The Thinking Reed

Those five years saw more changes in the USSR than just the succession of four General Secretaries. The social situation altered, with the emergence of a new generation for whom changes were just as natural as ‘stability’ had been for their predecessors. When I wrote the first chapters of my book an intense propaganda campaign was being waged in our country against ‘Eurocommunism’; the newspapers were full of praise for Brezhnev’s wisdom and literary talent; and drunkenness had become the only permitted form of protest against the demoralizing official reality. The epoch of stagnation was an epoch of drunken stupor.*

Five years later, when I learned from my British friends that The Thinking Reed was about to be published, I was able to rejoice not just on my own account. Interest in our country and demand for books about it had been evoked by the real changes that had taken place in the USSR. Whatever may have been the social and political basis for these changes, they are reflected directly in people’s lives. Books formerly banned are being published and heretical ideas discussed. Left-wing groups are allowed to function openly. In August 1987 these groups were able to organize, on their own, an actual conference at which an All-Union association of left-wingers was set up — the Federation of Socialist Public Affairs Clubs (FSOK). In October representatives of the Federation were able to hold a press conference for Soviet and foreign journalists, on the premises of the official news agency Novosti, and at the end of that month a gathering of editors of literary and political samizdat periodicals took place openly in Leningrad, and was attended by correspondents of the official press.

Izvestiya has published an interview with the surrealist Salvador Dali, whose pictures were until recently treated as an example of ‘the decadence of Western culture’. In the subway at Pushkin Square tickets are being sold for performances at the avant-garde Skazka Theatre, which has put on plays by French exponents of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. All this is becoming part of everyday life, although only recently it would have seemed unthinkable. Nobody is surprised when poets from the ‘Direct Speech’ club, which has joined the FSOK, call for the reorganization of that ‘offspring of Stalin’, the Writers’ Union of the USSR. Students collect signatures to a petition calling for the rehabilitation of Aleksandr Galich, a poet and playwright who died in emigration. Representatives of Central Television film the assemblies of unofficial groups.

To many people the changes that have taken place seemed a miracle they had never expected to happen. However, miracles do not occur in history. We were able to convince ourselves of that in November 1987, when the fall of the First Secretary of the Party’s Moscow City Committee resulted in a real political crisis. Speakers at the plenary meeting of this committee accused their former leader of all the mortal sins, resorting to the rhetorical methods of the period of Stalin’s purges. Millions of people who read the report in Pravda felt that behind the speeches of many participants in the plenum lay a real Stalinist threat.

Activists of the FSOK who were collecting signatures in the streets for a perfectly loyal letter about the granting to citizens of access to political information found themselves arrested by the militia. A gathering of the Club for Social Initiatives (KSI), one of the leading elements in the Federation, was broken up at the very moment when the television people were filming it. Some activists and leaders of the clubs complained that they were being closely shadowed.

By the end of November, of course, the situation had been stabilised, and the activity of the Left clubs resumed its normal path. After a fortnight’s crisis glasnost' had come into its own again. The attempt to force the left-wingers back into the underground, or to make political ‘outsiders’ of them, had not succeeded. Yet the November crisis demonstrated once again the contradictory character of the processes under way, the tenacity of the forces of Stalinism and their readiness to oppose any democratic initiative.