Trends in Soviet Literature (II)

[p026] TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE (2) ‘Whatever are you saying, Kapa?’ interjected Zina. ‘You have no right to speak like that. Popov is only 22. How and where would he have become rotten?’ ‘Some people are born rotten,’ said Andrei. ‘Especially when the weather is bad and when there is a lot of mud about,’ quipped someone else, ‘or in other words during a thaw.’ This novel was a great success. Kochetov, without doubt, had followed very precise directives, and if he dragged the liberals through the mud, above all from a political angle, it was obviously because their ideas found, and still did find, a following. Kochetov was quickly rewarded for his zeal: old Panferov died in Autumn 1960. There was now no editor for the magazine Oktyabr, which he had made into a liberal bastion. Two months later, Kochetov was appointed editor. The liberals thus lost control of an important journal, which after Yunost, had the largest circulation of all the literary journals. After a year and a half’s ‘freedom’, Kochetov was thus once again given control of a press organ. The conservative triumph received an admini- strative consecration. In December 1958, the Writers’ Union of the RSFSR, whose setting up had been decided more than a year before, held its founding conference. In the chair was the conserva- tive Sobolev, a case-hardened conservative by virtue of the fact that as an ex-officer of the Tsarist navy, a sympathiser of the Social-Revolutionaries, and still not a member of the Communist Party, he found it necessary to show an excess of zeal to obliterate his youth. The Writers’ Union was meant to swamp the all too turbulent Moscow writers with a mass of pro- vincials less open to subversive ideas. Pasternak was violently attacked at this congress and it emerged that two young poets, Khatabarov, who subsequently became a Stalinist, and Pankratov, both of whom had come under Pasternak’s ‘pernicious’ influence, had been expelled from the Komsomol for that reason and sent to work in the virgin lands. Parallel to the apparently definitive victory of the conservatives, the worries of the bureaucracy were subsiding. In Hungary Imre Nagy, Maleter and their friends had been shot and the Kadar govern- ment was getting on moderately well; Poland was quietening down since tthe banning of the weekly paper Po Prostu; agitation had declined; the intellec- tuals had everywhere been brought to heel, and all plans to set up an independent writers’ union around Literary Moscow were no more than memories—at the very moment that the extreme right wing was everywhere triumphant, the conditions for a modifi- cation of the situation appeared, The third congress FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 113 of writers was planned for May 1959 and with the way that things were going it looked like turning out to be a fiasco for the Soviet government, put on the spot by a real conspiracy of silence of all the liberal writers... . Moreover, through one of those ironies with which history is replete, it was at the very moment when reaction appeared victorious that a frail young boy with an innocent look in his eyes came on to the literary scene, and was soon to place himself on the extreme left of Soviet poetry, the writer most hated by the ultra-Stalinists: Andrei Voznessenski. VOZNESSENSKI Hated by the ultra-Stalinists A few weeks before his final examinations as a student at the Institute of Architecture, Voznessenski saw a fire consume the Institute and with it his projects. This fire was for him a symbol of the burning of Stalinist Russia, of the collapse of the past in flames. He then wrote his famous ‘Fire in the Institute of Architecture’, one of his first poems which was only to be published two years later. What he describes is the collapse of Stalinist Russia in an immense fire which wipes out the past: A fire at the Institute! It flies through the rooms like the news Of an amnesty through the prisons! Fire! Fire! Adieu, age of restrictions. is the dance of the flames. We are all aflame, Life To live is to burn... In November 1958, whilst the hysterical out- burst against Pasternak was at its height, Znamya published some fairly inoffensive poems by this admirer of Pasternak under a title symbolic of the young generation’s wish for renewal: ‘Twentieth Century’. In the same month, Novy Mir published a poem by him on Lenin. In any case, the twenty-first congress of the

[p027] i1l4 Communist Party, which was held in January- February 1959, far from being a step forward in the struggle against the liberals, shows a slight reduction of the pressure. To implement the goodwill, the government retired Kochetov from the editorship of TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE (2) the Literaturnaya Gazeta in March 1959 and repiaced him by S. Smirnov, thus enabling this journal to publish during the congress itself, a long article by Paustovsky, which questioned certain dogmas of socialist realism. The Third Congress of Writers The third congress of writers was held in May. No one expected much from it. After the traditional message from the central committee which taught the writers that they should ‘show in a true and living . way, the exploits of the people at work ... be the passionate propagandists of the seven-year plan and instil courage and energy into the heart of the Soviets’, the report of the Secretary of the Writers’ Union, A. Surkov, interminably expanded on the most outworn themes of socialist realism. Tvardovsky prudently asserted the need for a liberal policy and a comprehending attitude towards young writers. He stressed first of all the mediocre quality of Soviet literature, then the tasks of the Soviet writer, by invoking the existence of aesthetic laws without linking these to the ‘party-spirit’ (the famous ‘partiinost’) and he finally ended with an eclectic statement far from the traditional dogmatism: ‘As for me, reader, I fall upon a book which enchants me, which affords me the real joy of finding life in its most brilliant images, I do not worry much whether this aspect reveals roman- ticism or realism with a touch of romanticism, or I know not what. I am simply grateful to the author for the gift that he has made me.’ In spite of these lines, demanding a vast field of creative freedom for the artist, it seemed that the boring work of the third congress would give rise to nothing, and was only leading towards a negative balance between the two camps present, when Khrushchev made a ‘sensational’ speech. Of course, he reaffirmed the validity of the principles of socialist realism. Indeed, it is likely that he could not do otherwise: it is literature that he likes naturally ... Then he explained amiably that even if he had ‘exaggerated and generalised’ a little hastily the faults that were denounced in his book, “Dudintsev had never been and was not an opponent of the Soviet system.’ He had not read Dudintsev’s book himself, but Mikoyan had and had found it to be good. He did not know much about literature, he concluded. Consequently, no one could decide between the writers present, except themselves. . ‘You may say: criticise us, control us; if a work is bad, do not publish it. But you know that it is not easy to decide between what must and must not DUDINSTEV ‘had never been and was not an opponent of the Soviet system?’ be published. to publish nothing at all, in that way there would The most simple course would be be no mistakes . . . but this would be stupid. And so, comrades, do not weary the government with these questions. Sort them out yourselves, in a comradely way... Khrushchev added that the young writers must be left to do their own apprenticeship: ‘to learn to swim, you must have the right to throw yourself into the water’. You must be indulgent with the young writers if they make mistakes, as these mistakes cannot be compared to crimes. ‘A writer, if he is really a Soviet writer, makes mistakes involuntarily, and because he starts from false premises, or because he has an incorrect understanding of life...’ He concluded jovially: ‘If I have talked nonsense, I think that you will forgive me ...I am not sure that I have not made a mistake. That is why I am asking you not to be severe judges.’ This speech, unexpected, as Khrushchev likes them to be, brought the liberals two fundamental guaran- tees: 1. Some freedom of manoeuvre was permitted, since the distinction between ‘mistake’ and ‘crime’ had been made. 2. The government had told the writers: We do not want to interfere in your conflicts ... It is up to you to settle them yourselves. In return for this enormous concession, the govern- ment asked the writers to put into effect what it called a ‘consolidation’, that is to stop fighting amongst themselves: the spectacle of a semi-open FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p028] TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE (2) fight between two clans is, in fact, a serious crack in Stalinist monolithism. But on this ground, now deprived of the automatic support of the repressive apparatus, the conservatives were obviously in the weaker position. Organisational measures were introduced to give substance to the new balance of forces. Konstantin Fedin, the doyen of Soviet letters, replaced Surkov in the office of general secretary of the Writers’ Union. Surkov remained on the bureau, but he was accompanied by two men whose suspension from their jobs as editors-in-chief of Novy Mir and Oktyabr he had demanded and obtained at the time of the Pomerantsev affair: A. Tvardovski and Panferov. 2 The third congress had thus established a balance of forces favourable to the liberals, but an unstable balance. One of the big problems confronting the liberals was the problem of the press, vital for the propagation of their theses, especially as they had opted not to engage in battle at the congress, but to go into print. and [zvestia, which were directly under party control, the situation in 1959 was as follows: (a) the organs which favoured the liberals were: the journal Novy Mir, edited ‘by the poet Alexander Tvardovsky who was sacked in 1954 after the Pomeranstev affair, but who regained his post in 1956; the journal Yunost, edited by the veteran writer Katayev; the journal Oktyabr which regained Panferov as its editor in 1956, after he too had been sacked in 1954 with Tvardovski. (b) the three-weekly journal Literaturnaya Gazeta was neutral. Undecided but more favourable to the If we leave aside the dailies, Pravda. 115 FEDIN: Doyen of Soviet letters liberals was the journal Znamya. Also undecided, but more favourable to the conservatives was Moskva. (c) the conservatives held the journals Don, Neva, the journal of the Leningrad Writers’ Union, Zvezda, - the mass circulation magazine Ogonyok, edited by the hardened Stalinist A. Sofronov, and the three- weekly journal Literatura i Zhizn edited by the ultra-Stalinists Markov and Starikov. The alignment of the press was obviously vital for the struggle which was about to begin. We shall see that in the ensuing period, as the liberals con- solidate themselves more and more on the literary scene, the organs of the press will tend more and more to slip from their grasp. The emergence of the young poets 1960 was also marked by a number of positive events; the first two anthologies of the young poet Andrei Voznessensky’s verse appeared one after the other: Mozaika, printed in Vladimir, and Parabola, printed in Moscow. In them is to be found, among other things, the symbolic and brutal denunciation of the definitive silence to which the tyranny had condemned the poets (‘The Masters’). Others managed to express themselves at last, like the poet Boris Slutsky, who was already writing anti- Stalinist poems under Stalin himself and whase collection with the significant name Today and Yesterday was now published. Others confirmed themselves, like Eugene Vinokurov, who published The Human Face. 1960 was also the year when, for the first time since the institution of Zhdanovism— FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 since 1940 in fact—a selection of the verses of the futurist poet Khlebnikov, the prophet of ‘beyond reason’, who died in 1922, appeared. In 1961, once again the current turned when Kommunist published the speech that Khrushcnev gave at a writers’ meeting—together with Suslov-— in the summer of 1960. The main theme of this long speech was that Khrushchev declared himself to be satisfied with the activity of the Soviet writers and stated that: ‘under present conditions we are able to correct those who make mistakes without resorting to extreme measures’, He added that ‘Setbacks in the work, in particular in artistic creation, can occur even to those who serve the people faithfully and loyally... .’

[p029] 116 TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE. (2) The Aksionov and other scandals The relaxation produced by Khrushchev’s speech was soon to be disturbed. The June and July issues of Yunost contained a novel by A. V. Aksionov called The Starred Ticket. Aksionov, a young writer born in 1932, had already published The Colleagues a few months before. Like this work, The Starred Ticket was a novel on youth, but was far more critical in approach. Through the adventures of two brothers, Victor and Dimka Denissov, Aksionov drew a very non-conformist picture of Soviet youth. Witness this outburst by young Dimka towards his elder brother, who is preparing himself for a remarkable scientific career: ‘Do you think that I am dreaming about walking in your footsteps, that you are an ideal for me? Your life, Victor, was drawn up by mother and father when you were still in the cradle. First prize at school, first prize at the Institute, more diplomas, assistant lecturer, Ph.D., academician . . . and what next? Dead, respected by everybody? Not once in your life have you really made a decision, not once have you taken a risk. That is al! nonsense! We are scarcely born and everything is already mapped out for us, and our future is already decided on! Nothing doing! It is better to be a tramp and to move from failure to failure than to be a little boy all your life carrying out other people’s decisions.’ This same elder brother who receives this declara- tion of burning revolt, has himself to fight tenaciously against a thousand and one difficulties which he brings wpoon himself when he upholds scientific ideas contrary to the official ones. His stubbornness leads him to be summoned to certain strange military manoeuvres, on which he meets a no less strange fatal accident. His nihilist younger brother makes it his duty to pursue his interrupted work. This lyrical and brutal depiction, both criticising and romanticising Soviet society, brought forth the conservatives’ fury. ‘A forgery,’ shouted V. Kotov and I. Chvetsov in Literatura i Zhizn; ‘phony romanticism,’ replied L. Stichova in Young Communist: ‘A glorification of nihilism,’ declared all Aksionov’s opponents. The disturbances created by The Starred Ticket were hardly over when Yunost did it again. In its September issue, while the preparation for the Twenty-Second Congress of the party was in full swing, it published a film script by Victor Rozov, a member of the editorial board of the review called A.B.C.D. The young people which it presents are so optimistic that one of them, Volodya Fedorov, said: ‘The whole globe should be blown up. them should be annihilated! All of And it should all start again with amoeba. better chance! Eh!’ Reactions were a long time coming . the Twenty-Second Congress was on its way and there was no shortage of sensational material there, and a third scandal was about to break. ... The September 19, 1961, issue of the Literaturnaya Gazeta contained a poem by Yevtushenko which was to make the latter world-famous: ‘Babi Yar’. It recalled the atrocities of tsarist and Nazi anti-semi- tism and wondered at the absence of any monument to commemorate the ‘ravine of the good wives’, near Kiev, where so many Jews were massacred by the Nazis. This plea was made even stronger in that the author proclaimed a solidarity with the destiny of the Jewish people that was astonishing in the Soviet Union, where Stalin thad recreated in all its monstrosity the anti-semitism of tsarist Russia. Perhaps they would stand a ‘,.. Oh Russian people I know deep down inside you You are international But often those whose hands are impure Have called to arms in your name... ... The silence screams and bare-headed I feel my hair slowly turning white. I am no longer anything but a voiceless scream Above thousands who are buried. Tam each old man shot in this ravine. I am each child shot in this ravine. And nothing in me will forget it! Let the ‘Internationale’ thunder out When for eternity is buried the last anti-semite © A few days later, a certain Starikov, in Literatura i Zhizn attacked ‘Babi Yar’ violently and accused its author of anti~Leninist provocation: ‘Why does the editorial board of the literary journal of our union allow Yevtushenko to belittle the triumph of Lenin’s nationalities policy by an association of ideas and of evocations that can only be called provocative acts.’ The October 4 issue of Komsomolskaya Pravda carried a moderate criticism of the poem. For the time being, indeed, the important problem was not that one. The Aksionov, Rozov and Yevtushenko FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p030] TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE (2) scandals were to be settled after the Twenty-Secona Congress which was imminent (October 17-31). This congress was entirely unexpected by the foreign observers afid by the Soviet citizens, who knew no more than they did. But when its course is examined, there can be no doubt that it was carefully prepared. Why was there this brutal outburst against the politically conservative group? We do not know, and the answer is even more uncertain as the outburst was followed by no practical measure, until the recent expulsion from the CPSU of Molotov, Kaganovitch and Malenkov. In any case, Khrush- chev does not do two contradictory things at once, even if he does do them one after the other. Thus, the affairs pending on the left were postponed until after the Twenty-Second Congress, which was to deal with the old Right. Four writers spoke at the congress: Sholokov, Tvardovski, Gribatchov and Kochetov, these last two being amongst the most ferocious Stalinists. Sholokov’s speech demonstrated that it is perfectly possible to be a good writer and a dull individual. He courageously kicked the backside of the semi- disgraced minister of culture, Fursteva, and violently criticised those ‘writers who cannot distinguish between spring wheat and autumn wheat, and who confuse barley with oats .. . it is better if these people do not play the part of counsellors.’ Reducing literature in this way to the level of a household encyclopaedia is absolutely characteristic of Stalin- ism. ‘Gribatchov went even further, by recalling the liberal deviations of the summer of 1956 in the terms of a lackey: ‘A few years ago, our literature had a feverish crisis because a small group of writers had bitten the not-too-subtle bait prepared by Western fishermen. At that time, there could be noticed— sometimes even by communists—a reconsideration of the party’s line on literature, and the elimination of the party’s influence on literature. The demand was even made for everything to be published in the state in which the author had written it for, as one speaker put it, ‘the writer has the right to err”. On the whole this was a literary expression of revision- ism. The central committee of the CPSU, and in particular N. S. Khrushchev, with his explosive polemical temperament, his splendid practical firmness and his good sense, brought a rapid and efficacious aid to our literature. The storm which growled over our heads one summer’s day, swept away the rubbish, refreshed the atmosphere and gave way to fine weather.’ Kochetov, who spoke after Gribatchov and Tvardovski, and who was implicitly answering the jatter, drew out the present conclusions from Gribatchov’s ‘historical’ and rather general picture. Together with his direct attack on the leadership of the Writers’ Union, which he considered to have FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 117 capitulated, the reaffirmed that the innovators were foreign to Soviet literature, bringing them into two complementary categories: the old and senile writers and the young mad-caps; both of them completely irresponsible: ‘There remain, in the writers’ milieu, some sullen memory makers, who look more to the past than towards the future, and who, by virtue of this twisted vision, with a zeal worthy of better use, poke in the dustbins of a somewhat squiffy memory to bring back to daylight literary corpses, long rotten, to pass them off as something still capable of life . . there are also some prose-writing and even versifying chicks, still spattered with yoke of egg, who are dying to take on the dangerous aspect of fighting cocks.’ These two groups are pernicious because they are introducing into the USSR an ideology that ‘capitalist writers’ defend, an ideology bringing disintegration: ‘The world of these writers is not large. It has the dimensions of a sheep’s skin or, to be more accurate, of ithe bed in which take place the actions of an innumerable multitude of Western novels, stories, plays and films.’ Tvardovski’s speech started clearly with a criticism of the aspects of Soviet literature that holds it back: ‘Our literature has not yet been able to benefit from the favourable conditions accorded it by the Twentieth Congress ... The reader cannot put up with lies in what is essential, basic .. . Yet the fault of many books, is that truth is lacking in them, that the writer is circumspect, constantly asking himself what is and is not allowed ... This is simply a hangover from methods and habits of an epoch of our history that was characterised, in general, by a spirit of suspicion that proved absolutely deadly as far as literature and art were concerned .. . the cult of the personality; unfortunately, because of the force of inertia, echoes of the past can still be heard in literature and, generally, in the press.’ The congress did not solve any of these literary quarrels, the ideological importance of which, the conservatives’ mouthpieces attempted to stress. The writers elected to the central committee were A. Korneichuk, who was already a member of the central committee under Stalin, V. Ermilov, and Sholokov, three more or less floating and opportunist conservatives. As alternate members there were elected: Gribatchov, Tikhonov and Surkov, three apparatus men, although the last named was already showing signs of wavering which were to get worse . and Tvardovski, then only recently honoured with the Lenin prize for literature. Moreover, the desire, a thousand times repeated, ‘to re-establish Leninist norms’ of legality and of socialist democracy does not seem to indicate a hardening of the party in the literary sphere, but on

[p031] 118 the contrary a new broadening of the process of liberalisation now begun. In fact there was a move in this direction, accompanied by administrative measures destined to control certain ‘excesses’. Thus, while allowing greater freedom to the writers, the party stressed, by its intermittent interventions, the permanent nature of its control over literary life. A good example of this policy of balance is the way in which the three literary scandals were handled. The editor-in-chief of Literaturnaya Gazeta, Kossolapov, who had replaced S. Smirnov, sacked on December 15, 1961, for liberal excesses, received a reprimand for having published a poem that was ‘politically harmful’, but the editor of Literatura i Zhizn was sacked for having published a criticism of Yevtushenko ‘unworthy of Soviet internationalist writers’. Literatura i Zhizn was to be finally sup- pressed in December 1962 and replaced by the weekly Literaturnaya Rossia, Finally, it was decided to pass by ‘Babi Yar’ in silence, and it was not included in the two Yevtushenko anthologies pub- lished in 1962: A Sign of the Hand and Tenderness. Yevtushenko was asked to rewrite his poem, which he finally decided to do, as he announced while passing through Paris in February 1963. ; The Yunost affair ended in a different way. First of all, The Starred Ticket was never published as a book,. whereas this is the normal course of events for any work published in a journal. Then the editor-in-chief of Yunost, V. Katayev, was sacked and replaced in February 1962 by Boris Polevoi, one of the most notable examples of the Stalinist writer- policeman, while Rozov kept his place on the editorial board. Under Polevoi’s editorship, Yunost was to become so conservative a journal that even Komsomolskaya Pravda was to get worried about it in October 1962. Finally, Aksionov was sent on a mission to the island of Sakhalin, at the other end of the USSR, by Khrushchev’s son-in-law Adzhubei, editor-in-chjef of Izvestia. On his return at the beginning of summer, he published two short stories which proved that the lesson had had very little effect. The plenary meeting of the Writers’ Union of Moscow on April 4-5, 1962, unexpectedly accelerated the process of: ‘relaxation’. The meeting had been announced by all the literary journals. The Minutes of the meeting have yet to appear. For in those two days, literary deStalinisation began to take on a dangerous aspect. A new leadership, of 80 members, was to be elected by the approximately 600 writers present. The elections were marked by the following incidents : TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE (2) 1. The party section itself withdrew three of the retiring members from the list of 76 official candi- dates which it was putting forward, because it fore- saw their certain defeat. They wert Kochetov, Gribatchov and A. Sofronov. 2. Of the 76 official candidates, eight were defeated, among them N. Abalkin, editor of the literary page of Pravda and L. Sobolev, chairman of the Writers’ Union of the RSFSR. 3. Three famous ‘lefts’ were elected: Y. Yevtu- shenko, A. Voznessenski and the literary critic, Mariamov, who had brought himself into the public eye a year previously by publishing a pitiless criticism of Kochetov’s latest rag ‘The Secretary from Obkom’ in Novy Mir January 1962). Demitchev, party secretary for the Moscow area, gave expression to the disarray into which the elections had plunged the officials when he declared in his closing address: ‘the way was easy in the time of the cult of the personality, when you knew exactly what to write and what to avoid.” Today you no longer quite know. How can the bureaucrats clearly distinguish the good from the bad? During the following months, the movement for literary liberation grew apace. As well as the two Yevtushenko anthologies, which we mentioned above, and both of which reached 100,000 copies, the publication of The Triangular Pear of Voznessenski, a collection of poems as modernist in content as in outward presentation, which printed 50,000 copies, was the sign of a profound development. In a brief introduction, Voznessenski, who was to declare in January 1963, ‘I am a guilty son of socialist realism’ (Yunost, 1963, No. 1) defined the birth of his poem in a way which is indeed far from the canons of socialist realism: ‘I am working on a great theme, on the “discovery of America” ... In the course of this work, events, life, memories, the Russian countryside and the Baltic coastline interrupt the story and turn the author away from the course which he had set himself. From whence the “discovery” of all other objects. Birch trees, sunsets, and motor bikes mix with the characters. The poem sunk like an over- loaded ship . . . the verses sorted themselves out according to their wishes, with neither theme nor geography ... This is the elaboration of a doctrine of artistic creation which recalls the surrealist conceptions so reviled by the bureaucrats. These three volumes by Yevtushenko and Voznessenki soon disappeared from the shops, so great was their success. It is said that even before the publication of Tenderness, this anthology of Yevtushenko had received 300,000 orders. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p032] TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE (2) 119 The Plenum of the leadership of the Moscow Writers At the end of September, the new leadership of the Moscow Writers’ Union held its first plenum, devoted to the examination of the work of young writers and the preparation of the meeting of the Writers’ Union, anticipated for the beginning of 1963. Two detailed reports were given, the first on “Young Prose’, by A. Borchagovski, the second on “Young Poetry’ by J. Smeliakov. A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich .. . On October 21, Pravda published Yevtushenko’s ‘Stalin’s Heirs’; on November 24, Izvestia published five anti-Stalinist poems by Boris Slutsky; the November issue of Novy Mir announced the accession of Yevtushenko and of Aksionov to the editorial board of the journal; the November issue of Novy Mir published the astonishing story by A. Solzhenitsyn, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—the story of life in the Stalinist con- centration camps, hailed by Simonov in Izvestia as a great event. Literaturnaya Gazeta stressed the far-reaching effect of the work, stating: ‘We must, all together, throw ourselves on this theme and repeat what has been said .. . the dialogue with the reader has risen a degree, and that is new. Many things with which we could have been contented even very recently have now become devoid of interest and have been superseded.” (November 22.) On November 27, an ultra-conservative writer, I. E. Elsberg, was expelled from the Moscow Writers’ Union as a ‘provocateur’ and ‘voluntary informer’, accused of having sent people to prison under Stalin, people who never came lback. On November 30, the young Soviet poets brought together an audience of more than 15,000 young Muscovite enthusiasts in the Lenin stadium, to hear their poetry. It was announced at the same time that the conservative organ of the Writers’ Union of the RSFSR, Literatura i Zhizn was to be suppressed at the end of December. This liberal upsurge seemed to be carried out with the complete agreement of the party leadership, as witness the publication of Yevtushenko and of Slutsky in the party dailies and the fact that the publication of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was carried by a majority vote in the Central Committee. Yevtushenko, in any case, stressed in ‘Stalin’s Heirs’: ‘The party has ordered me not to appease myself. I may be told: calm down! But I would not be calmed. FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 The discussion which followed these two reports was extremely favourable to the young writers. One of them, the poetess B. Akhmadulina, could rightly declare at the end of the plenum: ‘I think that time has worked in our favour and that circumstances are now favourable to us, to myself and my young comrades.’ SOLZHENITSYN His ‘Day’ carried by majority vote on the Central Committee As long as there are on earth Some of Stalin’s heirs It will seem to me that Stalin Is still in the mausoleum.’ Perhaps it was not decisive, but an exhibition of ‘abstract’ paintings and sculpture opened in Moscow during the last week of November. And it was then that the current turned suddenly. Stalin’s return? At the same time as the suppression of Literatura i Zhizn, the suppression of Moskovski Literatur (the organ of the Moscow Writers’ Union), demanded by Gribatchoy at the 22nd Congress, was announced. In the first days of December, Khrushchev, while visiting an exhibition of painting and sculpture, violently criticised the ‘abstract? works which were on view. He declared: ‘Art like this is foreign to our people, who reject it. Those people who aspire to be artists should think of that. They aspire to be artists, but they

[p033] 120 make pictures of such kind than one cannot under- stand whether they have been drawn by a man’s hand or by a donkey’s tail. They must understand their errors and work for the people.’ Stressing the contrast with the developments of the previous months M. Tatu wrote from Moscow in the Paris Le Monde: ‘the brutal offensive carried out against the non-conformist tendencies in the graphic arts and in painting have had the effect here of a bolt from a clear sky’. (4.12.63.) The clouds were not long in appearing. A few days later, the moderate conservative Johanson was replaced as chairman of the Academy of Fine Arts by the hardened conservative Vladimir Serov. On December 17, the leadership of the CPSU called together the representatives of the intelligentsia to whom the propaganda chief, Ilichev, made a speech, still very moderate in tone. He stated, among other things, which was curious, if one thinks of what was to follow: ‘the Central Committee of our party is satisfied with the state of affairs in the cultural sphere. Culture is progressing on a healthy basis along a correct road, in step with the times. Our art is healthy’, However, he notes that ‘Unfortunately, formalist tendencies have begun to spread, not only in the visual arts but also in music, literature and the cinema.’ It was to face up to this danger that the party leadership organised the first meeting in two and a half years between themselves and the intel- lectuals. After the speech and a brief contribution by Khrushchev, a real and very confused discussion followed. Gribflatchov demanded the suppression of the Moscow Writers’ Union. Yevtushenko tock up the defence of the ‘abstract’ sculptor Neizvestny, against attacks from Ilichev and, especially, Khrushchev. The ex-inmate of the Stalinist camps, Serebriakova, launched into a brutal attack against Ehreaburg. In fact, it would seem that a new balance, less favourable than before, but acceptable, has been set up. This was confirmed by the speech given by Ilichevy on December 26 to the ideological committee of the Central Committee of the CPSU. He stated: ‘We can only salute the search for new artistic forms. But this search can only be fruitful if it is directed on to the right path. To accept formalism and abstract art is to admit the existence of different ideologies. It is to go along the wrong path.’ But on the other hand, he stressed that there must be no fear ‘that the criticisms by the party of certain deficiencies in artistic life might bring back to life in the country the atmosphere that reigned at the time of the cult of the personality. That would be a grave mistake: the party will tolerate no more witch- hunts, or indexes’ . . . Practically, simultaneously, on December 14, Pravda brought to light the case TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE (2) Neizvestny’s abstract sculpture attacked of a Soviet citizen, Rudolph Friedmann, who had become an American spy through his love for abstract art. At the beginning of February, general Epichev, who had recently replaced Golikov as political chief of the Soviet armed forces, declared that the penetration of decadent western art into the Soviet troops was a factor of demoralisation in the Red Army! On the very day of Ilichev’s speech, the editor-in- chief of the Literaturnaya Gazeta, the liberal Kossolapov, was sacked for having slowed up the appearance of an article hostile to abstract art. He was replaced by a dulli-witted conservative, Tchakovski. Three weeks later, the editorial board of the journal was reshuffled. Two famous writers of liberal views, Solukhin and Bondarev, dis- appeared; they were replaced by G. Markov, I. Smeliakov and E. Osietrov, of whom only the first was on the right wing. On the whole, although the young poet, R. Rozhdesvenski remained on the board, the most important Soviet literary journal! passed over to the conservative camp, which was FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p034] TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE (2) curiously marked by the almost total disappearance of poetry from its columns, previously so full of it. Contrary to what might have been expected, things did not rest there. The conservative offensive grew. I. Ehrenburg was the first target: in a violent article by Lakhtionov (Pravda, January 4), then three weeks Jater in a perfidious article by V. Ermilov (zvestia, January 29) which reproached Ehrenburg for having been Stalin’s conscious accomplice. Ehrenburg had been too consciously the bloody buffoon of the ‘father of the peoples’ to be able to defend himself in any way except by turning the accusation back on his accusers. But he obviously could not suggest that those who bore down on him today had their own quota of blood on their hands, starting with the sinister Khrushchev, the instrument of repression against the communist cadres of the Ukraine. A new stage was reached with the enlarged meeting held between the party leaders and the writers, on March 7 and 8, 1963. Ilichev gave Ehrenburg the coup de grace, overwhelming him with quotations from ‘past times’. The attack against the young writers was carried out at the same time, with great brutality. The opportunists sailed with the wind. Sholokov, for example, declared that ‘T have wanted to criticise Ehrenburg for a long time’ . whereas on December 17, 1962, he had ostensibly supported him against Serebriakova. Khrushchev made a long speech, of which about a quarter was devoted to a semi-rehabilitation of Stalin, and in which he violently attacked the writers Nekrassov, Paustovski, Voznessenski and Katayev. On the other hand he defended Yevtu- shenko, whose conduct in France he found to be satisfactory. A month later, the chairman of the Moscow Writers’ Union, S. Shipachev, was relieved of his functions and replaced by the conservative Markov. The fortress of liberalism was thus being dismantled. Fifteen days later there followed a new hardening which was to take on some rather surprising aspects. The fourth plenum of the Soviet Writers’ Union met on March 26, 27 and 28. The very same Yevtushenko, to whom Khrushchev had issued a certificate of good conduct on March 8, found himself constrained to carry out a painful self- criticism. Such a change in the situation leads one to believe that the turn carried out by Khrushchev in the field of the arts was imposed on him by an opposition strong enough by March 20 to attack a poet with whom Khrushchev had declared himself satisfied on March 8, Pravda, in any case, deemed the poet’s self-criticism to be insufficient, as he was attacked for having had published in France an autobiography considered presumptuous, and certainly embarrassing for the rulers, insofar as the FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 121 anti-Stalinism in it did not have the merely tactical value that it had for the Soviet bureaucracy. The attacks against the young literature at this plenum were general. Tikhonov, who had shown some liberal impulses in December 1962, retrieved himself by making a speech along the lines of the new directives. Voznessenski was also constrained to make a self-criticism, which he did very evasively, remaining within honourable limits. R. Rozhdest- venski, B. Akhmadulina, A. Tvardovski, V. Nekrassov (who refused to submit I. Ehrenburg, A. Borcha- govski, Shipachev, A. Solzhenitsyn, A. Surkov, and B. Polevoi were themselves accused of having bent to the liberal wind. The overwhelming majority of the writers answered the conservative offensive which was backed up by the government apparatus, by a retreat into complete silence. Podgorny noted with amaze- ment that V. Nekrassov, who refused to make a self-criticism at the Kiev Writers’ Union had said that ‘to publicly admit one’s errors is, for a communist, lacking in self-respect’. Self-respect in front of a bureaucrat! It quickly became apparent that the offensive had petered out. On June 18, Ilichev explained: ‘Our task is not to excommunicate Soviet artists, but to help them to understand their artistic and ideological mistakes.’ This kind of statement marked a definite retreat. From the moment that the party leaders themselves accepted that the struggles between the innovators and the conservatives was purely literary, they were forced to reduce the pressure. And that was what happened. None of the editors of the journals was sacked, as for example Tvardovski, the editor of Novy Mir, the bastion of liberalism, who was to have been replaced by that shameless Stalinist V.I. Ermilov. The latter, amongst other things, had denounced Mayakovsky as a Trotskyist! In August, Izvestia published a long poem by Tvardovsky, called ‘Vassily Tiorkin in the other world’, a lively satire on the Stalinist bureau- cracy. Since then, all the other exorcised writers have reappeared in the journals: Yevtushenko, then Nekrassov and Voznessenski, and finally B. Okud- zhava. Khrushchev denied that V. Nekrassov had ‘been expelled from the CPSU—an expulsion that he himself had announced. However, with the exception of Yevtushenko in March 1963, none of the writers confessed to his mistakes. Doubtless, some of the young writers took up a fairly dubious attitude of compromise, whilst old Ehrenburg played the fierce and immovable resistant, and this may have been considered half a success by those in power. But this half-success was more than counterbalanced by the pitiable retreat that they had to make before a conspiracy of silence on which

[p035] 122 they were unable to make any significant impression, even though Voznessenski was sent to work in a factory for a while as an example. Reconciliation between the regime that needs its intelligentsia and this intelligentsia’s demands for freedom, appears to be ever more difficult. Without doubt, the weakness displayed ‘by the bureaucracy in this sphere can not have any serious consequences so long as the force which it confronts is the intelligentsia. At the moment, the bureaucracy is only receiving scratches. But when the objective conditions are right, a scratch could lead to gangrene. Unconsciously, this is what the writers are preparing. The writers are beginning to raise fundamental questions. In Polytika, the weekly paper of the Central Committee of the Polish Communist Party, Aksionov asks ‘how could they allow 1937 to happen?’ (March 2, 1963). A. Gladilin, in his book Eternal Mission, explains that a good communist militant must ask himself a thousand questions including: ‘how could there be a 1937?’ He goes even further in The First day of the New Year where he makes an old communist remember ‘the days when, very sharp with one another, we dis- cussed Trotsky, our old teachers, the NEP, in our meetings’; this old communist goes on to explain that the scaffolding holding up the trials of 1937 has been completely dismantled: ‘the old Bolsheviks told themselves that the more monstrous the charges, the sooner would the future bring their absurdity to light. It was possible to believe that an cld Bolshevik, in ‘the heat of the inner party struggle, could have wanted to remove Stalin from the general secretaryship. But today, even a child does not believe that this old Bolshevik on top of that plotted in 1918, organised assassinations, set fire to warehouses, sabotaged our equipment, poisoned grain and caused little children to die, gave himself over to the British, American, French, German, Japanese, Polish, Brazilian and Iranian spy services all at once, and that he promised to hand over to foreign countries the Ukraine, White ‘Russia, the Crimea, the Caucasus and the Far East’. This represents a certain development. I remember in 1959 hav.ng told a student who was questioning me about juy political opinions: ‘I am a Trotskyist’, and the student answering ‘how can that be? Trotsky was respons- ible for the death of so many Bolsheviks, and you seem to be progressive!’ Finally, the son of the old communist states: ‘the consequences of the cult of the personality will not be wiped out if we are content with taking down portraits and renaming towns. ... we do not want to be an undifferentiated mass, all alike, voiceless participants on the chess ‘board of some great policy. TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE (2) ... We do not want to be simply small cogs...” sometimes the critical audacity is involuntary, but this merely gives it more weight. Thus in his novel The Return to Birthplace (1964), the conformist novelist Anatol Kuznetsov shows us a collective farm which goes to pieces because the manageress is lazy and a thief The dairywomen manage to get the manageress dismissed, as her incompetence was flagrant, but to encourage their development, she is not replaced. The result, which astonishes the collective’s peasants themselves, is that, now that they can organise their time themselves, the formerly fairly lazy, passive dairywomen, without initiative or ideas, become unrivalled workers. Once they stop mutely obeying orders from on high, once they have got rid of the parasite which had been imposed on them, they change themselves profoundly. It would, however, be illusory to believe that the floating mass of Soviet anti-Stalinist writers could be transformed into a serious revolutionary centre of attraction. It is sufficient to talk to Yevtushenko, Voznessensky or Nekrassov for a few hours to realise their ignorance of and indifference to Marxism. This attitude is clearly widespread in numerous circles of the intelligentsia and is one of the survivals of the success of the Stalinist policy of liquidation of Bolshevism. It explains, for example, why the anti-Stalinist intelligentsia made Pasternak (in spite of—or because of?—his Christian view of the world) its master, or rather its model. To this lack of any Marxist view of society, which is linked to the ambiguous position of the intelli- gentsia, is added an extremely burdensome spiritual inheritance. From the 19th century onwards, as a result, amongst other factors, of its place in Russian society, a place modified only in the disastrous post-revolutionary years of war communism and the NEP, the Russian intelligentsia has always oscillated between equally unfortunate Dostoievskyism and Tolstoyism: between the withdrawal into a demoral- ising feeling of nothingness or worthlessness, and a mystical exaltation of individual mission and of regeneratory non-violence! From there comes the instability of the Russian intelligentsia, subject both to wild adventure as at the time of the Narodniki, or to utter demoralisation or even cynicism, as at the time of Stolypin. In the New Leader of December 9, 1963, there is a letter from a Soviet writer which shows just where this moral and intellectual unbalance, this inheritance from the past maintained by the present conditions of the existence of the intelligentsia in the USSR can lead. ‘Russia, one feels, will always be an unhappy country. Even when it ceases to be impoverished, FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964

[p036] TRENDS IN SOVIET LITERATURE (2) it will still be unhappy ... How can this un- happiness be explained? Certainly not by com- munism alone. In Russia, unhappiness is almost a national character. Today it stands like Death in Holbein’s dances before the writer whose hand cannot hold a pen after the latest gutter campaign against him. It stands before the glum tense face of the man in the street. It stands before the sadist Stalin and the busybody Khrushchev. It stands next to everybody. How can it be escaped? I have not the slightest idea.’ Confronted with this metaphysical amoralism, how much weight can be given to the personal con- viction of the communist writer Tendriakov that one day democratic demands will triumph in the USSR? His school headmaster in An Extraordinary Tale praises the merits of discussion, of differences of opinion and organises a symbolic vote in his school on three conflicting programmes. His ideal is “We will live to see the day when the highest rules of a new discussion are instituted’. This reformism is a bit anaemic. To this latent demoralisation is added FOURTH INTERNATIONAL AUTUMN-WINTER 1964 123 the constant threat of the omnipresent police force, which has just sent away the young Leningrad poet Brodsky for five years’ hard labour for social parasitism.* Finally, it should be added that the Chinese polemic today adds yet another element of con- fusion, insofar as the Peking bureaucrats cover their criticisms of the Kremlin bureaucrats with Stalin’s banner. This can only hold up any progress of political consciousness in a social environment particulariy decimated by Stalinist terrorism. If Peking seems to be the only way out for those who reject both Washington and Khrushchev, it will lead to a dead end. Even here, in this restricted field, the vital need for a real Fourth International shows itself with cruel force. * After having falsely announced the release of the poet Brodsky, who was sentenced despite the protests of S. Marshak, K. Chovkovsky, D. Shostakovitch and other famous artists, the Soviet government has just announced his release for the second time.