The Thinking Reed

These changes have naturally also had an effect upon literary journals. Sergey Zalygin, who was put in charge of Novy Mir in 1986, immediately made it clear that he would strive to re-establish the reputation of the journal, which in the 1960s was the voice of the progressive anti-Stalinist intelligentsia. Alexander Tvardovsky’s achievements as editor in that period are well known. All the best journalists, poets and prose writers were published in the magazine at that time, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vasily Aksyonov. For a whole generation of Soviet citizens, Novy Mir became a symbol of independence. But the journal’s new editorial board has to face stiff competition from other publications. Grigory Baklanov, the new editor of the journal Znamya [Banner], has brought on to his editorial board Vladimir Lakshin, who in Tvardovsky’s day was the chief ideologist of Novy Mir. The journal Druzhba Narodov [Friendship of the Peoples] was for several months indisputably in the forefront of developments owing to its publication of Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Deti Arbata [Children of the Arbat]. Each issue of the magazine was passed from hand to hand and read until it fell apart. Some people secretly made copies of the text using photocopiers at their place of work (private citizens are not allowed to have photocopying machines in the Soviet Union).

Rybakov’s novel can hardly be called a masterpiece. The chapters in which he tries to explain the Stalinist terror are very superficial and the portrayal of historical figures is unconvincing. Historians have pointed out a large number of factual errors: Rybakov’s attempts to depict the terror of the 1930s as the result of the personal psychological peculiarities of the ‘great leader’ are to say the least naive. In his portrayal of Stalin as some sort of ‘evil genius’ of the terror, Rybakov remains trapped in the traditional formulations of the propaganda of the 1930s about the ‘leader’s omniscient genius’.

Nevertheless, the impact on the majority of readers was one of shock. For the first time in an official journal people could find a description of Stalinist prisons, of interrogations, of the mechanics of the fabrication of false accusations. Some material of this nature appeared in the 1960s (such as Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), but this is the first systematic account of the prosaic side of the terror, of the everyday concerns of executioners and victims.

Until now, pages like this could be found only in samizdat or in Western publications. The autobiographical parts of the novel, which describe the experience of a man who fell into the mincing-machine of the ‘great terror’, are written with powerful simplicity and authenticity.

Rybakov’s novel has become accessible to the public thanks to the politics of glasnost', but he started writing it in the time of the Khrushchev reforms. This is not an isolated case. The relaxation of censorship has brought about the mass publication of many works which have been banned until now. The editorial boards of literary journals are striving to outdo each other by announcing their intention to publish more and more ‘rehabilitated books’. The battles that were waged over the publication of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Akhmatova’s poem Requiem are already well known in the West. Such a masterpiece of post-revolutionary prose as Andrei Platonov’s novel Kotlovan [The Foundation Pit] has become accessible to Soviet readers. There are constant discussions about a Russian translation of George Orwell. A full list of ‘rehabilitated books’ would stretch over several pages, but some concrete examples are amusing in their way. For example, it has emerged that permission was long withheld for the publication of books by the Argentinian writer Ernesto Sabato only because he had allowed himself some critical remarks about Fidel Castro.

The most important of these rehabilitations so far seems to be the decision of the journal Oktyabr' [October] to publish Vasily Grossman’s novel Life and Fate, during 1988. The book stands out for the extraordinary depth of its comparative psychological analysis of Stalinism and Fascism. Ironically, Oktyabr' was the chief stronghold of diehard Stalinists during Grossman’s lifetime (indeed, denunciations from these circles played an important role in the banning of the novel). But today Oktyabr'’s new editorial board is eager to be among the leaders of glasnost', and as the Grossman case shows, is doing so quite successfully.