The Thinking Reed

Today, the intelligentsia has become an organic component of society which penetrates into all parts of the social mechanism. And this means that its responsibility has immensely increased. Not seclusion in an ivory tower but active struggle for the realization of advanced ideas is the path to be taken by the best representative of today’s intelligentsia. Freedom as merging with the progressive forces of society does not mean renouncing critical contemplation and self-analysis. The power of a philosopher, as such, does not consist in his knowing how to shoot. But when eighty-year-old Bertrand Russell joined in a sit-down demonstration, that was not only a political act but proof of the seriousness and sincerity of his beliefs. If intellectuals do not merely trade in ideas but live lives inspired by them, they cannot turn away from the struggle to realize these ideas.62

Kon’s appeal was more than timely. The practical conditions of the creative work of the Soviet intelligentsia had become markedly more complex. In 1970 Tvardovsky was removed from the editorship of Novy Mir. Under Kosolapov the journal soon began to lose its individual character, even though there was at first some attempt to retain it. After 1971 it could be said that Novy Mir had become a journal ‘like the rest’. It kept a large number of its writers — Abramov, Aitmatov, Tendryakov, Trifonov and others belonged, as before, to ‘the Novy Mir circle’ — but on the whole it was no longer the tribune of the liberal intelligentsia. Moscow wits said that the title page ought to bear the words: ‘Let us renounce Novy Mir [that is, the new world]!’

The Emergence of the Dissident Movement

The era of Brezhnev’s ‘historic compromise’ began — a sociopolitical lull. A. Lim called the rulers’ formula for this period ‘the new social contract’.63 The rulers guarantee the masses a certain degree of social stability while the masses, in return, are obliged to give up the struggle for their rights. The rulers guarantee that there will be no return to Stalinism, but do not carry out any further liberalization. The slogan of the era is ‘neither reaction nor reform’. Its ideal is stability, understood as meaning immobility. Its policy is conservatism in the most precise sense of that word. Class and political struggles are temporarily frozen. True, in the economy mighty hidden processes of disintegration and breakdown are under way which cannot be halted without introducing reforms, and it becomes ever more difficult to keep to the terms of the new social contract. In the long run the prospective results of this course cannot fail to be catastrophic for the statocracy itself which has imposed this ‘contract’ on society. But at first it can feel satisfied with the situation.

On the whole the rulers maintained a passive role in the new conditions. Having, in the course of the ‘preventive counterrevolution’,64 succeeded in crushing open opposition — in the legal press, at any rate — the statocracy went over to the defensive. ‘The requirements of ideology’, writes Rakovski, ‘were now entirely negative: not to challenge the supremacy of the official ideology, or rather to celebrate ritually (on rare occasions only) a willingness to submit to that ideology.’65 A Soviet culturologist called this ‘ritual selfdefilement’. But critical thinking — and consequently its bearer, the intellectual who disturbs calm and alarms the public conscience — had no place in Brezhnev’s ‘new order’. Lim writes: