The Thinking Reed

The literary criticism, writing on current affairs and theoretical investigations of those years were so variegated that they deserve special study. Here we can look at only a few of what seem to me the most interesting questions. Above all, what happened in the sixties was a marked erosion of ‘socialist realism’. On the one hand both the Left and the official theoreticians of the time sought more flexible and, consequently, vaguer definitions of the doctrine. People wrote of ‘socialist realism’ as an open, developing system, of its links with other tendencies, of the fact that adherence to ‘socialist realism’ was determined primarily by the artist’s world-view and not by the form assumed by his work, and so on. But the liberals, as a rule, invested this concept with a content quite different from that given it by the Stalinists. Essentially, this meant a form that washed away the firm and unambiguous canons of ‘socialist realism’. Attempts like this were made also in the official press and, still more frankly, in the samizdat publications which had begun to circulate. Medvedev’s Political Diary belatedly summed up these ideas in October 1966: ‘What is now especially important is somehow to shake people up and show them reality not as they would like to see it but as it really is.’156 That was the task of ‘socialist realism’ as Roy Medvedev presented it. But his Political Diary attributed to ‘socialist realism’ a task which was directly opposite to the one assigned to it in the thirties by its founders and inventors — Stalin, Gorky, Lunacharsky.

Clearly, nothing of ‘socialist realism’ remained but the name, yet the fact that people did not want to reject that odious name is significant. Even in the ideological sphere the intellectuals of the sixties always fought not against the official principles but only against distortion of these principles. The ideology of ‘true Communism’ was not in the least a concession to pressure from without, it was at that time absolutely organic for the left-wing intelligentsia. Solzhenitsyn, who continually abuses ‘those who submit to the censorship’, has to acknowledge that ‘to Novy Mir, Marxism was not compulsory ballast required by the censors.’157 Of course, this seems to him unnatural. In another place he writes, maliciously, that the Novy Mir group were Octobrists ‘in pre-revolutionary terminology: like the pre-revolutionary Oktyabristy, they wanted the existing regime to continue but to observe its own constitution.’158 The Lefts saw their task as criticizing the rulers in their own language. Solzhenitsyn thought otherwise, but in those years he was obviously in a minority and even adapted himself to the prevailing mood.

‘Of course,’ V. Lakshin recalls,

Novy Mir agreed with Solzhenitsyn on this point. We too disliked state-bureaucratic socialism, we defended human rights against their merely formal recognition, we shuddered at the horrors of Stalin’s camps and protested wherever we could against the subtle forms of social hypocrisy. But we believed in socialism with a human heart and not only a human face. For us the democratic rights of the individual were beyond question.159

The ideology of Novy Mir and of Yevtushenko’s Autobiography was widely accepted. ‘We need to remember’, writes Roy Medvedev,

that in the sixties the main line of political and ideological struggle in our country ran between different tendencies in socialist thought and between different currents within the Party itself — to put it crudely, between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists. In the first half of the sixties there were practically no other tendencies: others began to find expression only at the end of that decade.160