the sudden turn to the NEP, Stalin's second revolution, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the post-war psychosis of high Stalinism, and the sudden thaw after
the tyrant's death.
Looking over the sweep of modern Russian history, one's sense of the ironic is compounded. In the Muscovite period the most extreme statements of the exclusive nature and destiny of Russia came in precisely those periods when Westernization was proceeding most rapidly-under Ivan the Terrible and Alexis Mikhailovich. Indeed, the ideologists responsible for insisting on Russia's special destiny were often Western-educated figures: Maxim the Greek and Ivan Peresvetov under Ivan and Simeon Polotsky and Innokenty Gizel under Alexis. The Muscovite rulers concealed from themselves the incongruity of increasing at one and the same time both their borrowings from and their antagonisms toward the West. The pretense inherent in the historical theology of Old Russia was intensified rather than dispelled by initial contacts with the West. The manic xenophobia of Ivan the Terrible and the Old Believers had an enduring popular appeal, and provided the basis for a modern mass culture that was gilded with scientific sanction by zoological nationalists in the late nineteenth century and by dialectical materialists in the twentieth century.
Against such a background, the tsar-reformers of Imperial Russia found their careers beset with ironies. Theoretically freer than other European sovereigns to rule solely by "their own strength" (the literal meaning of the Greek autokrates and the Russian samoderzhavie), they repeatedly found themselves in bondage to the superstitions of their nominally bonded subjects. Grants of freedom and toleration often had the effect of calling forth ungrateful if not despotic responses. "Never did the raskol enjoy such freedom as in the first year of Peter's reign, but . . . never was it to prove more fanatical."4 Catherine, who did far more than any of her predecessors to gratify the aristocratic intellectuals, was the first to experience their ideological enmity. She, who launched the unending discussion in Russia about the liberation of mankind, probably did more than any of her autocratic predecessors to militarize society and freeze the peasantry in bondage. In the nineteenth century the popularity of tsar-reformers tended to vary in inverse proportion with their actual accomplishment. Alexander I, who accomplished surprisingly little and instituted in his late years a far more repressive and reactionary rule than prevailed even under Nicholas I, was universally loved; whereas Alexander II, who accomplished an extraordinary amount in the first decade of his reign, was rewarded by an attempt on his life at the end of the decade-the first of many, one of which eventually proved successful. Among the many ironies of the revolutionary tradition stands the repeated participation of aristocratic intellectuals, who stood to
lose rather than gain privilege. "I can understand the French bourgeois bringing about the Revolution to get rights, but how am I to comprehend the Russian nobleman making a revolution to lose them?" asked a reactionary former governor of Moscow when learning on his deathbed of the Decembrist revolt.5
The victorious revolution brought with it a new tissue of ironies. It is ironic that a revolution begun by pure spontaneity in March, 1917, and defended by a wide coalition of democratic forces should be canceled out by a coup engineered by the smallest and most totalitarian of the opposition forces, and one which played almost no role in bringing tsardom to an end. It is ironic that communism came to power in the peasant East rather than the industrial West-and, above all, in the Russia which Marx and Engels particularly disliked and distrusted; and that the ideology which spoke so emphatically of economic determinism should be so completely dependent on visionary appeals and on the individual leadership of Lenin. It is ironic that the revolution in power should devour its own creators; and that many of the very first elements to lend genuine grass roots support to the Bolshevik coup in St. Petersburg (the proletarian leaders of the "Workers Opposition" and the sailors of Kronstadt) were among the first to be brutally repudiated by the new regime for urging in 1920-1 substantially the same reforms which the Bolsheviks had encouraged them to demand four years before.
It is ironic that one of the most complete repudiations of democracy occurred at the very time when Russia was formally adopting the seemingly exemplary democratic constitution of 1936; ironic that the Stalinist war on the creative arts should occur at precisely the time when Russia was at the forefront of creative modernism; ironic that those organs of oppression that the people were least capable of influencing should be given the label "people's."
It is ironic that the USSR should succeed where most thought it would fail: m defeating the Germans and conquering outer space. It is perhaps most ironic of all that the Soviet leaders should fail in the area where almost everyone thought they would automatically succeed: in the indoctrination of their own youth. It is high irony that the post-war generation of Russians -the most privileged and indoctrinated of all Soviet generations, which was not even given the passing exposure to the outside world of those who fought in the war-should prove the most alienated of all from the official ethos of Communist society. There is the further irony of the Communist leaders' referring to youthful ferment as a "survival of the past," and the more familiar irony of partial reforms leading not to grateful quiescence but to increased agitation.
This remarkable situation is not without ironic meaning for the Western observer. Despite his formal, rhetorical belief in man's inherent longing for truth and freedom, Western man has been strangely reluctant to predict (and slow to admit) that such ideals would have any compelling appeal in the USSR. The tendency during the late years of the Khrushchev era to assume that evolutionary modification of despotism would continue without basic change represented the projection into the future of the trends of the immediate past. There was often also an implicit belief that the USSR (and perhaps also the United States) was evolving naturally toward a position somewhere between Stalinist totalitarianism and Western democracy." Such a balanced conclusion may, of course, be vindicated; but it would take all the cunning away from reason and represent an astonishing victory for the Aristotelian golden mean in a society that has never assimilated classical ideas of moderation and rationality.
A cultural history cannot offer a net prediction; but it must insist on the importance of the national heritage and the vitality of the ferment now at work. This ferment is not like a factor in a mathematical equation that can be resolved on the computers of Eastern political manipulators or Western political scientists. The ferment in the USSR today is more like indeterminate plants appearing on a burned-out field. One cannot tell whether they stem from old roots or fresh seeds blown in from elsewhere. Only time will tell if the landscape will be fundamentally changed. Yet the very appearance of the plants indicates that the soil is fertile; and even if they were to die, their leaves might yet provide humus for a stronger, future growth. The critical condition for growth in the years ahead will be the continuance of the relatively mild international climate of the post-Stalin era. Sustained storm clouds from East or West could have a chilling effect. Gusts of fresh vitality from neighboring countries could greatly stimulate growth in a culture that has always responded to fertilization from outside and in a world that is increasingly interdependent. Already the assimilation into the Russian orbit of such traditional foes on its Western borders as Poland and Hungary has had not the intended effect of silencing these nations but the ironic one of bringing added Westward-looking ferment into the Soviet sphere. There is no telling how important for future Soviet development increasing contact with the West or a renaissance of ideological elan within the West might prove to be.
One cannot wishfully expect automatic evolution toward democracy in the USSR now any more than one should have expected revolution for democracy under Stalin. Forces within one culture do not exist to serve the purposes of another; and the familiar institutional forms of liberal, parliamentary democracy are still incomprehensible to many Russians. But
Russia may well develop new social and artistic forms presently unforeseen by either
East or West which will answer the restive demand of its people for human freedom and spiritual renewal. If the West has anything authentic to communicate and has any direct and unpatronizing ways of doing it, it could almost certainly play a key role in this process. For nowhere is curiosity about the West-and particularly America-greater than among the youth of the USSR. Nowhere is the disappointment at the lack of spiritual vitality in the West more keenly felt than among the restless youth of the USSR eagerly looking for some guidance in their unsatisfied search for positive goals and new approaches. It would be a terrifying double irony if American philistinism should lead some Russian youth reluctantly to go along with a Communist ideology which both Russian tradition and contemporary Soviet reality encourage them to reject.
"He is an honest-searching man," says one character in quiet tribute to another in Everything Depends on People; and this might well serve as a characterization of the young generation in the USSR. The search is still incomplete; the hopes are unfulfilled; and the entire cultural revival seems at times a kind of evanescent mirage. But, since everything in history is ultimately incomplete, it may be well to introduce a final ironic perspective on the question of reality itself.
At the very height of Stalinist pretense, in the semi-official portrayal of the Revolution in Alexis Tolstoy's Road to Calvary, an idiot dreams that the great city of St. Petersburg-artificially wrenched out of the sufferings of thousands-was itself only a mirage that had suddenly vanished. That the phantasmagoria of Soviet construction seems to us the most real thing about Soviet history may be only a reflection of our own essentially materialist conception of reality. The Russians, on the other hand, have always been a visionary and ideological people, uniquely appreciative of the ironic perspectives on reality offered in such works as Calderon's Life Is a Dream and Shakespeare's Tempest. It may be that only those who have lived through the tempest of Stalinism will be able, like Prospero, to look on it as "the baseless fabric of a vision"; to see in "the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples" only an "insubstantial pageant faded," and to find fresh meaning in Prospero's final affirmation that man is, indeed, "such stuff as dreams are made on."
Tertz has spoken of the young generation's "enthusiasm before the metamorphoses of God . . . before the monstrous peristaltic upheaval of his entrails and his cerebral circumvolutions."7 It would be ironic, indeed, if God were in exile somewhere in the "atheistic" East; and if the culture produced amidst its silence and suffering were to prove more remarkable than that of the talkative and well-fed West. But this, perhaps, is the irony
of freedom, which tends to be treasured by those who do not have it and profaned by those who do. Here, too, is the enduring irony of creative culture, which comes into being through the painful self-denial of an individual opening himself up to larger worlds. True creativity in the USSR today involves voluntary suffering, or as Pasternak put it, "an offer of consecrated abnegation in a far and humble likeness with the Lord's Supper."
Such a role seems close to the monastic conception of the dedicated artist; and insofar as this burden of dedication continues to be taken up inside the USSR, it is likely to be sustained, if not by the faith of the Church, at least by its central belief in the Resurrection. Resurrection was the title of Tolstoy's last novel, the theme of Dostoevsky's and Pasternak's. It is only in resurrection that there is any final, ironic sense either in the comic incongruity of God disguised as man or in the tragic incongruity of human rebellion against divine authority. It is only in resurrection, some unforeseeable "metamorphoses of God," that sense could ultimately be made out of the implausible aspirations of Russian thought and the repeated rejection of higher ideals in Russian reality.
None can say that rebirth will occur; none can be sure even that there is any sense to be found in the history of a culture in which aspiration has so often outreached accomplishment and anguish impaired achievement. There may be nothing for the historian of culture to do except provide accompanying notes for the great novels, luminous icons, and lovely music and architecture that can be salvaged from an otherwise blighted inventory. Repeatedly, Russians have sought to acquire the end products of other civilizations without the intervening process of slow growth and inner understanding. Russia took the Byzantine heritage en bloc without absorbing its traditions of orderly philosophic discourse. The aristocracy adopted the language and style of French culture without its critical spirit, and variously sought to find solidarity with idealized sectarian or peasant communities without ever sharing in either the work or the faith of these non-aristocratic elements. The radical intelligentsia deified nineteenth-century Western science without recreating the atmosphere of free criticism that had made scientific advances possible. The exploration of "cursed questions" took place not in academies or even market places but in occult circles and "Aesopian" journals. Even Gogol and Ivanov in fleeing to the sun-drenched centers of Mediterranean classicism could not escape the nocturnal world of German romanticism, of forests and lakes, and of the dark northern winters.
High Stalinism provided a kind of retribution. Russia suddenly found
– itself ruled by Byzantine ritualism without Byzantine reverence or beauty,
and by Western scientism without Western freedom of inquiry. One is
tempted to see in the terrible climax, the "cleansing" (chistka) of the purge period, either total absurdity or some new and unprecedented form of totalitarian logic. But to the cultural historian, the horrors of High Stalinism may appear neither as an accidental intrusion upon, nor an inevitable by-product of, the Russian heritage. If he adopts the ironic perspective, he might even conclude that the cleansing did lead to a kind of purification far deeper than that which was intended-that innocent suffering created the possibility for fresh accomplishment.
Stalin may have cured Russian thinkers of their passion for abstract speculation and their thirst for earthly Utopias. The desire for the concrete and practical so characteristic of the post-Stalin generation may help Russia produce a less spectacular but more solid culture. The harvest may be long delayed in political institutions and artistic expression. But the roots of creativity are deep in Russia, and the soil rich. Whatever plants appear in the future should be more enduring than the ephemeral blossoms and artificial transplants of earlier ages. In an age of pretension, the cunning of reason may require a deceptively quiet rebirth. But Western observers should not be patronizing about a nation which has produced Tolstoy and Dostoev-sky and undergone so much suffering in recent times. Impatient onlookers who have come to expect immediate delivery of packaged products may have to rediscover the processes of "ripening as fruit ripens, growing as grass grows." The path of new discovery may well be parabolic, like that of Voznesensky's Columbus:
Instinctively
head for the shore . . . Look for
India- You'll find
America!8
Life out of death, freedom out of tyranny-irony, paradox, perhaps too much to hope for. One must return to the reality of plants not yet mature, of a ship still very much at sea. The last of the tempests may not have passed. We may still be in Miranda's "brave new world," and the perspectives of Prospero may not yet be in sight. This generation may only be, as Evtushenko has put it, "like the men in Napoleon's cavalry who threw themselves into the river to form a bridge over which others might cross to the other bank."9
Yet even here there is the image of that other hank. The melodramatic suggestion of a Napoleonic army somehow fades. One feels left rather in the midst of one of those long rivers in the Russian interior. There is no
bridge across, no clear chart for the would-be navigator. The natives still move along the river in zigzag patterns which often seem senseless to those looking on from afar. But the closer one gets, the more one notes a certain inner strength: "the good-humored serenity characteristic of people who see life as movement along the winding bed of a river, between hidden sandbanks and rocks."10 One senses that deeper currents may be
slowly pulling those on this river away from bends and banks into more open seas. One feels that neither the "stormy passage"11 of recent times nor the deceptive reefs that no doubt lie ahead will prevent them from reaching their long-sought and still undiscovered destination: "the other shore."
Thu, Aug 16th, 2012, via SendToReader
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The Icon and the Axe Page 88