The Thinking Reed

The Bolshevik Party’s effort to preserve and restore modern civilization, to save it from perishing in Russia, the new rulers’ relative tolerance in matters of artistic creation, the traditional links between the Bolsheviks and the old anti-monarchist movement (to which the left-wing Cadets belonged) and the rapprochement between the state and a section of the ‘experts’ could not fail to influence the main mass of the democratic intelligentsia, mitigating its oppositional attitude to the new regime. But the chief factor here was that the experience of the civil war proved once and for all that the Whites were even worse than the Reds. Compared with Denikin, Lenin clearly appeared as ‘the lesser evil’. Furthermore, after the civil war a considerable part of the intelligentsia saw the Bolshevik Party as having been ‘chosen’ by the majority of the people. Stankevich, who was in the White camp during the conflict, wrote: ‘This was not now a mere one-tenth of the nation, as at the beginning of the revolution, but the most numerous party, with the greatest influence among the masses. It was obviously stupid to wage armed struggle against this party.’76 The very fact that Bolsheviks were now supported by substantial masses of the working people gave cause for hope that the regime would evolve towards democracy. If the government was a people’s government, then sooner or later it would become a democratic government: the possibility that it might develop in the opposite direction was not given sufficient weight. If the people recognized the Bolsheviks as the lesser evil — and the peasantry, after some hesitation, supported the Reds against the Whites, at whose hands they suffered even more — then advanced members of the scientific and cultural communities thought it proper to follow their example. Science developed more or less freely. ‘At this stage,’ writes Zhores Medvedev, ‘there was still nothing to suggest the future long isolation of Soviet science. All the tendencies were against it.’77

In those days, writes Loren R. Graham,

almost no one thought seriously that the Communist Party’s supervision of intellectuals would extend from the realm of political activity to that of scientific theory itself. Party leaders neither planned nor predicted that the Party would approve or support certain viewpoints internal to science; indeed, such endorsement was fundamentally opposed by all the important leaders of the Party.78

Zhores Medvedev even calls the years 1922 to 1928 ‘the golden years of Soviet science’.79 (However, the ‘hundred flowers’ that bloomed in that period were soon ‘uprooted’ by the Stalinist bureaucracy.)

Culture, no less than science, became in the twenties a sort of politically neutral zone. This was not because it had no connection with politics — on the contrary, politicization of culture in the twenties went a long way — but because at that time in the cultural field it was not obligatory to take up a position on one side or the other of the barricades. Culture was a ‘no-man’s-land’, not in the sense that ‘no man’ was there but simply that everyone could be there, and there was no ‘boss’. A third way, though impossible in politics, was possible in spiritual life. Censorship existed but was still fairly liberal, so that a neutral position was permitted in this sphere.

Literary groups with different aesthetic and philosophical platforms began to appear. A definite quickening of social life undoubtedly occurred, and discussion was carried on pretty openly. Independent and semi-independent journals were published: Mysl' Ekonomist, Golos Minuvshego, Novaya Rossiya, Russky Sovremennik, Sovremennik, Byloe, Novaya Epokha, Volnaya Zhizn', Slovo Is tiny, Vestnik Literatury — and also almanacs: Krug, Kovsh, Zhizn Iskusstva. The Petrograd philosophical journal Mysl' freely published the writings of idealists and positivists who made no pretence at all of loyalty to Marxism. ‘Our journal’, wrote the editorial board,