The Thinking Reed

In Stalin’s day a writer would immediately have been put down for such ‘sins’. But times had changed. The fact that an open conflict between a number of writers and the authorities led to a polemic and not to the taking of repressive measures had, in itself, a positive influence on the social climate. ‘Warm spells’ alternated with ‘frosts’, but on the whole it was clear that the ‘thaw’ was continuing. Simonov, in charge of Novy Mir, came under sharp criticism, but in the end the only result was that Tvardovsky resumed the editorship. The journal Teatr and some other publications joined Novy Mir in its campaign.

It was then, at the end of the fifties, that V. Kardin’s famous review of Shtein’s play Hotel Astoria was published, putting a question mark over the very foundations of Communist ideology. The article began by discussing the change in artistic taste and the collapse of Stalinist stereotyped thinking. The first signs of this were ‘negative’:

We are already incapable, not just aesthetically but also, I would say, physically, of accepting certain theatrical contributions of the late forties which, in their time, were presented as great achievements in drama.136

Whereas, previously, exact following of ‘the rules’ had been valued, today what is valued is ‘the new word’, fresh thought, the topical problem. And Kardin put this question: Is Marxism a science or an atheistic religion? Depending on how he answered that question a person was in the camp of the reformers or in that of the conservatives, either with the Lefts or with the Rights, either on the side of the progressive intelligentsia or on the side of the narrow-minded dogmatists. Kardin raised the central question of the fifties and drew the line of demarcation, and the ideas he formulated have not lost their value even for the seventies and eighties.

The dogmatists sought to praise ‘soldierly faith’ and ‘devotion to the Party’, ‘optimistic fatalism’,

as if the power of our faith consists in blindness, in unthinking obedience, as though faith is the enemy of reason and is afraid of facts, as if it comes not from real understanding of everyday life and its processes but from revelations sent down from on high.137

The left-wing intelligentsia opposed such dogmatism. ‘For an artist,’ wrote Kardin, ‘an altar, even a renovated one, is a poor observation point. Ideas are displaced and real connections disrupted. And fear arises — fear of thought and of reality.138 A state of mind like that is impotent to create: ‘Once blind faith becomes the supreme ideal, what is most appropriate is holy mindlessness, setting one’s hopes on the higher powers. Nothing happens without God’s will.’139 In just this way the petty bureaucrat in Tendryakov’s writings, although he is constantly quoting Marx and Lenin, firmly believes ‘that the great doctrine is fully accessible only to those who are high above us, at the helm of state.’140 It is not given to those down below to think about it and understand it.

For his part, Kardin, referring to the experience of the Twentieth Congress, declared that ‘it is precisely knowledge, culture, that gives true Communist conviction, inflexible faith in radiant ideals.’141 Basically antipopular were the attempts of the official ideologues to counterpose ‘intellectual theorizing’ to the unthinking faith of ‘the simple man’. Such attempts revealed the desire of those in power to keep the masses in ignorance, to isolate them from culture and crush their minds. Their tenderness before ‘the simple Soviet man’ was false through and through: it concealed contempt for him — a conception of him as ‘cattle’, a beast of burden, or cannon-fodder.

The Social Role of the Intelligentsia