The Thinking Reed

Meanwhile, the ‘new dissidents’ were not wasting any time. As early as autumn 1986 a number of conservative activists began openly to criticize the changes that had been made. Chakovsky, editor-in-chief of Literaturnaya Gazeta, speaking at a session of the secretariat of the Writers’ Union, accused the supporters of change of ‘surrendering ideological positions’. Before Abuladze’s film Repentance was shown, several attempts were made to have it banned or cut. Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat was the focus of acute political conflict over a long period. One moment they decided to publish it, the next they demanded that it be rewritten. ‘How do things stand with Rybakov’s novel?’ became almost a ritual question in intellectual circles, a barometer of the political weather.

The process of cultural renewal proved to be far more complex and contradictory than it might have appeared to be at first sight. The principal problem, however, from the very outset, lay not in the stubborn resistance of conservative forces (nothing else was to be expected) but in the weakness of the positive programme put forward by the liberals.

The chief banner of the ‘children of the Twentieth Party Congress’ remains the criticism of Stalin. Abuladze’s Repentance, which was shown in all the major cinemas in the capital, ought, so to speak, to have given the signal for a new wave of anti-Stalin publications in the press, compelling the public to face up to the problems which had concerned the generation of the sixties. Unfortunately Abuladze’s film, for all its good qualities, was poorly suited for this role. The director had created neither a denunciatory pamphlet nor a realistic narrative of the terror, but instead a film-parable about the heirs of the murderers. The main theme is not the story of Varlam (a double of Beria) but the fate of those whose prosperity was based on the results of the terror. Varlam and his circle are murderers and executioners. His son and the children of his associates are transformed into complacent and almost respectable bourgeois. His grandson revolts not so much against Varlam’s evil deeds as against the hypocrisy and dissimulation of his father, who has built his bourgeois prosperity upon contempt for the victims of the terror and defence of the practices established by Varlam. In short, what we see is the revolt of the young generation, directed against the present rather than the past.

Most of the critics concentrated solely on the image of Varlam, seeing in the film no more than an allegorical account of the terror of the thirties in Georgia. It became quite impossible to criticize Abuladze’s work, which was far from being irreproachable in all respects. Since any reference to its weaker parts was taken by Moscow’s liberal circles as an attempt to rehabilitate Stalin, there could be no discussion of the film from either the creative or the political angle. Abuladze had every reason to be proud of its success. But many liberals had hoped for more when they had sought to ensure that Repentance was seen by the largest possible number of people. The revolution in public consciousness failed to occur — nor could it have done so.

Liberalization of culture proves most effective when the public is presented with works on subjects which, generally speaking, have not been openly discussed before. Such works invariably arouse great interest, regardless of their degree of merit. In society everything is less and less subject to taboos. Previously, for example, it was unthinkable to write a satirical play about the morals of the ruling upper crust. In the late seventies, when Rozov tried to do something of this sort in A Nest of Woodgrouse, the result of censorship and self-censorship was a failure from which the public simply stayed away. However, in the 1986-87 season two plays on this subject were put on at the same time in Moscow. Zorin’s The Quotation was a frank imitation of Griboedov’s comedy Woe from Wit, which all of us remember by heart from our schooldays. In this play the places of the serf-owning landlords of old Moscow are taken by high-ranking officials. All the characters speak in verse, combining traditional high-flown style with bureaucratic jargon. At the end some images from the Bible suddenly appear. The high-ranking official Baltazarov is quite unable to grasp the meaning of a quotation which he has himself hung up in his office, and is still less able to discover who wrote it. At last light dawns: he has unintentionally put up a text from the Bible distorted by bureaucratic slang — ‘The dead seize hold of the living.’ The ancient saying proves to be absolutely to the point. The whole story of the quest for the author of the quotation assumes new meaning. The incomprehensible slogan on the wall is a reminder of the letters which appeared before King Belshazzar, presaging his doom.