The Thinking Reed

The most interesting innovation in television is probably the monthly programme for young people entitled Twelfth Floor. Its millions of viewers have had shown to them many of the acute social and psychological conflicts in our society, the processes at work among our young people, the changes in mass consciousness and behaviour which had come about by the beginning of the eighties. Those taking part in the programme — both experts invited to the studio and young people from the streets — converse honestly and sharply about the inefficiency of the state apparatus, about people’s need for freedom, and about the spiritual crisis and conflict between generations. Important officials are obliged to answer irritated and sometimes abusive questions put by young people who are evidently trying to vent the social protest which has built up.

The editors of Twelfth Floor do, of course, try to soften the overall effect by resorting to all manner of technical and editorial devices and cutting some of the more barbed comments. But on the whole the picture is objective enough, and what ultimately matters for the viewer is not particular utterances by particular individuals but the general impression that is left. It is especially important that, through Twelfth Floor, the general public has got to know the leaders and ideas of the new movement among young people. Bit by bit, much of what is talked about on Twelfth Floor is taken up by the press, and serious discussions are started on problems which, until recently, people preferred to keep silent about.

A situation has arisen in which a newspaper is sometimes more interesting to read than a novel, and a TV discussion evokes more interest than an artistic film. This is giving rise to a sort of crisis in art. But it should be said that the responsibility is borne not only by the journalists or sociologists who have begun to write more honestly — which is not true of them all, incidentally — but also by the creative intelligentsia itself. It is significant that what most excited the public in the mid eighties were not new works but old ones that had been suppressed in an earlier period. As those bans were lifted, the aesthetic that had been held back was at last given satisfaction. New works conspicuously failed to compete with films or novels inherited from past years. The satirist Mikhail Mishin asked maliciously in the autumn of 1986: ‘What shall we do when everything that used to be forbidden is permitted?’

The most popular films of 1985-87 — German’s Road Test, Panfilov’s Topic and Abuladze’s Repentance — were all ‘taken down from the shelf’: Road Test had lain there for fifteen years until the ban was lifted under Chernenko. The publishing of works by Nabokov, Gumilev and other twentieth-century writers — which for political reasons had been struck out of the official history of literature — met with particular interest among readers, as did the appearance of unpublished writings by the recently deceased Trifonov and Vysotsky, or materials concerning them.

Not always, of course, was the screening of a film banned in Brezhnev’s time a genuine cultural event. A long film by Shatrov, made in 1969 and shown for the first time in 1987, signally failed to move the audience. Formerly, one of the main reasons for banning it had been that its makers depicted Bukharin in a sympathetic light, whereas today talk about Bukharin is quite widespread. What is really important, however, is that Shatrov’s oversimplified view of the events of the Revolution — Lenin always right, and those who disagreed with him (Mensheviks, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Left Communists, etc.) not villains but sincerely deluded people — is nowadays without much appeal to many. For some the history of the Revolution is no longer interesting and they have no time for the niceties of Shatrov’s polemic with official party historiography. Others, who were pondering the lessons of 1917 all through the Brezhnev years, have come to the more profound conclusion that the grandeur of the Revolution does not exclude a tragic element, and that none of its leaders was ‘a machine for taking infallible decisions’ (an expression of Trotsky’s). Incidentally, the absence of Trotsky from the screen also seriously undermined public confidence in Shatrov’s film.