The Thinking Reed

The Thinking Reed

Publisher s Note

Part One of this book, ‘The Thinking Reed’, was completed in 1982 and subsequently circulated in samizdat It is published here for the first time. Part Two includes two articles written by Boris Kagarlitsky in 1987, and an interview with him by Alexander Cockburn.

We would like to thank the editors of New Left Review for permission to publish ‘The Intellectuals and the Changes’, which originally appeared in NLR 164, July-August 1987. We also wish to thank the editor of the Times Literary Supplement for permission to reprint the article by Boris Kagarlitsky which appeared in the TLS of 25–31 December 1987. Our thanks to Labour Focus and The Guardian for allowing us to publish the transcript of Boris Kagarlitsky’s speech to the inaugural Meeting of Informal Associations and the declaration of the Federation of Socialist Clubs, which appeared respectively in Labour Focus vol. 9 no. 3, November 1987-February 1988 and The Guardian 12 September 1987.

We are grateful to Dr Nick Lampert and to Tamara Deutscher for editorial help with this volume; and we would also like to thank Brian Pearce, who translated ‘The Thinking Reed’ and the essay in NLR 164, for tracking down English versions of works cited in the endnotes.

Verso Editions

Preface

‘Manuscripts don’t burn!’ These words from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita were destined to prove prophetic. For several generations of the Soviet Russian intelligentsia they became a kind of formula for hope: what has been written will return to us, thought cannot be killed.

The history of our culture provides some wonderful examples to confirm the truth of what Bulgakov wrote. Vasily Grossman’s outstanding novel Life and Fate was seized from its author as far back as in Khrushchev’s time. It was supposed that all copies of the manuscript had been confiscated, and the chief state ideologist of those days could tell the writer, with absolute conviction, that this work would not be published for the next two hundred years.

Grossman indeed did not live to see the publication of his novel. Nevertheless, even in Suslov’s lifetime, at the beginning of the 1980s, a copy of Grossman’s manuscript which had secretly been saved from destruction was in the hands of foreign publishers, and in the summer of 1987 the Moscow periodical Oktyabr' announced its intention to publish the novel in its pages. ‘Manuscripts don’t burn!’

This is also true, to some extent, of the present book, most of which was written as long ago as in Brezhnev’s time. I was arrested in April 1982 just as I had, as I thought, completed the work, and had handed it over to be read by my friends. And so while I was in prison under Brezhnev, while, under Andropov, they were deciding whether to release me, and while, in Moscow’s kitchens, people were arguing about how long Chernenko could survive, my manuscript was passing, through channels unknown to me, in and out of several publishing houses, to end up, in Gorbachev’s time, in the hands of the editors of New Left Review — one of the periodicals for which I have the greatest liking and esteem.