The Thinking Reed

On the other hand, Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat, which is also devoted to a historical problem — Stalin’s terror and the life of Soviet society in the thirties — was at the centre of the battle of ideas even before the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress. Bound up with it were hopes for renewed criticism of Stalinism and a fresh surge in social progress. For this very reason conservative circles did all they could to prevent the novel from being published. Yet Children of the Arbat was begun by the author as far back as the sixties and is principally an item in literary history.

The main body of the intelligentsia proved to be unprepared for change, and incapable of providing either new ideas or new forms. The ‘revival of spiritual life’ — of which the leaders of the liberal wing in the official writers’ and artists’ unions spoke so gaily — turned out in practice to be no more than the recovery of positions that had been lost in the seventies. Besides, many cultural personages were gravely compromised. Some who, not long before, had been full-throatedly glorifying Brezhnev now went all out to show themselves in the van of the supporters of change. As though in response to a word of command, they all set about denouncing ‘shortcomings’ of every kind. Criticism of social practices sometimes seemed to have become a kind of conformism, and discourses on freedom in the Gorbachev era called to mind the panegyrics to stability we had heard in Brezhnev’s time. As a typical example one can take the poet Rozhdestvensky, who censured Abuladze in Literaturnaya Gazeta on the grounds that his film Repentance did not expose Stalinism thoroughly but preferred to use the language of allegory and mythological imagery. A rather serious charge, especially if one considers that the Georgian director made the film at a time when Rozhdestvensky was penning eulogistic odes to Stalin’s heirs. However, Rozhdestvensky does not lay claim to the role of spiritual teacher to the intelligentsia. He is simply endeavouring ‘not to be left behind by progress’. The position is a great deal more complicated in the case of persons who do claim to be leaders, or at least patriarchs, of the forward movement of society.

The well-known actor Mikhail Ul'yanov, who in 1986 became a leading figure in the Russian theatrical union even before the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, appeared before Western journalists to attack Yuri Lyubimov and Andrei Tarkovsky, who had left the USSR. He said repeatedly that none of the productions put on by Lyubimov had ever been banned. Yet Ul'yanov himself knew very well indeed what had really happened. The reason why Lyubimov departed for the West was that, over a period of several years, the Ministry had refused to authorize a single one of his productions. Not only is Ul'yanov not ashamed of his lie, he is calling for a moral clean-up and talking of ‘a harsh and unconcealed struggle’ against conservative forces. True, he does at the same time stress that ‘the crisis phenomena have not been created by the system itself’, that particular individuals are responsible for them.2 In the last analysis such calls for struggle turn into efforts to redistribute power ‘upstairs’ between different organizations and individuals.

Someone who compromised himself even more gravely was the playwright V. Rozov, who openly declared against democratizing the theatre. In his time Rozov had brought about a revolution in Soviet drama, by refusing to write plays in accordance with formulas left over from Stalin’s time. Rozov’s works in the sixties were models of truthfulness: he took as his subject not the grandeur of the state but the experiences of the individual. In the eighties, however, Rozov proved to be one of yesterday’s men.