The Thinking Reed

It is impossible not to agree with this judgement. Oppositional moralism and official schematism, as we shall see later, dominated the consciousness of the intelligentsia even during the seventies, but already in a new form.

Notes

5 The Turning Point, or The Crisis of Dissent

The Political Background to Economic Reform

The year 1965 was the time of the second liberalization which followed the fall of Khrushchev. The statocracy again introduced reforms, but this time on the economic front. As was to be expected, though, acute conflict immediately broke out around these reforms. To understand the polemic to which the economic reforms gave rise, we need to analyse more closely the general political situation in the country after Khrushchev’s removal. This situation was extremely contradictory.

After Khrushchev’s departure some of the intellectuals were, for a time, afraid that the changes at the top might lead to a return of mass terror. That did not happen, and could not have happened in the new economic and social conditions. At first, though, until 1968, the rulers’ policy seemed very difficult to understand. On the one hand, Lysenko suffered final defeat and economic reforms were introduced; but on the other, Sinyavsky and Daniel were brought to trial and preparations were made to rehabilitate Stalin. The rulers themselves had not yet finally decided on their policy: a new line had not been formulated.

The fall of Lysenko took place immediately after Khrushchev’s removal and was an important stage in the fight against Stalinism in the scientific sphere. It was at last possible to criticize Lysenko. Novy Mir published articles by anti-Lysenko writers who had previously been denied access to the press. True, already at the beginning of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, Troepol’sky — an agronomist by profession — showed what he thought of Lysenkoism in his novella Kandidat nauk; but this was only a story, and besides, far from everything could be said in it. Now, however, polemical and scientific articles directed against Lysenko appeared in Novy Mir — in particular, Zhores Medvedev’s.1 It was typical of the period that Medvedev was recommended to the editors by Solzhenitsyn. The united front had not yet been broken.

Materials on Lysenkoism appeared also in more official publications, such as Komsomolskaya Pravda. It might seem that the Lefts had cause to rejoice. But at this very time A. Sinyavsky and Yu. Daniel were arrested and their trial prepared. The authorities had not decided on taking this line in a hurry. The government even sought beforehand the opinion of the leaders of the Writers’ Union — but, as was to be expected, these officials of the world of literature readily sacrificed their brothers of the pen.

The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel served a quite definite purpose. ‘It might well be asked’, writes Shatz,

why the Soviet government bothered in the first place to prosecute two fiction writers for a few short stories that were not even available to the Soviet public. The question can be answered, and the trial itself comprehended, only in the light of Russian literature’s traditional role as a vehicle of social and political protest.2

The trial was a trial not of Sinyavsky and Daniel but also of all uncensored literature. The state was laying down the limits of the permissible. ‘The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel’, writes Rubenstein, ‘was meant to intimidate the intellectual community, but the government miscalculated. Since the death of Stalin, Soviet society had changed.’3 The trial stirred up a wave of protest and caused the opposition to become livelier.

It must be mentioned that the conduct of Sinyavsky and Daniel in publishing books in the West under pseudonyms was far from meeting with approval even among the Lefts. Many regarded it with bewilderment. Hardly anybody read the books themselves. It was announced that whoever wished might see them at the Writers’ Union, but for some reason nobody took up the offer. But they knew of some observations by Sinyavsky about ‘socialist realism’ which did not tally with the denunciatory ideas of his publications abroad. That put people on their guard.