The Thinking Reed

The opportunity for his declaration was provided by the death of the director A. Efros and the conflict in the Moscow Art Theatre. Efros had come to the theatre on the Taganka after the Ministry of Culture forced Lyubimov to quit the USSR. Efros’s company did not accept him, and the productions he put on at the Taganka were pretentious and feeble. An outstanding director, Efros was stricken, so to speak, by creative impotence as the price for his moral surrender. But when Efros died suddenly in early 1987, the tragedy was used by Rozov as an illustration of how fatal it is for actors not to submit to their director. It was all clear to him. Efros was a victim: the company, which had been unwilling to accept the man assigned by the Ministry, was the villain. The conflict between the majority of the Moscow Art Theatre company and chief director Efremov produced the result that when, for the first time in our history, an elected council was formed to lead the collective. Efremov failed to get elected. Rozov understood: the time had come to put a stop to ‘the saturnalia of the contemporary mob’.3 His position was quite simple. There is ‘good’ democracy, which consists in unrestricted freedom, not bound by the will of the majority, for the creative personality to impose their correct decisions upon the ‘mob’. And there is ‘bad’ democracy, when everyone is free to say what they think and decisions are taken on the basis of the views of the majority. In the latter case, democracy is carried to its ‘most repugnant extremes’ and the Ministry of Culture has to intervene so that ‘a catastrophe does not occur’. It is typical that, despite such absolutely anti-democratic opinions, Rozov and his like still regard themselves as patriarchs of the spiritual renewal and — what is most lamentable — to some extent do play that role.

When everyone is hailing liberalization, it is hard to make out who is sincere and who is not. The sportsman and writer Yu. Vlasov maliciously remarked on television that there is nothing more repulsive than ‘collective recovery of sight’. In his view, what the country needs is not general talk about freedom, but Marxist analysis of the social causes of lack of freedom, a struggle to change social conditions and not just the political conjuncture. Vlasov’s address, which was shown twice on television, became one of the most important events in our spiritual and social life towards the end of 1986. The TV station received a tremendous flood of letters. Essentially it was a question of finding a radical cultural alternative, a fresh, more sober way of seeing society. However, a different mood prevailed among prominent members of the creative intelligentsia. While Rozov stood on the extreme right flank of the renewal movement and Vlasov demonstrated the vitality and necessity of the ideas of its left wing, the majority of the ‘renewal’ intellectuals preferred to remain somewhere in the middle, more or less faithful to the traditions of the Khrushchev period. This enabled them to preserve an appearance of unity. Rozov’s statement evoked no serious protest, apart from an article in Moskovskie Novosti, which had become, under its new editor-in-chief Yakovlev, the mouthpiece of the radicals. As a rule, people wished to enjoy the new freedoms without effort, instead of thinking about far-reaching reforms. But the actual course of events was placing such reforms on the order of the day.

As Gorbachev himself has acknowledged, the economic reforms came up against vigorous and successful resistance from the bureaucracy, who were defending their privileges and power. The traditional measures for influencing the apparatus did not yield results. Orders were not carried out: on the one hand, many decisions taken in the localities were concealed from higher instances, while on the other hand resolutions adopted under the influence of Gorbachev and his supporters were hedged round with so many instructions and explanatory documents that their original significance was obliterated. Without some freedom of criticism it was proving impossible not just to smash but even to expose such ‘bureaucratic sabotage’. Hence the logic of the economic reforms insistently called for intensified liberalization. The new leadership showed interest in, and began to encourage, certain manifestations of freedom of thought. In this situation what was needed was not only a relaxation of the censorship but also more serious transformations.