The Thinking Reed

But as I have said, once it was in the vanguard of the social movement the intelligentsia had to speak for society as a whole, for the strata that were not yet ready to put forward their own demands, and this meant that the position of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and that of the Soviet intellectuals of the Khrushchev era — and, to a considerable extent, of the Brezhnev era as well — were similar. The intelligentsia found itself once more in a tragic situation: waging a struggle for the people’s rights while not being understood by the people itself. ‘In such a critical situation,’ wrote Ernst Fischer in 1966, ‘it is the duty of intellectuals to confront the people, because that is what will help the people to go forward tomorrow.’151 This ‘running ahead’ created a very difficult psychological situation, which later gave rise to a real spiritual crisis and even loss of belief in change — a conviction that the Soviet working class was incapable of decisive actions which, by an irony of history, became most widespread just at the time when there appeared the first, still feeble signs of an awakening of the workers. However, in Khrushchev’s time the intellectuals were still full of hope and also, alas, of illusions.

The literature of the sixties turned, as it were, towards the past. Its task was to recall and tell about that which it had not been possible to record of its own time… There was a sharp increase in interest in reminiscences and authentic ‘documents of the epoch’. Novy Mir published ‘The Diary of Nina Kosterina’, a young woman who was killed at the Front during the war. Of this the critic I. Solovyova wrote: ‘here we have the whole of that period…’.152 Yu. Trifonov published in Znamya a documentary story about his father, a Bolshevik shot by Stalin, in which the writer did not hesitate to include entire pages from letters and documents. What was important to him was to tell truthfully and objectively about the heroes of the civil war. The author held himself back, so to speak, refraining from giving his own view on the disputes of those years out of concern lest he insult the memory of the revolutionaries, who had ‘now all been made equal, as it were, by their fate, in that they were all destroyed by Stalin.’153

Ilya Ehrenburg published in Novy Mir, year after year, his memoirs People, Years, Life. These were not the mere memoirs of a writer. They were also the history of an epoch, seen through the fate of a Russian Jewish intellectual — a book which astonished not only Soviet but also Western readers by its truthfulness and objectivity. ‘One might venture to say that People, Years, Life will prove to be the most important book to be published during this decade in the USSR,’ an American writer has said. ‘Ehrenburg is the first writer in Russia to have described the past in a tone relaxed and yet so incisive.’154 Here we find Stalin’s repressive measures, and the destruction of churches, and the hopes or illusions of that time — real life described honestly and simply. Everything was said that could be said, and a great deal could be said at that time — at least about the past. True, we find Ehrenburg himself writing in a letter about the publication of the sixth part of his memoirs: ‘We’ll talk about the cuts when we meet.’155 The seventh part of the memoirs was not published, but came out in samizdat. On the whole, though, the sixties can be described as a time of relative liberalism on the part of the censors. This general liberal tendency survived the fall of Khrushchev in 1964, lasting until the collapse of the economic reform and the Moscow bureaucrats’ intervention in Czechoslovakia.

The Erosion of ‘Socialist Realism’