The Thinking Reed

This is quite natural. The well-known sociologists Nazimova and Gordon have pointed to the structural similarity, in a number of parameters, between social development in the West in the sixties and in the USSR in the eighties. Such a coincidence explains a great deal and opens some ground for optimism. The country which Gorbachev has inherited is already not the same as the one that came into Khrushchev’s hands. It is an urbanized society with a large number of hereditary townspeople and skilled workers. A whole number of ‘intellectual’ processes have acquired a mass character and have simultaneously become devalued. Young people have no memory of the poverty of the forties, but react acutely to any threat to lower their present standard of living. Problems of personal freedom and responsibility have come to the fore. People are tired of Brezhnevite ‘stability’. Protest against corruption and alienation of the personality calls forth a keen demand for new, democratic forms of collectivism.

‘Change!’ our hearts demand.
‘Change!’ our eyes demand.
‘Change!’ We want change.

So sing the ‘Kino’ group, and such songs are encouraged under the conditions of Gorbachev’s perestroika. But the crux of the matter is that many young rock groups, including some in the provinces, had begun to sing about the need for freedom and renewal even before Gorbachev came to power. Their initiative was not a response to any appeal from above. Independently of the will of the leadership, a new cultural milieu began to be formed already in the first half of the eighties. A group of young admirers of Marx gathered around a rock ensemble — that would have been hard to imagine ten years ago. This actual case illustrates very well the processes which have taken place. As in the West in the sixties, interest has increased sharply in both Marxism and utopian socialism. Some are interested in Kropotkin, others in Narodnik ideas about the free commune, others still in the theory of alienation.

The cultural mosaic of the ‘new protest’ is a great deal richer than anything the ageing ‘children of the Twentieth Congress’ can offer. It is clear that without Khrushchev there would have been no Gorbachev, and without the intellectual movement of the sixties the current changes would not have been possible. But every epoch has to find its own means of self-expression. Renewal of the ‘high culture’ of the professional intelligentsia will depend on its ability to comprehend the impulses coming from the spontaneously formed counter-culture of those down below. Historical continuity is inconceivable without the reinterpretation of accumulated experience.

Interest in the past is no less characteristic of the eighties generation than it was of those who participated in Khrushchev’s thaw. ‘In order to stand I must stick to my roots’, sings Grebenshchikov. The point, however, is that the new historical awareness that has spread so quickly among our young people has little in common with the ordinary ideas of cultural liberalism. The editor-in-chief of Moskovskie Novosti, Yegor Yakovlev, considers that the most important task of the day is criticism of Stalinism and, possibly, the rehabilitation of Bukharin. Yet an ever larger number of people are inclining to think that, instead of exposures and rehabilitations, what we need is a full, many-sided and objective interpretation of our historical past in all its contradictoriness. Society must find its memory again: not a selective but a complete memory.