The Thinking Reed

Only thus: to wager on the intellectuals alone in the Soviet Union would be as stupid as to count, in the West, on the students alone. Only when the majority of the working people really try to change something — not just protest in words or in intellectually refined manifestos, but when they go on strike, when they launch a general strike and street demonstrations, when all that becomes possible, then the way things are will be changed.6

One cannot disagree with Ernst Bloch. It is all just as Jerzy Lee said: ‘It’s not the same with freedom as with other goods… Freedom is the only thing that costs less the more it’s in demand.’7 From what has been said one should not conclude that the cultural struggle of past years was meaningless or useless. On the contrary, it prepared the social consciousness for the next steps, created the foundations for public opinion. And even if it began to seem, to participants in the events of the sixties and seventies, that everything they had done had been wasted, that deep process which they, consciously or unconsciously, had promoted was still going on. Although the results were not always visible, they were real. Forces had not been expended in vain. History will show what fruits will spring from the work done over many years.

Notes

PART TWO The Intelligentsia and Glasnost'

1 The New Cultural Context 1

When, in the spring of 1985, the third ceremonial funeral in three years took place in Moscow, most of the intelligentsia were in a state of apathy and pessimism. This was due, not to regret for the passing of the CPSU general secretary, Konstantin Chernenko, but to quite different causes. The Brezhnev epoch of Soviet history was described by the ideologists of that time as ‘an era of stability’. Later they took to calling it ‘a time of stagnation’. There is an element of truth in both appraisals, but the main problem in the early eighties consisted not in knowing whether Brezhnevism had been good or bad, intrinsically, but in the fact that this policy had now exhausted itself. The country’s economic situation was steadily worsening. Cultural life, based on the ideas and controversies inherited from the sixties, was in profound crisis. Brezhnev’s passing had clearly ‘come too late’, and with it also the change of course. The accession to power of Yuri Andropov in November 1982 aroused in many the hope of seeing radical changes, but unfortunately he was to outlive Brezhnev by no more than fifteen months. In that space of time not only was he unable to carry out any serious changes in the economy and the political sphere, he could not even exert any influence on the general psychological climate. When Andropov was succeeded by Chernenko, whom Brezhnev himself had regarded as his successor, it became obvious that the hopes were not to be realized.

At the beginning of 1985 the most widespread view among the liberal and left-wing intelligentsia was that ‘Brezhnevism without Brezhnev’ would be the country’s fate for ages to come. Some of the traditional spiritual leaders of the intelligentsia had died (Vysotsky, Trifonov), while others had emigrated (Lyubimov, Tarkovsky). Those who were left were sunk in deep pessimism. However, the times did change. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with the firm intention of implementing the changes that Andropov had not lived to accomplish. The balance of forces in the Party leadership altered to the advantage of the reforming and technocratic tendencies, which dissociated themselves from Brezhnevism. The restructuring that now began was bound to affect all spheres of life in Soviet society.