To the Soviet leadership, however, intellectual ferment was a subject of the most profound concern. The extraordinary amount of time and energy spent on artistic and intellectual affairs by Khrushchev-an earthy figure, who clearly had no personal interest in such matters-must be explained at least partly in terms of the omnipresent concern of insecure autocrats for the realities of power. The Soviet leaders have vivid memories of the extraordinary role played by the intelligentsia in the genesis of their own aging revolutionary movement. They also realize that Leninist governments-no matter how "liberalized" or "de-Stalinized"-are ultimately based on an ideology. Political power in a totalitarian state is not based either on the periodic popular elections of a democracy or on the religiously sanctified hereditary succession of more traditional forms of authoritarian rule. The stated rationale for Communist rule in the USSR has remained the metaphysical pretensions of that party to represent the vanguard of the historical process on the verge of moving "from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom." Although the USSR could shed its ideological pretensions and become simply another powerful state with a permissive, pluralistic culture, there is no reason to assume (as the history of Nazi Germany demonstrates) that such developments must necessarily result from growing education and prosperity.
There are, nevertheless, at least four reasons for believing that the
ferment of the post-Stalin era may represent the beginnings of something new rather than a finished or passing episode. First is the sheer number of people involved in the ferment. Previous ideological unrest in Russian history was invariably confined to a small minority which discussed issues in relative isolation from the populace as a whole. Many more people read Katkov's chauvinistic Russian Herald than Mikhailovsky's Annals of the Fatherland, the sensationalist illustrated Niva than the World of Art. In the USSR of the sixties, however, ideological controversy was waged in the most widely circulated journals-and among a populace which has acquired elementary literacy and some schooling in ideological terminology. The monopoly of the Communist party on the organs of communication seemed of decreasing importance in a time when the exact line on many questions remained either unclear or unenforced.
Khrushchev's denigration of Stalin in 1956 opened a Pandora's box of critical questions about where and how things went wrong. The petulant explanation ad hominem that the trouble began with Stalin's "cult of personality" in the mid-thirties and his institution of purges against the party did not answer the question or even provide the kind of "profound Marxist analysis" that loyal Leninists were seeking. Some apparently view forced collectivization as the fatal departure; others blame the entire Leninist conception of a totalitarian party and compression of the two revolutions into one. The "Aesopian" tradition of discussing unmentionable political questions in terms of past history has been revived; and the great increase in the late fifties and early sixties in the number of students studying history in effect bespeaks a more lively interest in public affairs among the younger generation.
The party devoted a special Central Committee meeting early in the summer of 1963 solely to ideological and cultural matters. Indications of unrest (even including occasional strikes) in the industrial and agricultural sector point to the fact that the vague desires and rising expectations of the young intellectuals probably correspond more closely to the grass roots attitudes of workers and farmers than in any previous period of intellectual ferment inside Russia.
Even more important than the numbers of people involved is the fact that this ferment is the product of something necessary for Soviet construction itself: expanded contact with the West and increased education. Though the intention of the Communist leadership is clearly to use travel and education as subordinate weapons in the development of Soviet strength, the effects of its policies may prove more far-reaching. Vasily Kliuchevsky, the great historian of the late imperial period, put the case
well in his classic study of the effects produced on Russian culture by increased Western contact in the seventeenth century:
We may consider that the technical fruits of a foreign culture may not and should not relate to the spiritual bases and roots of the foreign culture, but can people be kept from the desire to acquaint themselves with the roots of a foreign culture when borrowing its fruits?73
For the USSR of today the answer is clearly, no. The curiosity about all things Western-art, music, sports, and manner of life-is animated and inescapable.
The scientific and technological emphases that the Soviet leaders have built into their educational system and cultural exchange proposals have led some Western observers to fear for a "new illiteracy,"74 whereby people are successfully taught to read and even to perform difficult technical tasks without ever learning to think critically. It is difficult, however, to keep technology and ideology in hermetically sealed compartments, particularly in such fields as architecture. Garish and costly monumentalism had become a symbol of the Stalin era, which his successors were anxious to eliminate. By sending delegations to the West to study cheaper and cleaner methods of construction, the regime inadvertently stimulated curiosity about the possibility of integrating architecture with local surroundings and family needs and removing questions of aesthetic judgment from the hands of bureaucrats.75
The first important denunciations of "degenerate excesses" in the anti-Stalin campaign after the Twentieth Party Congress in February, 1956, took place in a scientific laboratory.78 There is receptivity among scientifically trained young Russians to the proposition that Marxism, although a logical outgrowth of nineteenth-century scientific thinking, is inadequate for the more complex and sophisticated thought world of twentieth-century science. Voznesensky, the most technically sophisticated and ideologically heretical of all the young poets, reports that his largest following lies precisely among scientists. Those who work most intimately with the complexities and subtleties of natural phenomena are, he reports, sympathetic to these same qualities in art.77 Evtushenko makes a similar point by insisting that an art of the "oxcart" age is incompatible with life in the space age.78 Increasingly, the literary heroes of the new generation are lonely scientific workers, misunderstood for the most part by their contemporaries and harassed if not persecuted by the Soviet system. Increasingly, the message they seem to be conveying is that of the lonely inventor in Dudintsev's
Not by Bread Alone: "Once a man has started to think, he cannot be denied his freedom."
If, as seems probable, scientifically trained and practically oriented figures are to play an increasingly important role in pressing for change inside the USSR, some of the self-defeating utopianism of past intellectual agitation may well disappear. Creeping pragmatism may not seem an exciting phenomenon to the distant observer. But to those who have seen great expectations so often give way to renewed tyranny and despair this new no-nonsense approach may well provide fortification against disillusionment in the quest for meaningful reform.
A third and even deeper reason for taking the youthful ferment seriously is the psychological need for Russians to make some sense out of the enormous suffering they have undergone in this century. Perhaps forty million people have been killed by artificial means in the last half century -in revolution, civil war, forced repopulation, purges, and two world wars. The myth of Communist infallibility in terms of which all of this suffering was justified is now dead. The papacy of world Communism has been destroyed by Khrushchevian sacrilege-or perhaps moved to Peking. In any event, Russians no longer regard their leadership with the awe and passivity that so long prevailed.
The ordinary man still seeks a credible account of recent Russian history to replace the mythic one of the Stalin era. Thus, the quest for explanation goes on. It feeds on a belief rooted in the chronicles and secularized by Hegel, Marx, and Lenin that there is an intelligible pattern and meaning to history. Behind the quest lies the desire to feel that suffering has not been in vain, that beyond statistical consolations and ideological opiates something better
is really coming into being-on earth as it is in space. Many continue to call themselves Communists, because that is the banner under which Russians have worked and suffered in recent years. But Evtushenko is typical in his highly un-Leninist definition of communism as "the decency of the revolutionary idea," deserving of respect because it has become "the essence of the Russian people," entitled to authority only in "a state in which truth is president."79
Decency and truth demand an owning up to some of the darker pages of Russian history. Just as the younger generation has embraced a kind of philo-Semitism as a means of atoning for the anti-Semitism of past Russian history, so has it adopted a sympathetic attitude toward the small Baltic states, whose periodic despoliation and repopulation by Russian conquerors from Ivan III to Stalin has long bothered sensitive Russians. The term "Baits" was used as a synonym for Siberian prisoners in the High Stalin era; and recent Soviet literature has tended to praise and indeed idealize
this beleaguered region. There is special respect for the Esthonians, whose integrity and fidelity to democratic forms during their brief period of independence between the two world wars won them an admiration comparable to that earned by their cultural kin and northern neighbors, the Finns. The hero of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich devotes a special paragraph to the subject:
Well, it's said that nationality doesn't mean anything and that every nation has its bad eggs. But among all the Esthonians Shukhov had known he'd never met a bad one.80
The rebellion of four youths in V. Aksenov's Salinger-like Ticket to the Stars is told in terms of their plan to flee to Tallinn, the capital of Esthonia and traditional center of Westward-looking gaiety in the eastern Baltic.81 The growing respect for decency and truth can also be measured by the increasing inability of party functionaries to gain support for their periodic campaigns of denunciation. Younger writers seem unlikely to be either fully bought off by the material inducements or fully intimidated by the partial punishments which the regime alternately employs. Sensitive weathervanes of ideological change, such as Ilya Ehrenburg, have unreservedly thrown in their lot with the younger generation. The term "fighter of the first rank" (along with second and third ranks) has been introduced as a kind of informal patent of moral nobility; and Evtushenko has noted that "people someday will marvel at our time when simple honesty was called courage."82 Even Khrushchev felt obliged to sell himself as the benefactor of youthful expectations against "Stalin's heirs," who were blasted with his approval in Pravda by Evtushenko's poem of that name. Khrushchev's successors were, initially at least, deferential if not defensive toward dissident young intellectuals, assuring them that the arbitrary interference of the Khrushchev era would cease and attempting to present themselves as the true friends of "genuine intellectuality" (intelligentnost'). This term became late in 1965 the latest in the long line of normative terms derived from intelligentsia, but when officially proclaimed to be "in no way opposed to narodnosf or partiinost',"83 seemed more likely to remind Russians of the three "ism's" comprising the confining "official nationality" of the nineteenth century than to guide them toward the new world they seek in the late
twentieth century.
A fourth and related reason for insisting on the future implications of the current intellectual ferment is the fact that it has roots in Russian tradition as well as Soviet reality. The more one looks at the younger generation and its search for positive ideals, the more one senses that they are not just opposed to their Stalinist parents (often referred to now as "the
ancestors"),84 but are in many ways seeking renewed links with their grandparents. They are, in short, rediscovering some of the culture which was just reaching new richness in both the political and artistic spheres at the time of the Stalinist blight.
In a short poem written in a Soviet youth magazine in the old folklore form a young Soviet poet seeks to rehabilitate the symbol of Westernization desecrated by Stalin, to free it even of its Leninist name and revolutionary symbols:
Tell us something of St. Petersburg,
For as yet we have not seen it.
Long ago we implored the producers
Please, do not bring us all those miscellaneous films
About lovely, deserted ladies,
But bring us St. Isaac's in a movie
The Bronze Horseman, the old fortress
And all about the vast St. Petersburg.85
Of course, it is impossible fully to appraise-and would be dangerous to underestimate-the crippling effects of a generation of terror and the continuation of tight censorship and control. "Moral convalescence"8* may be a long process. The "silence of Soviet culture" is most insidious in the self-imposed censorship that it subtly encouraged. As the Soviet novelist Daniel Granin wrote in a short story in 1956 significantly entitled "My Own Opinion" (and severely criticized by the party bureaucracy):
Silence is the most convenient form of lying. It knows how to keep peace with the conscience; it craftily preserves your right to withhold your personal opinion on the grounds that someday you will have a chance to express it.87
Yet there can also be a positive side to silence: a depth and purity that sometimes comes to those who have suffered in silence. This quality is often hard to discover in the uninhibited and talkative West, but may be more familiar to those who for so long gave special authority to monastic elders trained by long periods of silence and withdrawal from the world.
"Speech, after long silence; it is right," wrote Yeats.88 Perhaps those who have been so long forced to live with silence may have rediscovered the joy of simple speech or penetrated the mysteries of authentic human communication more fully than many seemingly sophisticated and articulate writers outside. "Music is born in silence," reverently writes one of the best of contemporary Soviet movie directors,89 and one of the best of the young poets has written vividly:
I know that men consist of words which
have embraced them. The word moves. Earth is on fire. Deep feelings rest on silence. Suffering is mute and so is music.90
The respect of so many of the young artists for Pasternak is based on his faithfulness in guarding the integrity of his words, and his faith that a new birth would come out of those regions "where the language is still pure." The most intense and dedicated of young writers seem to have recaptured some of the old monastic sense of writing as a sacred act, the recording of words so that they may be sung aloud with joyful exaltation. Some of them even seem to be suggesting that the Word of the evangelist may offer an antidote to the "words, words, words" of the old intelligentsia and the endless slogans of the new. One poet has written in honor of the great monastic iconographer:
Rublev knew how to fall on his knees before the word.
That is to say
The One that was in the beginning.91
He goes on to point out that Rublev was redeemed and inspired "not by a swineherd symbolizing labor, but quite simply by the Savior."
There is, of course, no way of knowing how deep and lasting the ferment of the Khrushchev era may prove to be, or of evaluating how much and in what ways the young generation will continue to press for reform when tempted by lucrative careers in the official establishment and increasing material prosperity. One recent Soviet story tells how a watchman suddenly discovers on the outskirts of a collective farm Christ in bast shoes saying to the Mother of God: "We have tested men in many ways-by war and hunger… . We must try them now with a good harvest."92 Perhaps with a few good harvests unrest will vanish and the unfulfilled aspirations of Russian culture will linger on only as a kind of wistful memory. All things pass, and the impossibility of knowing what may prove important to the generations ahead is the final fascination and ultimate mystery of history. Perhaps all that the non-prophetic historian can do is make a few last reflections on the historical process itself, and on that part of it which he has examined in search of some final clues to the chapters that lie ahead.
4- The Irony of Russian
In looking fo
r some way of understanding the perplexities of history, the concept of irony has a certain appeal. A sense of the ironic leads man somewhere between the total explanations of nineteenth-century historicism and the total absurdity of much present-day thought. In his Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr has defined irony as "apparently fortuitous incongruities in life which are shown upon closer examination to be not merely fortuitous."1 Irony differs from pathos in that man bears some responsibility for the incongruities; it differs from comedy in that there are hidden relations in the incongruities; and it differs from tragedy in that there is no inexorable web of fate woven into the incongruities.
Irony is a hopeful, though not a reassuring, concept. Man is not a helpless creature in a totally absurd world. He can do something about ironic situations, but only if he becomes aware of their ironic nature and avoids the temptation to conceal incongruities with total explanations. The ironic view contends that history laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations. It is capable of giving man hope without illusion.2 Applied to history, irony suggests that there is rational meaning to the historical process, yet that man-as a participant-is never fully able to grasp it. Seeming absurdities are part of what Hegel called "the cunning of reason." History does make sense, though our understanding of it tends to come too late. "The owl of Minerva spreads his wings only at the gathering of the dusk."3 Ironically, yet not senselessly, the flow of history always seems to be just one turn ahead of man's capacity to understand it. Today's equilibration of forces is said to be an equilibrium or even a permanent solution by those who confidently project current trends forward into the future without considering those deeper forces which account for discontinuous (or "dialectical") changes in human history. Yet such changes do occur-often with great suddenness in ways not foreseen except by isolated thinkers far removed from the rational consensus of their day. Recent Russian history is full of such discontinuous change: both revolutions of 1917,
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