The Thinking Reed

After Solzhenitsyn’s novella had been published in Novy Mir, and later as a separate work, the one and only possibility was created for discussing the essence of Stalinism in a legal periodical. Of course, the question of its class character — the principal historical question — could not be raised. Moreover, at the beginning the social thought of the intelligentsia’s members, who had been taught to think in pseudo-Marxist categories but were poorly acquainted with Marxist method, was simply incapable of conceiving such a question. The left-wing intelligentsia still saw the resolutions of the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Party Congresses as models of critical analysis, and its illusions connected therewith had not been outgrown. Yet the official explanation of the ‘cult of personality’ was utterly idealistic, reducing everything to Stalin’s psychology, to his incorrect theoretical views, and so on. In this sense, the articles in Novy Mir and Problemy mira i sotsializma were very much more profound than the official conceptions. The discussion around One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich made possible an extension of the critique of Stalinism, touching on political questions and, as we shall see, really getting close to social questions. ‘The logic of real life,’ noted Yu. Karyakin, ‘the logic of class struggle shows that the novella is hated and feared more and more as one hates and fears a living and powerful enemy, and the author can only rejoice in such hatred directed at him.’195 ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’, wrote Lakshin,

was read even by people who do not usually read novellas and novels. One such ‘irregular’ reader said to me: ‘I don’t know whether it is written well or badly. It seems to me it couldn’t be written in any other way.’196

It is curious that this little novella had more influence on public opinion than Solzhenitsyn’s later work on The Gulag Archipelago. That was not only because One Day was printed in many thousands of copies, whereas the Archipelago was an ‘underground’ publication (on a relatively large scale, to be sure). The simple denunciatory force of this remarkable work was extremely great — greater even than that of articles specially devoted to the subject. Lakshin wrote rightly: ‘Solzhenitsyn disappointed those who had expected from him a story of crimes, tortures, bloody torments and excesses of inhumanity in the camp, a story of martyrs and heroes of penal servitude.’197 That would come. But for the time being he had written an artless tale of camp life, of one happy(!) day in a prisoner’s life. It had a very powerful impact.

The main thing in Solzhenitsyn’s book that struck Lakshin, Karyakin and other left-wing theoreticians of the sixties intelligentsia was its conclusion concerning the antipopular essence of Stalinism. ‘The word “people”’, wrote Lakshin, ‘was transformed in Stalin’s mouth into an empty abstraction. It was as if there existed something called “the people” and yet no single individual belonged to the people.’198 But the antipopular character of the regime does not only arouse anger. Understanding it enables us to perceive in the people that force which, sooner or later, will put an end to tyranny — we see in the people our grounds for hope. ‘Consequently,’ wrote Karyakin,

it is not just a matter of the tragic fate of some individuals but also, and this is what is most important, of the forces which make it possible to overcome that tragedy, of the elimination of the illusions of the ‘cult’, and of the maturing of the people’s verdict on arbitrary and lawless rule. And all that, of course, refers not just to the past.199