The Thinking Reed

Originally, I intended to confine myself in this book to studying the legal culture, as I considered that samizdat and books published abroad, being accessible only to a minority, were, so to speak, on the periphery of our cultural life. But I gradually became convinced that it is not possible to talk about the legal culture without discussing samizdat. The same main tendencies are found in samizdat as in the legal culture, but are more frankly expressed. Therefore one can see the literature of the dissidents as part of a single cultural-political process. Two principal social groups have produced dissidents — the literary and scientific elites. The former were brought into the movement by the logic of the literary struggle which began in the sixties; the latter by the logic of scientific thinking. ‘For true scientists,’ writes Zhores Medvedev, ‘the basic human rights are inseparable from their right of research. Violation of these rights only damages the creativity of work.’70 Some of the highly placed scientists had great possessions, enjoyed considerable personal freedom and privileges, but such people speak out not only for themselves but for wider circles of the intelligentsia.71 Naturally, therefore, members of the statocracy, who see gain as the only possible motive for people’s conduct (everyone of limited outlook is inclined to attribute his own way of thinking to others) were taken aback by the initiative of the dissident scientists. No less unexpected for the rulers was the form assumed by the dissidents’ activity, in defending Soviet laws against abuse by the authorities. Since the laws and public statements of the statocracy are contradicted by its practice (this is natural when a society is called socialist yet is not so in reality) such actions prove extremely hurtful for the ruling class corporation. ‘The governments’, wrote the Vienna journal Neues Forum, ‘act illegally, the opposition upholds the laws.’72

The dissident movement as a whole remains a cultural movement, although its members sometimes think they are engaged in politics. But they do not confront the system with any programme for change or any new conception of society, or even any new ideology. The dissidents really have created an alternative, but only a moral alternative. Their actions were calls for individual honesty. They developed a certain model of personal conduct, but gave no answer to the question posed by society. Most of the political books they have published abroad are theoretically feeble.73 Jean Elleinstein is obviously exaggerating when he writes that the books of the dissidents published in the West ‘are undoubtedly no less dangerous to the nomenklatura than were the philosophical works of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau to the Ancien Régime in France.’74 The theories of Sakharov and Amalrik are hardly to be taken seriously, for they consist of combinations of commonplaces with personal notions that are not based on study of factual material.

The most successful works by dissidents were those devoted to literature, especially works of fiction that made no claim to scientific sociological analysis.

One cannot really blame the dissidents for their lack of political thinking: it is not their fault but their misfortune. In a period when there is no mass-scale ‘practical movement’ for democracy in a country, conditions for the elaboration of political programmes are not very favourable. In the period of stagnation which began after 1968 a search for a global alternative might well seem an idle and needless occupation — besides which, the dissidents inherited all the shortcomings of the sixties intelligentsia. The dominance of art in spiritual life and the subordinate role played by philosophy were to be expected in a society which had only just emerged from Stalin’s terror. Art could begin to flourish much more rapidly than the social sciences, which require for their development time and the accumulation of knowledge and experience. However, what was understandable in the sixties was perceived in the seventies as a weakness. The country felt acutely the shortage of theory, a sort of ‘ideological hunger’. Everyone tried to satisfy this hunger to the best of his or her abilities. Under these conditions, writers, biologists and mathematicians came forward unexpectedly as social theoreticians, though their interventions were sometimes far from successful.

The elaboration of qualitatively new ideas and emancipation from the dogmas of the past is a process more complicated than might appear at first glance. This process has its blind alleys, its temptations and its imaginary ways out. As Rakovski has written,