The Thinking Reed

Lenin said that our country’s destiny depends on ‘the really enlightened elements for whom we can vouch that they will not take the word for the deed, and will not utter a single word that goes against their conscience.’207 It was to that appeal of Lenin’s that the anti-Stalinist intellectuals sought to respond. They felt a new sense of responsibility. Karyakin considered, however, that it was necessary to go further:

Too high a price has been paid for us to restrict ourselves, in the end, merely to the safeguarding of those convictions with which the Communists began the hard task of building a new world. That is necessary but insufficient. And if such a price has been paid, we must extract everything we can from the experience we have undergone.208

Although Karyakin called for deeper analysis, in his own writings there is nothing but criticism of ideology. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn had raised questions which could be answered only on the social plane. What was at issue here?

When Karyakin sees Stalinism as merely an obstacle on the road to socialism, he is right, in the last analysis. But it is not difficult to suggest that this obstacle was, in its own way, logical and inevitable — that Stalinism did not come from nowhere, without any roots, and that it played a certain role in our country’s modernization. All of which needs to be looked into. And then, when we have understood the roots of Stalinism — its essential nature — we must investigate how to overcome it. Characteristic of the first post-Stalin decade was a striving to tell the truth, to expose, to reveal the reality of society. Now a new need was arising — to go into the inner mechanism of things and analyse it.

The Limits of Moral Criticism

The change in the problem to be tackled and the change in the nature of the left-wing intelligentsia’s thinking brought on a crisis. The Twentieth Congress had given hope, but it had also proved a source of illusions. It had prevented us from perceiving the main thing — the class nature of the regime. The liberals of the sixties believed that society as a whole, the system as a whole, was moving towards the elimination of Stalinism, yet what happened was merely its updating. They saw in the Twentieth and then in the Twenty-Second Congresses the beginning of a new course but in fact that was, in both cases, the end of it. They did not realize that everything that had happened was closely connected with the class struggle. Oddly, people who were Marxists when they analysed the West seemed to forget class analysis when they turned to their own country. In 1965 M. Gefter, Ya. Drabkin and V. Mal'kov published in Novy Mir an article entitled ‘The World During Twenty Years’ which was a real manifesto of Soviet liberalism; in it they called for ‘the creation of political, ideological and moral guarantees to make impossible any revival of the cult of personality’.209 Note that they spoke of moral problems, yet said nothing about social problems — this was due not to censorship but to the writers’ way of thinking. One can distinguish two weak aspects of the ideology of the Lefts in Khrushchev’s ‘great decade’. On the one hand there was their naive belief in ‘true Communism’; on the other their moralism. They tried to think about political questions exclusively in cultural categories and, though sincere supporters of Marxism, they had not mastered the Marxist method of social criticism. ‘Of course,’ writes Rakovski,

the critique of theoretical ‘dogmatism’ went hand in hand with the denunciation of political and sometimes institutional ‘distortions’. But the unofficial Marxists of this period never used the argument that in Soviet-type societies it is only the vocabulary of the official ideology that is socialist.210