The Thinking Reed

Stalin’s crimes were not ‘mistakes’ and ‘deviations’ from ‘the correct line’; they were themselves ‘the correct line’ of the statocracy at a certain stage of its struggle against the working classes and against socialism. Legal Marxism was censored, and in this case it is clear that such an idea could be voiced only in samizdat: but up to that time it had not been heard in samizdat publications.211 This resulted from the willingness of the ‘true Communists’ to remain within the limits set by official dogmatics. It is important to remember that even in the best period of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, the left-wing intelligentsia was unable to break away from the ‘Procrustes’ bed’ of the Stalinist schemas, and thought in terms of the old categories. Subsequently a long (and still uncompleted) struggle took place against the schematism of ‘Communist’ dogma and for dialectical thinking. Getting rid of schemas and starting to think about the world freely and critically proved, as we shall see later, extremely difficult. In the sixties ‘critical’ thinking still confined itself to correcting dogma in accordance with a commonly accepted schema, finding internal contradictions in the dogma and studying them, squeezing into the ‘ideological fissures’ of Stalinism.

Such ‘fissures’ existed in the sixties and were constantly being widened owing to the political conflicts within the statocracy itself. Certain groups in it were disposed to support the Lefts, and so we had the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. After Khrushchev’s fall the statocracy closed its ranks. Attempts by oppositionists to squeeze into the ‘political fissures’ between its different groups proved less and less successful, and the ‘fissures’ themselves became narrower. Under Brezhnev the statocracy achieved an ideal equilibrium such as it had not possessed either under Stalin or under Khrushchev. True, this did not rule out the appearance of new groupings and new ‘fissures’ after Brezhnev, but that is another question. What matters is that in the seventies the ideology of ‘true Communism’ ceased to be ‘operative’.

Moralism had a rather different significance. We must remember that the movement of the sixties was necessarily, at first, not a political but a literary and cultural movement, subject to the laws of literature’s development and Russia’s cultural traditions. Given the existence of censorship, literature had to bear an additional political workload, but politics itself became ‘literary’. Russian literature is in no danger of being ‘over-politicized’, for in order to continue as art it rethinks politics in philosophical and — especially — in moral categories (one has only to remember Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn’s best works). It exercises moral judgement over politicians. But here a danger of a different order arises. Shatz writes:

As Solzhenitsyn noted in his Nobel speech, literature by its very nature deals with the problems of mankind in moral terms, that is, in terms of the clash between good and evil. Indeed, it is the great tradition of moral seeking that has given Russian literature so much of its universal appeal and intensity.

However, he observes, ‘not all political and social issues are moral issues… nor are they always susceptible to moral solutions.’212 Another unfortunate circumstance is that in history such moralists as Saint-Just, Robespierre and their like have showed themselves bloodthirsty enough in their striving to ‘punish the wicked’.

Political activity must be based (despite the hypocritical chatter of the Philistines to the effect that politics ‘in general’ is amoral) upon definite moral principles, but it cannot be reduced to those principles. Moral indignation and a thirst for justice do not, by themselves, help to revive an economy. ‘Russian literature’, writes Shatz,

has a long and honourable history as an opponent of political oppression and social injustice. But it is a form of opposition with inherent limitations, limitations that the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia frequently displayed and that have left their mark on Soviet dissent.213