oppres- sion. By and large, the work of art must represent ‘socialist’ society, or one of its aspects, so as to convince the reader of the superiority of this society and then in such a way as to help him perfect himself and perfect it. Whence springs the propa- gandist and moralising character of what are officially the most typical works: those of Fadeyev, B. Polevoy, C. Simonov, Babayevsky, etc. The great epoch of socialist realism stretches from 1946 to 1953. On August 14, 1946, the Central Committee of the CPSU published a decree devoted to literature which violently attacked the Leningrad magazines Zvezda and Leningrad and two great Soviet writers whose works were published in these magazines: Zoschenko and Akhmatova. At the same time this decree defined the tasks of Soviet literature: ‘The strength of Soviet literature, the most advanced literature in the world, consists in the fact that it is a literature in which there are not and cannot be interests other than the interests of the people, the interests of the state. The task of Soviet literature is to help the state to educate the youth correctly, to answer to its requirements, to bring up the new generation to be strong, believing in its cause, not fearing obstacles, ready to overcome all obstacles.’ On August 26 and September 4 two new decrees from the Central Committee applied the same FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964 principles with regard to the theatre and the cinema. On September 4 the Praesidium of the Writers’ Union stated that one of the essential tasks of the Union was: ‘the education of the Soviet writer as a loyal and attentive servant of the interests of the people and of the Soviet state, as an assistant of the Party in the communist education of the people.’ So the educator must be educated. The distrust of Stalin towards the writers showed the degree of difficulty of the task assigned them. If socialist realism was to content itself with being the faithful representa- tion of existing ‘Soviet’ society, the Writers’ Union, that is to say the police apparatus responsible for controlling writers’ activities, would have no need to educate its members. The real meaning of socialist realism was the reduction of literature to the role of First Propagandist of the Political Bureau. That meant its disappearance as literature, very soon to ANNA AKHMATOVA under fire with Zoschenko

[p029] 24 pose a problem of which Stalin himself was to become aware. For war literature the decrees of the Central Committee substituted the era of the cult of optimism, which has been called the Babayevschina from the name of the novelist Babayevsky, a specialist in the production of rosy-hued novels and idyllic depictions of Stalinist life, and author of Cavalier of the Gold Star and Light. on the Earth. This Zhdanovist process was characterised by a shameless idealisation of Soviet literary life and the reduction of literary, romantic or dramatic conflict to its most simple expression: Good, whose victory is obvious from the first words onwards, struggles against Bad, which represents either elements foreign to Soviet society or the remains of backward elements still existing inside it, however feeble these might be. With regard to the period starting from before the war, Zhdanovism was conspicuous for the systematic application of terror to solve literary and artistic problems. Unable to realise that it was itself responsible for the progressive disappearance of Soviet literature, Stalinism sought scapegoats, who also. found themselves charged with other than literary crimes. By virtue of the public that he influences the writer is in fact always a potential danger. In 1949, one year after the death of Zhdanov, there began the first big terror campaign in the world of letters: the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign. On January 28, 1949, Pravda, in an article entitled: ‘On an Anti-Patriotic Group of Theatre Critics’, launched a violent attack against certain drama critics who had denounced the insipidity of the conception of dramatic conflict in the Soviet theatre. To set the tone for this campaign it had been preceded by a denunciation of the magazine Znamya which was accused of having ‘weakly participated in the struggle to unmask bourgeois cosmopolitanism’ and of ‘not having led an active struggle against formalism and naturalism in literature’. Pravda denounced the drama critics in question in this way: ‘Nests of bourgeois aestheticism, camouflaging an anti-patriotic, cosmopolitan, corrupt attitude towards Soviet art . . . aesthetic formalism merely serves as a camouflage for anti-patriotic substance ... the top-priority task of the Party criticism is the ideolo- ; gical crushing of this anti-patriotic group of theatre - critics.’ In the face of these increasing attacks, the writers in question confessed their mistakes. But in the police-hysteria style then in vogue, they were accused of conspiracy. The Literaturnaya Gazeta of February 26 describes them thus: TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE ‘They tried to represent the chain of consciously committed crimes as ‘chance errors’. The facts refuted them. Driven to the wall, they found them- selves obliged, reluctantly and incompletely, to admit the existence of a group, of agreement, of co- ordinated acts which had been prepared in advance.’ Through the drama critics, the campaign was aimed at two goals: to carry into the literary field the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign which had at that time been organised in the political sphere and which was aimed at Jews and prisoners of war of 1941-45; and to sweep aside any attempt to loosen control, aesthetic and political, of the Party over artistic life. During the whole of this period the Soviet press took pleasure in revealing the ‘real names’ of Jewish journalists and authors who were using Russian pseudonyms, a task especially assigned, of course, to other Jewish journalists. The writers who had been singled out disappeared for a time from the literary scene. With all the campaigns developing to the same pattern, it is sufficient to point out the following: An article in Pravda of July 1951 entitled: ‘Against Ideological Distortions in Literature’ marked the beginning of the campaign, the opposite of the previous one, against bourgeois nationalism. The main pretext for it was a poem ‘Love The Ukraine’ by the Ukrainian Sosjura and, secondly, the libretto of an opera on ‘Bogdan Khmelnitsky’, a Cossack leader of the 17th century, written by Vasilevskaya and Korneichuk. Sosjura’s poem was written and published in 1944. He was now being reproached for depicting an anachronistic Ukraine and not the radiant Ukraine of 1950, the industrialised Ukraine, happy to work, ‘the new, flourishing Soviet Ukraine, created by the will of the people under the guidance of the Bolshevik Party’. . This campaign spread into the field of history. It was then in fact that the heroes of the non-Russian peoples who had formerly fought Czarist expansion, were suddenly dethroned and relegated to the rank of Anglo-Turkish agents. In the literary field proper, the campaign was aimed at chasing out every manifestation of literary a-politicalism. Within the mosaic of peoples which makes up the USSR, the return to the traditional themes, the ‘native soil’, and the ‘region’, was a fairly convenient way out for the authors who refused to be police-poets. The campaign quickly assumed the features of a struggle to impose the point of view of a great Russian nationalism which Stalin had made one of the themes of his policy. The chauvinistic exaltation of Russia, from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin, was meant to replace the material needs of the masses. It went so far that, FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964

[p030] HERITAGE OF ZHDANOVISM on August 2, 1951, Pravda brutally attacked the old epic poem of 11th century Azerbaidjan, ‘Dede Korkout’, which was suddenly qualified as ‘a reactionary work’. . . ‘scandalous’, serving to spread ‘pan-Turkish nationalist ideas’ . . . ‘an ignoble epic, of a character hostile to the people’. A few weeks later Pravda announced: ‘Thanks to the intervention of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaidjan it has fortunately been possible to unmask the reactionary character of the epic poem “Dede Korkout”. . .3 Eventually in 1952 Stalin began the liquidation of the Jewish intelligentsia which led to the deaths of dozens of intellectuals like Markich, Kvitko and Bergelson and which culminated in the ‘plot of the Jewish doctors’. It is obvious then that the Stalinist regime did not know how to resolve the problem with which it was faced: how to control literature closely in order to make it an effective instrument of propaganda, while at the same time ensuring a wide distribution of this conformist literature. But, while the works of Tolstoy, Pushkin or Gogol and the translations of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Jules Verne or Victor Hugo would disappear almost as soon as they were published, the works of Soviet authors cluttered up the library shelves. Even from the point of view of the bureaucracy and its interests, Soviet literature was in crisis because it seemed incapable of carrying the good word to the masses who turned away from it. The meddling of the Party in the slightest details of literary life could only sterilise literature. When A. Fadayey, an author-policeman character, found ALEXEI FADEYEV author-policeman shot himself in 1956 3. On January 11, 1951, Culture and Life, the weekly journal of the Central Committee’s Agit-Prop, had already denounced the old Buryat-Mongolian epic poem ‘Gesser-Khan’ for its ‘reactionary character’ because it preached ‘hostility against the Russian people’ to whom the Buryats and Mongolians owed ‘their liberty and well-being’ . . . a somewhat strange statement if one considers that the Buryat-Mongolians had been submitted to Great-Russian domination by the Czarist regime. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964 himself obliged in 1951 to publish a corrected version of Young Guard, a novel which had won the Stalin prize in 1946, it was clear that the very act of writing was dangerous if the author did not limit himself to a simple ‘aesthetic’ tabulation of resolutions of the Political Bureau. It was necessary therefore to fill in somewhat the ditch which had been dug between official art and the masses, and to get a bit of life back into literature. The bureaucrats enthusiastically em- barked on this task even in Stalin’s lifetime, launch- ing in 1952 the campaign for the development of satire. In Stalinist socialist realism the literary concept of conflict lessened considerably and tended logically to disappear. It no longer existed save in the shape of an external struggle between the capi- talist and socialist worlds and of an internal struggle between past and future, between the good and the better. The Soviet writer had to handle the idea of internal conflict in the Soviet world with extreme caution, as any criticism could very easily be imputed as slander. In such an atmosphere satire was obviously impossible. It was reduced to a police- type denunciation of all those who were at a given moment the enemies of the leading bureaucracy. It was not suprising therefore that a Soviet ‘dramatist’, holder of the Stalin Prize and a complete cynic, N. Virta, should go so far as to elaborate the theory of the total absence of conflict in Soviet literature and particularly in Soviet theatre, an absence due to the very high social and cultural level reached by the USSR. On being attacked Virta switched sides and in an article entitled ‘Let Us Speak Frankly’ published by Sovietskoye Isskustvo (Soviet Art) he explained that his false conceptions ‘arose as a consequence of cold observations of the mind on the manner in which those of our plays which contain sharp life conflicts passed through the barbed-wire obstacles of the agencies in charge of the repertoire’. In this way Virta pushed the (his?) responsibility on to the bureaucratic control imposed on literary activity. At this time the Party papers launched a campaign intended to restore a little life to Soviet literature, concentrating on two themes: the necessity for developing an authentic Soviet satire, and de- schematising, making the depiction of society ‘typical’. Pravda on March 4, 1952, stated: ‘We need our Gogols and Shchedrins.’ An editorial on April 7, 1952, entitled ‘Overcome the Lag in Drama’ emphasised the necessity for depicting ‘real’ men. One writer, who was completely devoted to the régime and who figures today amongst the most fervent of the ultra-Stalinists, wrote in May:

[p031] 26 ‘Plays must portray the working man in a com- prehensive and detailed manner. To portray a worker does not mean to bring a turner onto the stage at the moment when he is turning out a mould. We must get to know his inner world, his loves, his friendships, the whole range of feelings and passions which possess him. . (Literaturnaya Gazeta, May 27, 1952) Socialist realist literature has to implant in the reader a certain number of values, those of work, the family, the homeland, devotion and _ self- abnegation. The Stalinist construction of ‘socialism in a single country’ needs to implant in the masses these ‘values’ which the ‘bourgeoisie cherished so fervently in the days of the primitive accumulation of capital. But a literature which depicted nothing more than the man at work, as if no other side of life existed, overstepped the desired aim. To depict Stakhanovites was all very well, but to depict nothing but Stakhanovites was a mistake which was all the more serious since the workers and peasants had, and still have, a solid hatred of these hero- lackeys of the bureaucracy. On August 28, 1952, Pravda spoke out against this error in cinema: ‘Not infrequently the authors of scripts sub- ordinate the rich material of life to a set scheme, depicting the workers and collective farmers in a TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE one-sided way as technical interests.’ It is impossible to speculate on the course of development which this campaign might have taken. The death of Stalin was to express itself amongst other things, in the liquidation of one of the funda- mental theses on which Stalinist policy in the artistic field, as in that of social and political life, had defined itself—the thesis of the heightening of the class struggle concomitant with the strengthening of socialism in the USSR. In any event, the new literary vrientation undertaken in 1952 emphasised the absolute defeat of Stalin’s policy in the literary field as elsewhere. The use of terror to resolve literary problems had killed Soviet literature. The reduction or suppression of terror was the only way to give a real basis to the calls for a renewal of satire and of honest depiction of the true man. But the Stalinist régime could not survive wholly intact unless it kept the operation of the terror also intact. This was the bureaucracy’s only method of maintaining its domination in face of the vast passive strike of the Soviet masses and intelligentsia. The potentially revolutionary situation in which Stalin’s heirs have involuntarily placed the USSR by liquid- ating part of their master’s heritage is sufficient to bear out this assertion. persons entirely absorbed in The thaw Trotsky wrote: ‘A revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of “leading” and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power. Such a pretension could only enter the head of a bureaucracy—ignorant and impudent, intoxicated with its totalitarian power— which has become the antithesis of the proletarian revolution. Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence cannot tolerate them.’ (June 1938).4 It was in the name of this principle that Trotsky, in collaboration with Lunacharsky and Bukharin, in 1925 drew up a resolution which was adopted by the Central Committee in which, amongst other things, one can read the following: ‘Without being beguiled as to the class content of literary currents, the party, as a whole, cannot afford any favour to any kind of conception of literary form ... the party cannot support a single literary faction. .. . The party must come out in favour of 4. cf. Labour Review, Autumn 1962. TROTSKY LUNACHARSKY BUKHARIN ... in 1925, drew up a resolution free rivalry between the different literary groups and currents, . . . The party must stifle attempts at administrative, arbitrary and incompetent interfer- ence,’ Following the decree of the Central Committee on April 23, 1932, which dissolved the existing writers’ organisations and ordered the regrouping of all writers in a Writers’ Union under the rigid control of the party, the Stalinist policy went in the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964

[p032] IHE THAW opposite direction to that of the 1925 resolution. Since the death of Stalin writers have spontaneously attempted to seek out once again the interrupted tradition: to practise their craft and their art without control and likewise without any attempt to bring into question the acquisitions of the October revolution. The first sign of demands by the movement which was subsequently to be dubbed ‘the Thaw’ was the publication of an article by the mediocre Leningrad poetess Olga Bergoltz: ‘A conversation about lyric poetry’ (Literaturnaya Gazeta, April 16, 1953). O. Bergoltz emphasised that Soviet lyric poetry had died because the poets were constrained to put across an entirely optimistic view of man and society in their works. Ehrenburg, Powstovsky, Tvardovsky, writers of standing, affirmed in the months that followed, the right of the writer to obey the demands of his personality. This demand was linked with the winning by the writer of guarantees of minimum legal personal security, held out in the reform of the Penal Code promised by Malenkov, but which were not to become effective until after the liquidation of Beria and the demolition of a section of the police apparatus which had come under his control. The subordination of the various departments to the party and the regularisation of the party’s functioning constituted real guarantees for the writers insofar as they belonged socially to the privileged layers in the USSR. An article by Pomerantsey ‘On Sincerity in Literature’, published in the December 1953 edition of Novy Mir, raised the debate to a higher stage. Pomerantsev denounced the rule of “insincerity’ in Soviet literature; he saw this as the basic reason for its mediocrity. Despite the author’s prudence in discreetly leaving in the shade the answers to the question he was posing (‘How was insincerity able able to penetrate our literature?’) the official reactions were savage. Denounced by the secretary of the Writers’ Union, Tvardovsky was dismissed from the post of chief editor of Novy Mir and replaced by the more docile C. Simonov. But the fact that the cogwheels of the terror had jammed was sufficient to bring the crowd of critics into attack on the bureaucracy. Three months after Pomerantsev’s article the magazine Theatre published a play by Zorin, “The Guests’. The argument and content of this play called into question the very nature of the bureaucratic regime. Zorin depicts three Soviet generations: an old Bolshevik, Alexis Kirpitchev, still morally loyal to his origins; his son, Pierre, a cynical high-up official, married to a parvenue; and two grandchildren, one FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964 27 of whom is a teddy boy who hangs around the cafés. At one point in the play Pierre’s sister, Varvara, interrupts a conversation between him and _ his wife by shouting out: ‘How I detest these bourgeois!’ Further on, with regard to these bourgeois, she states that she ‘feels something resembling class conscious- ness’, and she ends with a question for which she finds no answer: ‘How was this high society able to come about in our country?’ In a conversation with his son Pierre the ageing Alexis, recalling the old Bolsheviks, says: ‘I worked alongside them and I never knew the taste of power. But you have known it since your childhood and it has corrupted you.’ The play was taken off after its second performance. In June the ‘college’ of the Ministry of ‘Culture’ denounced the play as a ‘harmful absurdity’, What more harmful absurdity than this passage in which Alexis says to his son: “The country has become stronger, the people have become richer. But the bad part of it is that together with the good man, alongside the hard workers, imperceptibly, people like you have appeared: rank-conscious, aristocrats, greedy and conceited, remote from the people’? But these are precisely the words used by Russian workers and students to characterise those who claim to speak on their behalf. So less than a year after Stalin’s death, the first signs of literary liberalisation had overflowed into an investigation of the character of the bureaucracy and its social pre-eminence in all fields: in order to get the workers to work more and better, the peasants to produce more, and the intel- lectuals to produce better, the bureaucracy makes certain concessions. But no sooner is the door ajar than the bureaucracy has to expend all its energy to prevent it opening any more. The initial con- cessions open up the cycle of demands which place its political power and its social privileges in question: the Soviet economy is still far too much an economy of hardship for the bureaucracy to be able to distribute its privileges harmoniously and to noticeably slacken its absolute power. The May 1954 edition of Znamya published the first part of Ilya Ehrenburg’s new novel ‘The Thaw’ which was to give its name to this period. The enlisting of Ehrenburg, an official and prudent personage, an old-time licensed dealer in. slander against Trotskyists, surrealists, the POUM and so many others, proved that a section at least of the controlling circles supported the liberalisation which had been commenced. The movement once again tended to step outside the official limits: on October 26 Literaturnaya Gazeta published an open letter signed by seven writers (B. Kaverin, Kazakievitch,

[p033] 28 ILYA EHRENBURG ‘If I write another book...’ Lukonin, Marshak, Powstovsky, Pogodin and Chipachev) which spoke out violently against the bureaucratisation of the Writers’ Union: ‘The Writers’ Union is taking place in a vacuum... . Literature is following its own path which does not coincide with that of the bureaucrats. . The liquidation of the Union’s commission would do nobody any harm... .’ In November, the polemic started by this letter broadened its scope and some moderate writers called for the creation of rank-and-file sections of the Writers’ Union in Moscow and in all the big towns in the USSR. (‘For real democracy inside the Writers’ Union’ by A. Bezumensky and Korolkova in Literaturnaya Gazeta on November 13, an idea taken up in the same paper, on November 23, in an article by N. Zadornov.) Two days before the opening of the Second Congress of Writers, on December 13, a delegation from the Writers’ Union was received by the Party leadership. In order to regularise the functioning of its domination over the USSR, the ruling clique of the CPSU sought to associate with it the broadest possible layers of the bureaucracy by consulting with them and associating them with the decisions it took in their field of activity. It was a ‘democrati- sation’ which was carefully limited to those who had a more or less direct share in the privileges of the ruling bureaucracy. While it did not reject authori- tarian argument, discussion § replaced terror. Obviously that could only represent a break with Stalinism to common impressionists who judge a régime’s social nature by the number of prisons or the degree of feminine elegance. The Second Congress, a public ceremony, was more limited than the individual initiatives which had preceded it. The probable division of the Party leadership was reflected in the attacks made on TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE Ehrenburg’s ‘Thaw’ and the latter’s astonishing reply to his opponents in Literaturnaya Gazeta: ‘If I write another book, I shall try to make it a step forward from my last novelette, not a step back.’ One month before the conference opened, in the November issue of the magazine Theatre, the dramatist Alexander Stein had published a play called ‘A Personal Affair’ whose contention underlined the deepening of literary criticism of the Stalinist past. With a ‘doctors’ conspiracy’ in full cry, an honest communist is expelled from the party by an opportunist leader who knows how to make use of the watchwords of ‘vigilance’ and the hysterical police atmosphere of suspicion of the 1950s. With the box-office kept open, in contrast to Zorin’s play “The Guests’, ‘A Personal Affair’ enjoyed a vogue that was significant since it was a political work and the Soviet public was deserting the theatres where conformist political plays were shown. The year 1955 was a year of cautious adaptation to the new and uncertain possibilities. At the same time as the rehabilitation took place of certain writers like Babel who had been shot under Stalin, a Party official, Mikhailov, replaced the philosopher Alexandrov in the Ministry of Culture. The factional struggle which then developed in the top layers of the bureaucracy and especially the shake- ups of the Twentieth Congress (February 1956) gave a new spurt to the literary liberalisation move- ment which this time was displayed in a double qualitative leap: 1. Numerous works appeared which brought into question the traditional content of socialist realism and, often, going on from there, the social founda- tions of the bureaucratised USSR: the poems of Kirsanov (‘Seven Days of the Week’), and Yevtu- shenko (‘Station Zima’), and Dudintsev’s novel (“Not by Bread Alone’), etc. YEVGENI YEVTUSHENKO His ‘Station Zima’ raised questions FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964

[p034] IHE THAW 2. We saw how in 1954 a large number of writers stood up against the tutelage of the Writers’ Union, either by demanding its liquidation or its decentrali- sation. The attempt was renewed on a higher level in 1956. Under the leadership of Benjamin Kaverin a group of writers decided to set up an autonomous trade union organisation alongside the bureaucratic official organisation. This dual critical and organisational movement showed itself spectacularly with the publication of the Moscoy Literary Almanac, the second volume of which went to press during the first days of the Hungarian Revolution. The publication of the almanac was destined to provide a programme, or at least a platform, for the literary opposition. The editorial board included amongst others M. Aliguer, A. Bek, B. Kaverin, E. Kazakievitch, C. Powstovsky, V. Tendriakov.5 Volume II contained numerous texts which vigorously denounced the bureaucratic character of the Soviet regime especially in the countryside. (A. ashin: ‘The Levers’; N. Zhdanov: “Return to the house’.) ‘As long as there is no confidence in the rank and file peasant, things can’t be right... . Everything has to be handed down from the top. Plans from the top, chairmen from the top, even crop-fields are prescribed from the top. . . . It’s so much easier this way: just launch out, regardless of anything, and keep on “recommending”... .” (A. Yashin: ‘The Levers’.) The dramatic critic A. Kron tried to deepen the criticism of Stalinism by going beyond the official thesis of the ‘personality cult’ and of the pro- imperialist manoeuvres of Beria. This criticism reached no higher a level than that of an idealist description, but insofar as it itself underlined the idealist and subjectivist character of Stalinist ideology, it did constitute a preliminary platform for discussion: ‘Any kind of cult is organically hostile to the proletariat’s scientific conception of the world, Marxism-Leninism. Wherever there exists a cult, scientific thought is obliged to draw back in face of blind faith, creative spirit in face of dogma, public opinion in face of despotism. The cult gives rise to a hierarchy of servants of the cult: any deity requires bishops and flatterers. The cult is incompatible with critique, and the most healthy critique is readily transformed into heresy and sacrilege. The cult is anti-popular in its very essence: it humiliates the . people and forces what has been paid for entirely 5. Kazakievitch, Tendriakov and Rudny were members of the Communist Party. Since then, Rudny has been expelled and Kazakievitch has died. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964 29 by the sweat and blood of the people to be con- sidered as a gift from on high. . . . The Chief was the servant of the People, but when millions of conscious individuals rose to their feet at the mere name of their ‘servant’, this was something completely foreign to the democratic traditions in which we had been brought up by the revolution and by the Soviet regime. . . . We must clearly evaluate our forces and our potential, and we shall see that we have more than enough to overcome in a resolute and consistent fashion the aftermath of the cult in all the fields of our régime, economic, political and cultural. . . . The personality cult was above all an_ ideological perversion.’ Volume II of the Moscow Literary Almanac was sent to the printers at the height of the Hungarian uprising, at a time when the ruling bureaucracy, endangered by the revolutionary ascent in Hungary and Poland, was brutally hardening its line: the bureaucracy was favourably disposed to what liberalisation was necessary to harmonise its relations with the intelligentsia, but it was hostile to a liberalisation constituting a threat to itself. The Hungarian revolution showed quite clearly that intellectual agitation, initially limited to the top layers of the intelligentsia, could become, if linked with the discontent of the masses, ‘an explosive factor. In the absence of any independent organisation of the workers, the intelligentsia played, with regard to the workers, the role of a detonator in a barrel of gunpowder. In themselves the attempt to set up an autonomous writers’ trade union and the reformist social criticism which constituted its platform were no more than limited phenomena, but they bore witness to an elementary revival in consciousness in a country where the entire efforts of the Stalinist bureaucracy had been aimed at destroying every possible breeding ground for the awakening of consciousness, beginning, of course, with the old Bolsheviks, including the most humble of them and including the basic part of Stalin’s own faction. Deprived of the means of reaching consciousness, the masses’ reaction to bureaucratic domination and wastage tended to be constrained inside the frame- work of the individual enterprise, of intermittent sabotage, of passive refusal and of striking with arms folded. In June 1957, in a warning aimed at the rebellious writers, Khrushchev stated that, had they executed a few dozen intellectuals in Hungary in 1956, the ‘counter-revolution’ would never have taken place. This manifest exaggeration, while it shows a highly bureaucratic lack of understanding of the spontaniety of the masses, also displays the bureaucracy’s need to tame culture in order to maintain its domination.

[p035] 30 V. DUDINSTEV branded an epileptic 1957 and 1958 marked the triumph of conserva- tive reaction which followed the crushing of the Hungarian revolution. To recount its history would be devoid of interest. On the question of the brutal attack against the upholders of intellectual liberali- sation, let us simply take this passage from a con- tribution by Alexis Surkov at the Moscow Writers’ Union in January 1958: ‘Unfortunately my hopes were not fulfilled that soiae comrades who hold extreme points of view would speak at this conference, not in order to cast ashes over their heads, but in order to say, gathering all their inner manliness, that from now on, they will no longer make such mistakes.’ While certain writers had in fact capitulated in face of the conservative offensive (Kazakievitch, Bek, Aliguer), the majority had taken refuge in silence. This quotation from Surkov — ‘unfor- tunately my hopes were not fulfilled’ — displays the essence of the difference between ‘Stalinism’ and ‘Khrushchevism’: the disappearance of terror and the fear of physical elimination as a means of settling every question. The writer who is denounced by a policeman-colleague knows that this denuncia- tion no longer means being sent off to a concentra- tion camp. Sofronov had branded Dudintsev, Kirsanov and their ilk as ‘epileptics’, but the epileptics did not lose their heads; they were able to continue writing; quite simply, their works of summer 1956 were listed in the index. 6. The Nobei Prize for Literature has never been awarded to a writer from the ‘socialist camp’, but in 1953 it was awarded to such a great writer as Winston Churchill. To present it to Pasternak in a period of sharp reaction and to do so manifestly for his Doctor Zhivago was to throw an open defiance to the bureau- crats. fRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE The Pasternak affair, unleashed by the provoca- tive presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize for literature® to the author of Doctor Zhivago, pub- lished in the West in November 1957 but banned in the USSR, raised the Stalinist counter-offensive to a higher level while at the same time demonstrating its limitations. Pasternak was obliged to renounce his Nobel Prize after having declared himself to be ‘infinitely grateful, touched, proud, delighted, moved’; he was expelled from the Writers’ Union, which normally speaking means being deprived of his salary and accommodation, and, broken by the vicious campaign which was directed against him, was obliged to send a letter to Pravda in which he ‘confessed his mistakes’ (November 6, 1958). But while the terror had succeeded in morally breaking a great poet, it stopped short there. The rebel writers kept quiet, but did not consider themselves to be faced with a choice between prostitution or deporta- tion. One could not fail to 'be struck ‘by the contrast between the rage of certain leaders (like the secretary of the Komsomols) and the paucity of political measures taken. The conservative victory was a Pyrrhic victory, as subsequent events were to show. Two conclusions can be drawn from _ the panorama which we have just outlined: 1. Contrary to a theory which is often put forward, the literary liberalisation movement was not simply a product of decisions from above brought into material being by the 20th Congress. It expressed the desire for emancipation in a privi- leged sector and in a privileged way which all layers of Soviet society were advancing, including the bureaucracy, which wanted to rid itself of Stalinist BORIS PASTERNAK expelled from the Writers’ Union for ‘Dr. Zhivago’ FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964

[p036] THE THAW terrorism for which it had itself paid the price on more than one occasion! And there, in part, lies the ambiguity of this literary liberalisation move- ment. Every ruling power needs a finery of intel- lectuals to serve as clowns or as leaders of the congregation. Even if this power switches from the cudgel to the carrot and to discussion, the precentors or the clowns can make only bad use of the freedom that they have acquired. 2. Ever since the break-up of the police terror mechanism the social contradictions, which had been apparently checked, if not eliminated, and at any tate distorted by the concentration camps and the 31 summary executions, have once again been expressed in all their amplitude. No longer is absolute control possible for the ruling caste; as a result, as we see in the USSR, the democratic needs of the masses tend to be expressed in a confused way and to slowly undermine the whole edifice. Then there is posed the problem of consciousness, of the link between the unconscious aspirations of the Soviet masses and the expression of revolutionary con- sciousness. We will handle this subject when we examine the evolution of Soviet literature from 1959 to 1963. (To be concluded) LEON TROTSKY Where is Britain Going? _A brilliant survey of British politics just before the General Strike of 1926 Price: Seven shillings and sixpence Available from: New Park Publications Ltd, 186A Clapham High St, London $.W4. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964

[p037] THE THAW terrorism for which it had itself paid the price on more than one occasion! And there, in part, lies the ambiguity of this literary liberalisation move- ment. Every ruling power needs a finery of intel- lectuals to serve as clowns or as leaders of the congregation. Even if this power switches from the cudgel to the carrot and to discussion, the precentors or the clowns can make only bad use of the freedom that they have acquired. 2. Ever since the break-up of the police terror mechanism the social contradictions, which had been apparently checked, if not eliminated, and at any tate distorted by the concentration camps and the 31 summary executions, have once again been expressed in all their amplitude. No longer is absolute control possible for the ruling caste; as a result, as we see in the USSR, the democratic needs of the masses tend to be expressed in a confused way and to slowly undermine the whole edifice. Then there is posed the problem of consciousness, of the link between the unconscious aspirations of the Soviet masses and the expression of revolutionary con- sciousness. We will handle this subject when we examine the evolution of Soviet literature from 1959 to 1963. LEON TROTSKY Where Is Britain Going? A brilliant survey of British politics just before the General Strike of 1926 Price: Seven shillings and sixpence Available from: New Park Publications Ltd, 1864 Clapham High St, London $.W4. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL SPRING 1964

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