The Thinking Reed

A freak! Looking at his self-portrait, you could be frightened. Shouldn’t anyone be ashamed of wasting his efforts on such a disgraceful object! How can it be that he has studied at a secondary school and a higher educational institution, that the people’s money has been spent on him, and he eats the bread provided by the people? And how has he repaid the people, the workers and peasants, for the money they have spent on his education, for the benefits they are giving him now? With this self-portrait — this abomination and monstrosity.190

Zhutovsky had depicted himself, and the people had nothing to do with it. But Khrushchev sometimes reacted like an offended property-owner (a lot of money has been spent) and sometimes like a man who is going to buy a machine for making tarpaulin boots and at the last moment discovers that what it actually turns out is steel tubing (even of the finest quality) — that is, like an offended customer.

Brzezinski and Huntington say that ‘Khrushchev’s remarks, crude and often vulgar, were also designed to stir up the anti-intellectual prejudices of the masses.’191 That is unlikely. What is more likely is that Khrushchev was giving free rein to his own prejudices. At that moment he spoke as a typical man of the Stalin era, antagonistic towards new ways. ‘But the so-called fashionable modern dances’, he said with indignation,

are simply something unseemly, mad and the devil knows what! They say that one can see such unseemly things only in the religious sect of the Triasuny [Shakers]. I don’t know whether that is actually so, because I have never attended any of their meetings.192

Ortega y Gasset once wrote that, when a man cannot understand a work of art, ‘he feels vaguely humiliated and this rankling sense of inferiority must be counterbalanced by indignant self-assertion.’193 That was exactly what happened with Khrushchev. True, while going for the ‘modernists’ he also mentioned that ‘works in which Soviet reality during those years is truthfully depicted from Party positions have appeared’ — such as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.194

In 1963 policy towards the intelligentsia changed again, and a struggle was waged for Solzhenitsyn to be awarded a Lenin Prize: it did not succeed, but was significant nevertheless. However, liberalization was on the ebb. This was not due to a weakening in Khrushchev’s position but because he had already reached the limits of toleration by the ruling statocracy, which increasingly saw in his reforms a threat to their corporate interests. The ‘thaw’ was ending, and a time beginning for its first results to be summed up.