The Thinking Reed

As regards the years 1965 to 1968, when bureaucratic sabotage was obviously dooming to frustration all hopes for successful practical measures to introduce reforms, the struggle moved on to the theoretical plane. The left-wing economists continued to pay attention to the grave economic situation and to uphold their views, while hoping to find supporters in the future rather than counting on being able to influence the fate of reform in the present. Every serious statement on their part met a rowdy response in the official press, which began to ‘unmask’ the new theoreticians. In reply, the latter set out their views again and again in Novy Mir, deepening and sharpening the argument. In 1967 V. Kantorovich published an article, ‘Sociology and Literature’, in which he tried to break out of the limits of a purely economic discussion. The problems raised by reform on the economic plane were transferred to the social plane, and from there to the cultural plane. The discussion revealed the need for a new approach to Western sociology and philosophy, especially to the Frankfurt School, which had elaborated the scientific instrument so badly needed by the new economists. The reform also showed the bankruptcy of the existing organization of education and culture, the contradiction between the rising intellectual level of the working people and the prevailing forms of work organization. Art had already done quite a lot to concretize these problems and attract public interest to them. Another important point of contact between the new economists and the creative intelligentsia was that both swept aside all vulgar-sociological stereotypes and mechanical schemas and tried to see life in its many-sidedness, complexity and dynamism. It was not by chance that A. Birman advised those educated in the humanities to study economics, hoping that they would see reality ‘in a more three-dimensional way’. Kantorovich, too, summoned the creative intelligentsia to the aid of the ideologues of reform. In so doing he referred to the ‘Prague spring’ activist Z. Mlynář. Alas, this association was not accidental.

As fewer and fewer hopes survived in Soviet society for rapid changes for the better, attention became more and more focused on Prague. The hopes of the left-wing intelligentsia was concentrated on Czechoslovakia. Prague became the Mecca of the Soviet opposition. The Medvedevs’ Political Diary regularly published translations and abstracts of Czechoslovak writings from 1965 onwards. In 1966-68 much material came out in samizdat. A great deal arrived, too, through official channels.31 Despite the fact that the Soviet reader was allowed to see an abridged version of the action programme of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, adopted in April 1968, a complete translation of it was passed around in Moscow. The Political Diary recorded at the time that ‘some Muscovites who know Czech are translating… material from Rude Pravo and circulating it among their friends.’32 The official leadership in the Kremlin showed a certain tolerance at the beginning of the ‘Prague spring’, hoping that the process of change in Czechoslovakia would not go too far. Kalvoda writes that Dubcek even enjoyed at first the confidence of the Soviet leaders: ‘Brezhnev called him “our Sasha”.’33

The invasion of Czechoslovakia and the restoration there of the old political and economic system meant the end of the Soviet economic reform and also of hopes for a new wave of liberalization. Until 1968, to be sure, the new economists carried on a sort of ‘rearguard battle’ for economic modernization. Two articles in Novy Mir by N. Petrakov served as requiem for reform and warning for the future. He reminded readers that the country was living beyond its means, that having money did not ensure acquisition of goods and, finally, that it would be necessary, sooner or later, to pay for the protracted refusal to recognize the laws of the market. These warnings, though, were sounded either too soon or much too late. Reform had been frustrated, but the crisis of the economic mechanism had not as yet reached the point where it could stimulate a serious revolutionary ferment. ‘By the end of the 1960s at the latest,’ writes Rakovski,

the ideology of ‘market socialism’ had undergone a total defeat everywhere.

But the defeat of the ideology only moderated the amplitude of oscillations

round a general tendency, and has in no way changed the tendency itself.34