The Thinking Reed

The changes are gradually ceasing to be the concern only of leading figures and veterans of the Khrushchev period. Thanks to Twelfth Floor, Parfenov has become known throughout the country. The talented publicist G. Pavlovsky has at last gained access to a wide readership. It was he who, at the end of the Brezhnev period, edited the samizdat periodical Poiski [Quests]. In those days the appearance of Poiski was an important event in the life of the opposition, its pages containing not only criticism of official practices but sober considerations on the defects and weaknesses of the dissident movement. Poiski showed how left-wing tendencies had grown stronger in the ranks of the opposition. One of the most determined spokespersons for these new moods was Pavlovsky himself. In 1982 he was arrested and sentenced for ‘slandering the Soviet power’. When he returned from imprisonment, after Gorbachev’s accession to power, he was given permission to live in the capital and later allowed to take up a job as a journalist — this time on the official periodical Vek XX i mir.

In Pavlovsky’s view the movement for change stands in acute need of a renewed socialist strategy — not one artificially constructed by theoreticians but one that has grown out of our history, out of the everyday experience of the masses (just as in the first Russian Revolution). Socialism, wrote Pavlovsky, is

a simple, industrious word, whose definition excites passions today. The workers in overalls and the artisans of the 1920s like my grandfather knew what it meant: after cleaning their machines they wiped their hands on a greasy cloth and went home, stopping by at a shop on the way for bread and kerosene. Yet hardly any of them would have passed an exam in scientific communism. So were they socialists?… They were simply the Russian people. And from this arose their need for socialism. What kind? Today we can only guess. At that time there emerged a workers’ definition of socialism, its basic features blending with popular speech and with the Revolution. We remember how it was distorted and lost and wish to believe that that is what surfaces in our memory, returns to the past, with a peculiar freedom, a peculiar love, a peculiar unwillingness to condemn.9

One must not suppose, of course, that it is only the progressive forces that are becoming active. Liberalization created new legal opportunities not only for left-wingers but also for the extreme right. For the latter the centre of attraction became the Pamyat' [Memory] and Rodina [Homeland] clubs which established branches in Novosibirsk, Moscow and Leningrad, together with VOOPIK as mentioned above. Their leaders do not hide their anti-semitic and antidemocratic views: they dream of a strong state and the revival of the true spirit of the old Empire. They have taken root in a number of the temperance clubs formed in the course of the campaign against drunkenness that was launched by the authorities in 1981-86. In the area around Moscow a semi-spontaneous movement has arisen called ‘the Lyubers’ (from the Lyubertsy suburb). Their programme is simple in the extreme: to beat up Muscovites, everybody who wears foreign clothes, to drive out the ‘metallists’ and to cut the hippies’ hair. The ‘Lyubers’ belong to the same age-group as the admirers of ‘heavy metal’, but they represent, so to speak, two different epochs. The psychological basis for the Lyubers’ activity is nostalgia for Stalinism. As the editor-in-chief of the youth magazine Smena, A. Likhanov, put it, they ‘want to model their “behaviour” on the most distressing period of our history.’10