The Thinking Reed

First and foremost it must be realized that the very term ‘Communism’ has been discredited among the peoples of Eastern Europe. They associate it with the ideas of one-party rule and dictatorship of the apparatus, relying on the hegemony of the Soviet Union in a particular geographical region.38

However, disappointment has its logic no less than hope, and it is the logic of inertia. Rejection of Communist reformism led many unofficial intellectuals into hostility towards Marxism and socialism — still further: to denial of progress, revolution, democracy even (for all these values were proclaimed by the left-wing ideologues, including the Communists). Pelikan wrote that the majority of active opponents of the regime in the USSR

identify socialism with Stalinism (they have seen nothing else), and so they reject socialism in general, as though it cannot be reformed or modified. Personally I do not agree with such views, although I can understand them as an emotional and moral reaction to the situation that exists in the USSR.39

It was important, though, that the countries of Eastern Europe had practical experience of Communism reformism, which produced real successes. The theories of Pelikan, Šik, Lukács and Kardelj were for these peoples not just ‘fantasies’ but definite practices, even if they had not been carried to completion. The Soviet intelligentsia lacked such experience: instead we had suffered, along with the Hungarians, the intervention of 1956 and, along with the Czechs, the invasion of 1968. These were events in our history; they were our experience, which was, in the upshot, as negative as could be. The tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia of the seventies was that without having directly witnessed the victories of reformism, it was present at its collapse. The defeat suffered by the ideology of ‘the liberal decade’ in Russia was therefore complete and crushing. It was no accident that Solzhenitsyn, who after 1968 took up more frankly some extreme right-wing positions, wrote: ‘Those days, 21 and 22 August, were of crucial importance to me.’40 If until then the intelligentsia had retained some sympathy with socialism, in 1967-68 it disappeared. A frenzied quest began for new values to counterpose against the old. They wanted not only to burn what they had worshipped but also to worship what they had burned — although, in fact, what they worshipped and burned were often the same thing under different names.

Disappointment had already begun to take possession of the public consciousness after Khrushchev’s fall. In the Political Diary for October 1965, V. K-v wrote:

A substantial section of the youth cannot believe in the truths that we believed in, and this loss of faith in the spiritual values of the past allows the attitudes of despair and disenchantment, now fashionable in the West, to penetrate into the ranks of our young people by the most varied channels.41