The Thinking Reed

The action of the government, which spent a great deal on discovering the real names of the authors (a real espionage operation was carried out abroad) seemed simply ridiculous. If the authorities had not gone so far as to stage a trial but had confined themselves, as in Pasternak’s case, to the ‘usual’ hounding of the authors in the press, many would have concluded that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. But a trial — that was too much. The authorities had obviously gone too far. The intelligentsia became agitated. On 5 December 1965 Bukovsky and his friends succeeded in assembling about 200 people in Pushkin Square for a protest demonstration, against the judicial onslaught that was being prepared against the writers. (To this day Pushkin Square has remained the favourite place for dissident demonstrations.) On 16 February 1966 — two days after Sinyavsky and Daniel had been sentenced — a stormy meeting took place at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, to discuss Nekrich’s book 22 June 1941, which exposed Stalin’s mistakes on the eve of the war. The Stalinist Deborin had been appointed rapporteur, and that immediately aroused in those present, as Gnedin later recalled, the suspicion that they ‘were to witness an attempt to prepare public opinion for an open departure from the policy of the Twentieth Congress and for a rehabilitation of Stalin’s baneful policy.’4 The anti-Stalinists spoke up, sharply and unanimously. Gnedin even ended his speech with these words: ‘The question of the accuracy and truth of information is still today a burning question’,5 thereby obviously alluding to the policy of the new rulers. Rubenstein writes that ‘the meeting turned into a raucous denunciation of Stalin’.6 The dissenters were openly taking revenge for what had been done to Sinyavsky and Daniel. Their success was relative. In the end Nekrich’s book was banned and he himself was expelled from the Party, while Gnedin received a Party reprimand. All the same, they had scored a moral victory.

The struggle around the rehabilitation of Stalin was still only warming up. As early as the beginning of 1965 some extreme Stalinists among the statocrats (Trapeznikov, Yepishev, Pospelov) started to campaign for the rehabilitation of their ‘friend and teacher’. The intelligentsia answered with such means as were available to them — samizdat. ‘It was precisely in these months’, Roy Medvedev recalls,

that a whole variety of manuscripts and materials began to circulate among the intelligentsia, protesting in one form or another against the rehabilitation of Stalin (e.g., the letter of Ernst Henri to Ilya Ehrenburg, a pamphlet by Gregory Pomerants, etc.).7

When rumours got around that the Stalinists might win the day at the Twenty-Third Party Congress the intelligentsia began to write collective letters:

One letter in particular made a major impression — it was signed by twenty-five leading members of the Soviet intelligentsia, including Academicians Peter Kapitsa, Leonty Artsimovich, Mikhail Leontovich, Andrei Sakharov, Igor Tamm, Ivan Maisky; the writers Valentin Katayev, Viktor Nekrasov, Konstantin Paustovsky, Kornei Chukovsky, Vladimir Tendryakov; the theatre people Maya Plisetskaya, Oleg Yefremov, P.D. Korin, V.N. Nemensky, Mikhail Romm, Innokenty Smoktunovsky and A.G. Tovstonogov. The first twenty-five signatories were soon joined by others, including Academicians A. Khlmogorov, A. Alikhanov, Mikhail Knunyants, Boris Astaurov, P. Zdradovsky; the writers Ilya Ehrenburg, Vladimir Dudintsev; the artists G. Chukhrai, Vanno Muradeli, Igor Ilinsky.8