The Thinking Reed

Later, people saw this as the weakness of the opposition in Khrushchev’s time, but its weakness did not in fact lie there. The serious problem for the dissidents of that period was that they did not understand the fundamental contradiction: the incompatibility between their democratic-socialist ideal and the pseudo-socialist phraseology of the statocracy. On the contrary, they set great hopes on the statocracy and even imitated its language.

‘In the first years after the Twentieth Congress it seemed (perhaps for longer than it should)’, writes E. Gnedin,

that it was possible, by means of public statements in written appeals to the government, to hasten the process of renewal, to make it possible, by indirect action, for society and the right-thinking section of the state and Party apparatus to see that the country needed complete restructuring. It seemed that one could establish historical truth, and also prevent lawlessness (especially through the use of judicial procedure for repressive purposes), that one could prompt those in power to promote the establishment of truth and justice by addressing them in the language they were used to, not shrinking from use of their own stereotyped expressions.161

Despite the obvious limitations of such thinking, much was achieved, especially in the sphere of art and aesthetic theory. There was a systematic critique of aesthetic dogmatism, under whose influence of the official theoreticians did renounce — even if only in words — the normative approach to art. Setting out the views of the Lefts, Lakshin wrote:

Any normative conception is hostile to what it regards as unnecessary questions. It is strong in its self-importance and blindness to everything around it. It is rounded and smooth, and not even grass grows there. When a writer depicts real life the very text of the work is felt as an obstacle.162

On the other hand, modern art was explicitly rehabilitated, as it was found to be compatible with ‘socialist realism’. On this plane the memoirs of Ehrenburg, mentioned above, were important. The author of People, Years, Life strove to give the so-called modernists their due — to show their importance for the development of European art in the twentieth century:

The Futurists were accused of disrespecting the past, but the Futurists’ weapons were pens, not picks and shovels. When forests were cut down in the thirties it was not only chips that flew but sometimes age-old stones. In Archangel in 1934 I saw them blow up the customs house built in the time of Peter the Great; when I asked why, I was told: ‘It interferes with the traffic’; yet in those days you could count the cars in Archangel on the fingers of two hands.163

While proclaiming respect for tradition, for popular creativity and for the classics, the Stalinists in reality did not hesitate to destroy historical monuments. Epigonism announced as a virtue had nothing in common with respect for tradition, or with art in any way at all. ‘The age of idols is past,’ wrote Ehrenburg,