The Thinking Reed

Publication of the novella coincided with a new wave of de-Stalinization — otherwise, indeed, it would hardly have been published. Khrushchev liked it, and Pravda, lzvestiya and Literaturnaya Gazeta rallied to its support. One Day was put forward for a Lenin Prize. Nor was this novella of Solzhenitsyn’s the only work on a ‘labour-camp’ subject. For example, in 1964 Zvezda published G. Shelest’s Kolyma Notes, which had much in common with One Day, although it was written from the standpoint of a Communist soldier who looked on what had happened with different eyes, trying to remain a Communist even in the camp. What was distinctive about Solzhenitsyn’s novella was not only that it dealt with life in a labour camp but also — and above all — its literary qualities. There is no time to discuss the book here in detail: what concerns us is something else.

The consequences of the publication of One Day were many-sided. It was truly an event of historical importance. Perhaps one of the most important results was the development of samizdat. The novella evoked a great number of replies, imitations and reflections. A flood of ‘camp writing’ poured into editorial offices, as though a dam had broken. Soon, however, an instruction came down from ‘on high’ that this sort of material was not to be published any more. But people went on writing and reproducing what they had written; the flood merely took a different direction. Whatever the state publishing houses did not accept was circulated in samizdat. At this time, the circulation of samizdat material was not regarded as being anti-government — at least, in the minds of the intellectuals who engaged in it. Their activity was no direct challenge to the statocracy. ‘The circulation of typewritten copies was seen’, writes Rakovski, ‘as a kind of pre-publication which would be followed by their being brought out by state publishing houses or in journals.’185 There actually were instances when material which had first been passed around in manuscript was eventually published, albeit with cuts by the censor. The editors of Novy Mir took care not to let the manuscripts they received go into samizdat, as this might make publication difficult: at that time there was no clear-cut dividing line between what was ‘permissible’ in literature and what was not; it was defined afresh in each concrete instance. But this situation did not last long.

‘The publication of Ivan Denisovich and The Heirs of Stalin seemed to be a prelude’, writes Shatz, ‘to a new wave of de-Stalinization and a new attack on the conservative diehards. That wave never broke.’186 In December 1962 Khrushchev visited an exhibition by young artists of the ‘modernist’ school, at the Manège and went into a frenzy. Nobody was in any doubt that the whole business of his visit to the exhibition had been set up by conservative elements in the leadership who were trying to put an end to the prolonged ‘romance’ between Khrushchev and the Left intelligentsia.

It is important to note that the summer of 1962 had seen a mighty wave of strikes, caused by increases in the cost of food and by bad housing conditions. The position of the workers was indeed frightful. Tor example,’ some American Sovietologists wrote at that time, ‘by 1961, after an intensive housing-construction drive, the average living-space per Soviet inhabitant was approximately 8 square metres. (The minimum sanitary standard recommended by the United States Bureau of Prisons is 9 square metres.)’187 Later, in 1964-70, thanks to the economic reforms (which will be discussed below) the workers’ standard of living improved considerably. We even attained that American prison minimum.

It would be interesting to know what influence the strikes had on the balance of forces within the statocracy. In any case, they could not have passed unnoticed. The well-known strike at Novacherkassk, which ended with firing on a workers’ demonstration — comparable only with the Tsarist shooting-down of the workers in St Petersburg on 9 January 1905 or the Lena massacre of 1912 — was far from being the only initiative taken by the lower orders. Strikes spread all across the country.188 Most probably these events, by intensifying the nervousness of the bureaucracy, facilitated the progress of intrigues by Suslov and other conservatives. This question we must leave to future historians who will be able to work in the Kremlin archives.

In any case, Khrushchev yielded to the provocation. He came down on the ‘modernists’ with all the violence of his temperament, declaring that ‘formalist and abstractionist vagaries are alien to and not understood by the people’.189 For some reason he was particularly shaken by B. Zhutovsky’s self-portrait. ‘But whom has B. Zhutovsky portrayed?’ exclaimed ‘our Nikita’.