The only official socialist realism likely to endure beyond the memory of the Stalin era is that of Michael Sholokhov's novels, which captured
some of the flavor of its epic transformations and violent inhumanity. The Leninist and Stalinist revolutions are retold in credible if somewhat two-dimensional terms in his And Quiet Flows the Don and his Virgin Soil Upturned, respectively. But even this scrupulously loyal (and fundamentally anti-Western and anti-intellectual) writer was harassed and delayed in his effort to tell the second of these stories. In the high Stalin era, he withdrew increasingly to the countryside of his native Ukraine, summoning up the image and authority of an enduring nature in titles and descriptive passages, publishing the full version of Virgin Soil only after Khrushchev had denigrated Stalin, and becoming after Khrushchev's fall the third Russian writei to be awarded a Nobel Prize.70
For the historian of Russian thought, the Stalin era has an importance quite apart from the personality of the dictator. For it was a period in which many long silent forces suddenly came to play an important role in Russian cultural life. Like forms of growth incubating in the frozen subsoil, masochistic and chauvinistic impulses suddenly shot forth as Stalin's mechanized plows dug below the surface and brought them closer to the light.
At the same time, the soil overturned by this "second revolution" proved hospitable to new crops that sprang up from fresh seeds of literacy and learning. Though Stalin liked to fancy himself as having infinite power to control the vegetable as well as the human world (as his deification of Lysenko's environmentalism reveals), he was faced with some unexpected crops on the steppelands that he had so systematically harrowed and burned out. If the political and economic historian must deal largely with Lenin's seeding and Stalin's weeding, the cultural historian must look at the deeper problems of the soil, and-however tentatively-at the relation of present harvests to those of the past and the future.
3. Fresh Ferment
Ihe general nature of Russian accomplishments under Bolshevism have long been evident. Urbanization and industrialization have accelerated; the sinews of military strength have dramatically increased; and centralized control has combined with a scientific ideology to achieve greater internal discipline than had previously been attained by Russian rulers. The resourceful, if brutal, leaders of the USSR have perfected-out of their own revolutionary experience-effective means of frustrating any political challenge to their authority, whether through agitation from within or subversion from without. Finally-largely because they were in power during World War II and have registered important material accomplishments since- the Communist leadership has sold itself to the long-suffering Russian people as something more than a passing phenomenon in their long historical experience.
But the plans and accomplishments of the ruling oligarchy have always been only a part of the complex record of Russian history. Just as the Russian heritage influenced in many ways the official culture developed under Stalin, so also the problems that came to perplex him seem strangely familiar. The historian can, of course, never know precisely how the past relates to the present, particularly when surrounded by the unprecedented problems of the atomic age. Nor can he know precisely how the inherited forms of art and thought affect the world of power politics and economic necessity. But it is his duty to point out those themes which sound like echoes from the past, and there was a hauntingly large number in the late Stalin era.
To begin with, there was the stimulus of war: a recurrent theme of modern Russian history. The sense of exhilaration, self-sacrifice, and increased social mobility had traditionally combined with new Western contacts to stimulate reformist sentiment in modern Russia. Indeed, radical agitation had almost invariably followed important wars and enlisted the services of returning veterans: the Decembrists following the Napoleonic
wars; the "new men" of the sixties, the Crimean War; the revolutionary populists, the Turkish War; the Revolution of 1905, the war with Japan; and the Revolutions of 1917, World War I. It was not unreasonable to suppose that the dislocations and exposure to the West during World War II would lead to similar reformist pressures-coming in the wake of the suffering and deception of the 1930's. Many Russians did, indeed, defect to the Germans; and Stalin went to extremes to limit contacts with his wartime Western allies. The purges and violent anti-Westernism of the early post-war period were, in large measure, attempts to prevent what might otherwise have been an irresistible drift toward some form of political liberalization and accommodation to long-suppressed consumer needs.
The fact that the key purges of 1948-9 are referred to in Soviet literature as "the Leningrad case" points to a second traditional feature of recent Soviet history: the recurrence of the old tension between Moscow and Leningrad. The revenge of Muscovy had perforce to be directed against its ancient rival for pre-eminence in the Russian Empire. Leningrad was still a "window to the West," and, within the Communist Party, the Leningrad organization had traditionally represented revolutionary idealism and broad international culture from the time of Trotsky and Zinov'ev. These figures had been among the earliest victims of Stalin's intrigues; and he began the purges of the thirties with the murder of their successor as head of the Leningrad Party, Serge Kirov. His successor, Andrei Zhdanov, perished in turn with mysterious suddenness in the midst of the post-war decimation of the Leningrad Party. Having suffered nearly three years of blockade during the war, Leningrad had emerged with certain credentials of heroism that commanded respect in the post-war USSR. It had become the center not only of artistic and intellectual ferment but also of a relative emphasis on light industry in future economic development. Leningrad was still, as it had been in the days of tsarist St. Petersburg, the center and symbol of patterns of development closer to those of the West than those favored in Moscow.
Another recurrent theme is the dilemma of despotic reformism confronted by Stalin's successors. Following, as had Catherine II, Alexander I, and Alexander II, on the heels of a repressive and authoritarian predecessor, Stalin's heirs sought to rekindle popular enthusiasm by sweeping initial amnesties and vague promises of reform. The line first sounded by Malenkov with his amnesties from forced labor camps and promises of a "new course" was taken over and given a new theatrical quality by Khrushchev. But the new ruler soon confronted the classic problem which had so perplexed Catherine and the two Alexanders. How can one introduce reforms without jeopardizing the despotic basis of control? How can one
revive initiative without stimulating insubordination? In the wake of his denunciation of Stalin in February, 1956, Khrushchev met in Hungary, Poland, and his own country the equivalent of the shock administered to Catherine by Pugachev and the French Revolution, to Alexander I by the Semenovsky uprising and the European revolutions of the early 1820's, and to Alexander II by the ideological tumult and assassination attempts of the 1860's. Faced with a revolution of rising expectations that he had helped to call forth, he was forced to reassert the authoritarian essence of his position. As so often in the past, reformist rhetoric gave way to renewed repression.
Pressures for retrenchment on reform in the late fifties and early sixties were, however, to some extent countered by yet another recurrence of an old Russian theme: the conflict of two generations. Khrushchev appeared to have sensed the wisdom of attempting to befriend the articulate young generation, whose outlook differed profoundly from that of the shell-shocked survivors and bureaucratic beneficiaries of the Stalin era. For the new generation the material accomplishments of the second, Stalinist revolution seemed as remote as the Utopian dreams of the first Leninist revolution had been to their Stalinist parents. The new generation was brought up, rather, amidst the high hopes that had accompanied the wartime effort. It was a better-educated generation, conscious of the disparity between its own technical competence and the bureaucratic sloth and psychotic excesses of Stalin's post-war rule. It had been a silent generation; but it rapidly found things to say, when Khrushchev in his own political insecurity ga
ve it the opportunity in 1956. Even more important, the new generation kept on talking after the inevitable reaction in late 1956 and 1957. Voices began to be heard from creative periods of the Russian past; less timid they seemed, or at least less intimidated. By the early sixties some were speaking of an even more radical generation composed of those in their early twenties and known by the historically venerable term "men of the sixties."
The age of Stalin was at last coming to an end: a quarter of a century dominated by the idea of zagovor, or "conspiracy." A conspiratorial code of revolutionary expediency had been transposed into a system of government, and Stalin's own intrigues camouflaged with tales of conspiracy by Trotskyite wreckers, capitalist encirclers, Titoist vampires, or simply "certain circles." All these forces were united in "a conspiracy of the condemned" against the USSR (to cite the title of Virta's violently anti-American drama of 1948). Within the USSR, Stalin's subordinates might be forming a "conspiracy of boyars" (the subtitle of the second part of Eisen-stein's Ivan the Terrible). Even inside the Kremlin, the possibility existed that conspiratorial doctor-poisoners were secretly at work.
From the populace in general, Stalin was aided by what came to be called "the conspiracy of silence" (a phrase used first in the 1820's by a disillusioned Westernizer, Prince Viazemsky, to describe the political passivity of Russians before the tyrannical methods of Nicholas I).1 Bruno Jasienski, a Polish Communist who moved to France and then to suicide in Russia during the purges, used the even more telling phrase "conspiracy of the indifferent" (the title of his important unfinished work of the thirties, which was published only after the denigration of Stalin in 1956).2
After the death of Stalin, the all-important question was: What could provide an antidote to conspiratorial government supported by conspiracies of silence and indifference? A prophetic hint was provided by yet another concept of conspiracy that had been put forth on the eve of Stalin's second revolution by the last of the short-blooming crop of humorists from Odessa, Yury Olesha. In his tale of 1927, Envy, Olesha gathered together a few Old World intellectuals into a "conspiracy of feelings"3 (which became the title of the dramatic form of the novel). Supremely superfluous people, envious of the brave new world being built about them, Olesha's "conspirators" are implausible egg-head cavaliers (one of them is named Kavalerov) among the revolutionary roundheads: vacillating, yet still princely Hamlets in an age when this symbol of the old intelligentsia was about to be abolished from the stage.
In Olesha's novel the strong arm of Soviet power is represented by two figures, one a soccer player and the other a sausage maker, bent on building a kind of giant supermarket system for the new society. They are clearly the wave of the future, and to sustain their conspiracy Olesha's errant cavaliers flee to the world of fantasy, where they build a machine to destroy all machines and name it "Ophelia." But this missing Madonna for the conspiracy of feelings will not permit herself to be used. It was Hamlet's coldness that killed Ophelia; and now, brought back to life by the Hamlets of the old intelligentsia, Ophelia proves a vengeful lady-turning on them rather than the machines.
The net effect of the story, however, is to arouse sympathy for the "conspiracy" and leave one with the impression that its apolitical opposition to the new order will somehow continue. The activity of the decade since Stalin can be viewed as a posthumous vindication of some of the feelings which Olesha's cavaliers had been unable to defend.
After a quarter of a century of Stalin's "conspiracy of equals" (the title of Ehrenburg's laudatory novel of 1928 about Babeuf's organization of that name4), the time had come for "the thaw" (to cite the title of the novel he published in 1954). The killing frost had stricken Russian culture in full blossom, and no one could be sure what would emerge after such a
winter. But one old branch survived unbent, and many new shoots did appear. Thus, one must turn to the envoi left by a "survival of the past," Boris Pasternak, and to the fresh voices raised by Soviet youth in the decade since Stalin.
The Reprise of Pasternak
Whatever his historical impact on Russian culture may prove to be, Pasternak set forth in the last writings before his death in i960 a remarkable human testament and a moving reprise on the culture of Old Russia that is deserving of study in its own right.
It was perhaps to be expected that this reprise should be that of a poet. Man's power to sing spontaneously and implausibly may well provide his only path to dignity and self-respect in an age of calculation, deception, and spiritual isolation. Boris Pasternak, one of the purest and most musical poets of the century, had that power. It put him in communion with the world of unheard melodies and higher harmony which has always been suspect to proponents of a closed and authoritarian society. Plato would have banished the poets from his Republic, and Lenin the sounds of the "Appassionata" from his memory.
But, for Pasternak, poetry was everything: not just a form of consolation for the adversity of contemporary political and economic life, but rather a way of cutting through all artificiality to the real world-the throbbing and sensuous world of persons, places, and things. Pasternak seeks to defend that world against the less real world of abstract slogans, creeds, and statistics. Individual poetry is the language of the former; corporate prose, the medium of the latter. In a land bent on producing quantities of the most artificial prose in a pretentiously bureaucratic century, Pasternak remained an uncompromisingly lyric poet. His commitment was not to ideas but to life itself-from the verses he wrote in the revolutionary year of 1917 entitled My Sister Life to the last poems of Doctor Zhivago, whose name means "living."
Why was the poet of life permitted to survive? He was too well known to have been overlooked; yet, despite long periods of silence and diversion into translating, Pasternak never renounced his poetic course nor compromised himself by writing servile odes to Stalin and hymns to collectivization, Stalin himself must have willed or agreed.to his survival. Perhaps he was in some way moved by the uncorrupted quality of this pure poetic offshoot of Old Russia. Or perhaps Stalin sensed a certain occult power
in the one who defined the poet as "brother to a dervish."5 Certainly Pasternak had a singular record of nonconformity to the artistic mores of Stalinist Russia, beginning with his letter to Stalin at the time of the mysterious death of Stalin's first wife in November, 1932. Refusing to sign the stereotyped letter of consolation offered by other leading writers, Pasternak published a letter of his own to Stalin:
I align myself with the feelings of my comrades. On the eve I was thinking deeply and tenaciously about Stalin; for the first time as an artist. In the morning I read the news. I was shocked exactly as if I had been alongside, had lived and seen.6
Whatever the reasons, Pasternak survived and stayed on in Russia. With the coming of the first "thaw" after Stalin's death, Pasternak published in April, 1954, ten poems described as "poems from the novel in prose, Dr. Zhivago." There was a good deal even in this first announcement. The statement that the poet had nearly finished his first and only novel created considerable anticipation, for it meant that he had for some time been occupied with a new kind of work. He had accepted the prosaic world of contemporary Russia, and decided to communicate at length with it apparently in the language it could understand. The description "a novel in prose" indicated that he intended to replay with variations older literary themes, since Pushkin had characterized his Eugene Onegin as a "novel in verse." The idea that the novel would deal with Soviet reality and at the same time recapitulate some of the older Russian cultural heritage was quietly set forth in the author's explanatory note that Zhivago was to "cover the period from 1903 to 1929," and deal with "a thinking man in search of truth, with a creative and artistic bent."7
There are many ways of looking at this work, which was published abroad three years later despite strenuous Soviet objections, and then awarded a Nobel Prize which its author was forced to decline. Stalinists in Russia and sensationalists abroad have referred to it as a kind of anti-Revolutionary dia
tribe; literary specialists have demonstrated their critical sang-froid by calling it inferior to his poetry and assigning to it a kind of B+ to A- rating on their literary scorecards; students of the occult have looked at the work as a kind of buried treasure chest of symbols and allusions.8 Behind this critical din stand the massive shadows of two less articulate groups: the millions with no knowledge of Russia who have read and been moved by it; and the millions within Russia who have not been allowed to see it.
If Stalin would not permit Pasternak to be done away with altogether, neither would Stalin's successors permit him to publish freely. Pasternak's
last years were spent in forced isolation, surrounded by petty harassments and veiled threats. Indeed, no figure within the USSR was treated to a more shrill and vulgar chorus of official denunciation during "de-Stalinization" than this mild poet. To the all-powerful Communist bureaucrats of Khrushchev's Russia he was the bearer of a "putrid infection," the producer of "decadent refuse," and generally "worse than a pig," because "a pig will never befoul the place where it eats and sleeps."9
There were good reasons why the campaign against Pasternak had to be pursued vigorously despite awkwardness and embarrassment. For Pasternak's Zhivago posed in effect a challenge to the moral basis of the regime. Rather than follow the approved path of criticizing the particular cheers which writers had previously rendered to Stalin, Pasternak was challenging the entire conception of writer-as-cheerleader. He presented in Zhivago a challenge to the moral superiority of the imitative activist who has externalized and materialized life, who accepts the constant rationalization that the individual self must be sacrificed for "the good of the social collective."10 By creating an essentially passive sufferer and giving him a credible, even appealing, inner life, Pasternak offered an alternative to the two-dimensional "new Soviet man."
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