The Thinking Reed

In this way there began in Russian literature the trial of Stalinism, in which the weightiest argument became not Khrushchev’s reports at the Twentieth or Twenty-Second Party Congresses, but Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. A new system of positive values took shape. Literature and criticism in ‘the great decade’ which followed Stalin’s death were, in the words of V. Lakshin, one of the leading theoreticians of Novy Mir, ‘imbued with that vivid organic humanism which is nowhere equivalent to pleasing everybody and pardoning everything.’142 Stalin had been a god, but the god was dead. Henceforth everyone bore responsibility for himself, and not only for himself but for society as a whole.

In those memorable moments
At the grave of the dread father
We became fully answerable
For everything in the world,
To the end.

So wrote Tvardovsky in 1960.143 Everyone thought about that, and everyone understood.

None the less, a particularly heavy responsibility lay on the shoulders of the intelligentsia. Stalin’s policy had dispersed and declassed the proletariat. In the society which emerged from the crisis of 1953 there was no hereditary working class, and there were no democratic parties or even fully formed tendencies. The great mass of the people were not united in any way, and were therefore helpless. In 1960 more than half the engineering workers — traditionally the most conscious section of the workers — had been in industry for less than ten years. There was no real political and class alternative to the bureaucracy in the country, but a cultural and moral alternative to Stalinism did exist. Its bearer was the intelligentsia, the only subordinate social stratum which had at that time attained a certain social maturity. It was in this stratum that the new consciousness developed most rapidly, due to the very nature of the intellectuals’ professional work (the development of new ideas, and so on). The intelligentsia spoke not only for itself but also for the entire oppressed mass which was as yet incapable of becoming ‘a class for itself’. Here we hit upon a very important theoretical question: Why, all the same, did social consciousness awaken in the intelligentsia earlier than in the working class, if the intelligentsia was also dispersed and intimidated in the Stalin era? The working class, having lost its internal structure, had been temporarily transformed into a declassed marginal mass, but the intelligentsia, too, had to a large extent lost its traditional structure and a new structure was only in process of formation. This problem has been examined with particular attention by some Hungarian Marxists, who have reached useful conclusions.

The experiences of Stalinism laid a tremendous moral responsibility on the intelligentsia and on every thinking person. Whoever approved of the system bore moral responsibility for the crimes by which it had been created. By virtue of their position in society members of the intelligentsia knew more, and so they bore greater responsibility. ‘The tragic thing about this situation’, writes Rakovski, ‘was that it had something inevitable about it: one could not decline the choice.’144 Choice, of course, is not a privilege of intellectuals, but it was not only that. ‘One could ask’, he goes on,

why the Soviet intelligentsia has not made contact with the working class, but that is not the right question. The question which in fact corresponds to the situation in Soviet-type societies is as follows: why is the intelligentsia — which does not constitute an autonomous class — able to create its own ideology and its own culture, and even its own counter-culture and embryonic counter-institutions, while the basic classes are unable even in this very restricted sense to form themselves into a class as a practical entity?145

This can be explained, to some extent, by the fact that