The Thinking Reed

I have already said that the spiritual crisis of the Russian intelligentsia after 1968 can be compared only with the crisis set off by Vekhi. The present crisis, however, is deeper and graver. It has been produced by the combination of two interacting processes of disintegration — the crisis of the pseudo-Communist official ideology and the crisis of Communist reformism, a sort of spiritual bankruptcy of both government and opposition. Isaac Deutscher wrote that almost all those who broke with Stalinism did so, in the first place, in the name of ‘true Communism’:

Sooner or later these intentions are forgotten or abandoned. Having broken with a party bureaucracy in the name of Communism, the heretic goes on to break with Communism itself. He claims to have made the discovery that the root of the evil goes far deeper than he at first imagined, even though his digging for that ‘root’ may have been very lazy and very shallow. He no longer defends socialism from unscrupulous abuse; he now defends mankind from the fallacy of socialism… He remains a sectarian. He is an inverted Stalinist. He continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colours are differently distributed. As a Communist he saw no difference between Fascists and Social Democrats. As an anti-Communist he sees no difference between Nazism and Communism. Once, he accepted the Party’s claim to infallibility; now he believes himself to be infallible. Having once been caught by the ‘greatest illusion’, he is now obsessed by the greatest disillusionment of our time.168

Those prophetic words were uttered in 1955, before the Twentieth Party Congress, the Hungarian Revolution, the ‘Prague spring’ or the publication of The Gulag Archipelago. People shaped by Stalin’s totalitarianism are often unable, despite all their efforts, to get rid of the birthmark of Stalinism. ‘Character and psychological make-up remain the same as a rule, whatever the changes in ideology’, wrote L. Kopelev.169

Stalin in his underground activity, in the civil war, and at the peak of his autocratic power, never lost the rhetorical style, the oily cunning and the boorish rudeness of the seminarist. Something similar is observable in our own day in the case of many deserters from Stalinism and Leninism. The more radical and fanatical their new views, the more firmly they retain many of the distinctive features of the world-view and moral consciousness — or, rather, subconsciousness — they acquired in Soviet schools and institutes.170

This was said about Maksimov, after Saga About Rhinoceroses. When Zhores Medvedev asked a mutual acquaintance to describe Maksimov to him in a few words, he got more or less the same reply: ‘Even after rejecting the ideology, symbols and sacred objects of the Stalin system’, Maksimov ‘fully retained the same method of thinking.’171

Plekhanov frequently reminded his readers that ideology cannot be understood in isolation from psychology. Stalinism suppressed reason, replacing it with irrational emotions and faith in absolute ideals. ‘This irrational emotionalism dominates the evolution of many an ex-Communist’, wrote Deutscher.172 To Maksimov and to many opponents of the system we may apply the words of this British historian, written in 1955: