The Thinking Reed

The last line held by open oppositionists within the limits of censored literature was the journal Novy Mir. In spring 1968 its editorial board suffered a blow. Zaks and Dement'ev were removed, but this only facilitated the editors’ movement to the left. Owing to bureaucratic slovenliness the authorities had got rid of the very members who were most moderate and timid. The journal became more militant. As often happens, bureaucratic decisions had the opposite effect to the one intended. At the same time the authorities could not make up their minds to suppress the journal. The conviction prevailed for a long time in Stalinist circles that Novy Mir ‘ought not to be suppressed’, that it was the journal for ‘a certain section of the Soviet intelligentsia which includes writers who, if there were no Novy Mir, would send their work abroad, like Sinyavsky.’45 This view, experience showed, was quite sensible. Nevertheless, the editors themselves knew that the destruction of Novy Mir was only a question of time. Not a single number came out without a struggle. It was not only the political censorship that had to be fought. Getting Bulgakov’s Teatral'nyi roman ‘through’ proved very difficult, although there was no politics in it. The bureaucratic leaders of culture considered that to cast doubt on the authority of K.S. Stanislavsky in theatrical matters, as Bulgakov did, was like criticizing Lenin in politics. There must be no encroachment on sacred ground. After 1963 the editors of Novy Mir were guided by the principle: ‘Treat every issue as though it were the last.’ They had to work in inconceivably difficult circumstances. For example, a special personal censorship was introduced for the articles of V. Lakshin, who was regarded as the chief ideologue of the tendency. However, the authority of Tvardovsky (and other factors too, perhaps) put off the dispersal of the editorial board for at least eighteen months, and that interval was well employed. The journal continued to publish very interesting works by Kolman, Kon and others. This was its ‘swan song’. Although Novy Mir was obviously doomed, it kept up its resistance.

Le Monde wrote later:

Despite the change of façade, Tvardovsky’s group (those of them who remained in 1969) and a new group of polemicists published some pointed articles. Even though the official press criticized them and raised various objections, they managed, as before, to get round the censorship which, in 1968-73, was more vigilant than usual. Undoubtedly these articles had to be read with attention, one needed to be able to read between the lines, but, then, that method of analogies and parallels was traditional in Russian literature: Pushkin, Saltykov-Shchedrin and Dostoevsky had all resorted to it. To judge by the use of allusions, and the nuances of the text, we may conclude that Novy Mir's traditional nonconformism had given place to scarcely restrained fury, bitter reflections and murderous satire.46