The Thinking Reed

The heart of the problem amounts to this: born as a mythological embodiment of the working people’s hopes for deliverance from their day-to-day burdens, utopian collectivism becomes in practice, when it is put into effect, worse in many ways than slavery. Inherent in utopia are both the basis for the future movement of liberation and an internal danger thereto. And inasmuch as the future is always imagined in the consciousness of the masses in a way that is to some extent utopian, any party that is orientated on the future constantly comes up against the phenomenon of utopianism. No scientific knowledge can guarantee against this. Bernard Shaw, discussing Darwinism, remarked that any science can become an ideology in itself — even a religion (and can consequently engender utopian illusions). In the twentieth century, he observed, we see ‘the revival of religion on a scientific basis’.77 Even where scientific ideas have triumphed, in the shape of Marxism, nothing yet ensures that utopian thinking will not make a comeback, assuming different forms. A relapse from science to utopia is sometimes expressed in a false interpretation of scientific conclusions. ‘The correctness of a principle does not guarantee the correctness of its application,’ wrote G. Vodolazov.78 An objectively reactionary utopia can adopt scientific terminology and acquire an appearance of soundness. The utopianism of the mass consciousness helps totalitarianism to subject the people, if only at first, but that is not the whole story. Totalitarianism sometimes performs really necessary work. The only question is how it does this.

According to Cheshkov and Vodolazov, for example, there are objective historical tasks that confront every society — tasks which are, so to speak, supra-class. But the means and methods for accomplishing these tasks possess a class character. Such a task is the modernizing of a backward country. In its own way, totalitarianism copes very well with that task. The point is, though, that it does this at man’s expense. ‘If this condition is not “stipulated”,’ wrote Vodolazov,

the problem is rendered extremely simple. All ‘subtleties’ are then eliminated from the problem with all the complications of transitional stages and measures, the solution to the problem is set out in straight lines, and a system made up of these lines is realized in the form of a system of barbed-wire fences, places of detention, prisons, concentration camps, and so on.79

On History and Historiography

All these general-theoretical conclusions became concrete in discussions among historians. One can even speak of a renaissance of historiography in the USSR at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies. The acuteness of the problems, their ‘non-theoretical’ significance, compelled the historians to think very intensely and productively.

In the 1940s George Orwell wrote that ‘what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.’80 After Stalin’s death it fell to the historians to rectify a situation that seemed irremediable: they had to rehabilitate not just this or that person, but historiography as a whole in the USSR. Later, in 1965, a group of historians, replying to Izvestiya's attacks on Novy Mir, wrote that they regarded it as their duty ‘in the name of the past and of the future, to comprehend historical truth in all its fullness.’81 But it was impossible to tell the truth about the past without affecting certain interests that exist in the present. At first, however, the government itself encouraged the search for new ideas in history. Soon after the Twenty-Second Party Congress an All-Union Conference of Historians was held and was addressed by B.N. Ponomarev, who at that time was already a prominent ideologue of the CPSU. He blamed Stalin for having ‘placed the study of historical problems under his own supervision, subordinating it to the task of glorifying his personality’, and even spoke of ‘the Procrustean bed of Stalinist schemas and formulas’.82 This sharply anti-Stalinist speech set the tone for the whole conference. A.K. Kasimenko said that