The Thinking Reed

The anti-semitic pronouncements of Astaf'ev in The Doleful Detective could not have failed to provoke protests from many cultural figures. Eidelman, a historian fashionable among the Moscow intelligentsia, sent a letter to Astaf'ev in which he exhorted him to renounce his views. But the author of The Doleful Detective wrote back that we need to put an end to the activity of the Jews in Russian culture, to ‘the seething pus of Jewish super-intellectual arrogance’, and so on. The Jews must pay for having killed ‘our last Tsar’. A position at which The Doleful Detective only hinted was thus given its ultimate development. Lamentations over the woes of the Russian people turned into a call for pogroms. Eidelman began to justify himself: it was not we who killed the Tsar, ‘most of those who did it were Ekaterinburg workers.’ Astafev’s letter, which had been sent as a private communication and not intended for publication, was duplicated by the historian and circulated by hand. Although, of course, one cannot put the two participants on the same level, it is plain that Eidelman did not come off the better. A critique which repeated general truths to the effect that it is bad to be a racist and an anti-Semite could hardly change Astafev’s position, while the unprejudiced reader would simply find nothing new in it. The misfortune of the liberal intelligentsia of the eighties lies in their lack of fresh, original ideas and their unwillingness to proceed from mere declarations to more profound analysis of the historical situation that has come about. Persons who claim the role of spiritually leading the renewal — Aitmatov, Eidelman, Shatrov — offer each their own recipe, but all their ideas are alike in being directed towards the past. Some talk of a return to Christian values (Aitmatov), others of the traditions of nineteenth-century liberalism (Eidelman), yet others of a rebirth of true Leninism and the heritage of the Twentieth Party Congress (Shatrov and the group around the paper Moskovskie Novosti); and sometimes these ideas are quaintly interwoven. The future turns out to be the hostage of the past.

Yet the young generation’s frame of mind is, as a rule, much more radical. In the last days of 1986 the television showed an encounter between Leningrad youngsters and some singers known as ‘the bards’. In the sixties the ‘bard’, the man with the guitar, was the symbol of spiritual independence, freethinking opposition to the Establishment. The leader of the ‘bard’ movement, Vladimir Vysotsky, actually became a national hero. Vysotsky died, however, and the movement has evidently lost its original radicalism. Those present at the meeting reproached the ‘bards’ for having stopped singing about social problems, about freedom, about how the masses live today. What we need now, they argued, are ‘songs of protest’, ‘songs that lift people above themselves’. The popularity of some rock groups is to be explained precisely by the fact that, in one way or another, they have managed to strike a note that accords with this mood.

The ‘Aquarium’ group, led by B. Grebenshchikov, has had enormous success in seeking to assert new positive values. Towards the end of the Brezhnev era Grebenshchikov was expelled from the Komsomol and sacked from his job on account of his songs. Only in 1986 did it become possible for ‘Aquarium’ to appear on television, and its first record went on sale still later. Nevertheless, Grebenshchikov conquered his audience: they learnt his songs by heart and put them on cassette. To the surprise, it may be, of his enemies and of Grebenshchikov himself, he became one of the leaders of the new youth culture which slowly took shape underground in the late seventies and early eighties, and then burst vigorously on to the surface of social life.

Crowds queued to buy tickets for the Latvian film Is It Easy To Be Young? It is very unusual for a documentary to enjoy such sensational success in our country. The explanation, in this case, is to be found mainly in the subject of the film — young people talking openly about their problems, admitting that they need a lot of money, questioning the values of society, protesting against official requirements or simply asserting their right to be unlike other people. Among those who appeared on the screen were punks and adherents of the Hare Krishna sect, as well as men who had fought in Afghanistan. The film is very beautifully made, and even the scene where a morgue orderly is cutting up corpses is shown in a highly refined way: the cameraman obviously spent a long time selecting the best angles and compositions. One cannot help thinking that the makers of this fashionable film would have photographed a murder no less professionally.