The Thinking Reed

The ideological legacy of Gramsci was appreciated even later. A three-volume edition of his writings had appeared in Russian translation in 1959, but the importance of his Prison Notebooks actually began to be understood only in the seventies, in connection with a growth of interest in the Italian Communist Party and Eurocommunism. One of the first to popularize Gramsci’s ideas was G. Vodolazov. In 1968 he published in Novy Mir an article on Gramsci’s legacy in the field of aesthetics. In this article he wrote mainly, however, on the historico-philosophical reflections of the author of the Prison Notebooks. Vodolazov was principally interested in Gramsci’s ideas on the destiny of the revolution, which had much in common with the Russian experience. Gramsci observed that ‘a revolution is not proletarian and Communist, even if a wave of popular revolt has placed in power men who call themselves Communists (sincerely too)’.97 If the proletariat as a class is not ready to take power, then the victory of the Communists, despite all the enthusiasm of the worker masses, will not lead to socialism and will require ‘further and even more frightful sacrifices’ in order to ensure the establishment of a democracy of the working people.98

After the events of 1968 the left-wing intelligentsia gradually began to realize how true these views of Gramsci’s were. But it was not possible to look for answers to our present-day problems in the work of a thinker of the past. One had urgently to make up for past neglect, and go forward. ‘Consequently,’ we read in Gefter’s symposium,

if our assimilation of the heritage is to be creative, it cannot be restricted to mobilizing ‘quotations’ directed against particular oversimplified schemas and propositions. It has to be — and the crucial character of our epoch necessitates this with special force — a fresh reading of the historical conceptions of Marx, Engels and Lenin.99

The old Stalinist historiography combined magnificently a bald empiricism with speculative ‘general laws’ — only at best, however, for most often there was mere falsification under both heads. The task of the legal Marxists was to renew theory and develop method through concrete historical research. In a certain sense they had to open afresh the road traversed by Marx in such works as The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The principal problem, on the general plane, which faced historians (and brought them up against the ‘accursed’ questions concerning Russia’s fate in the twentieth century) was that of how the world of today came to be. Here the field of activity was broad, to say the least. It included the origin of socialist ideas, the origin of the revolution in Russia, the formation of nations in modern Europe, the establishment of ‘Faustian civilization’, and so on. In this context even works devoted to medieval subjects (such as A. Gurevich’s notable book on the origin of feudalism in Western Europe) appeared highly topical and far from boringly academic.

Official ‘istmat’ (historical materialism), as M. Markus and A. Hegedüs observed,

constantly proclaimed its scientific character, but in reality it rejected science to the extent that it refused to confront theory with social reality, and did not recognize the necessity for social theory to develop any further.100

The most important problems of Marxism — alienation, for example — were simply omitted from the official textbooks. What was needed, however, was not merely to restore Marx’s original theory of history but also to renew it. Accumulated experience does not permit one just to ‘go back to Marx’. Marc Rakovski noted that in so far as most East European Marxists characterize societies of the Soviet type as ‘sui generis class societies existing alongside capitalism’,101 it is necessary to take a fresh look at all the traditional schemas of history: