The Thinking Reed

In another place this same Trotsky — who, not long before, was ready to love those who would have blown up Petrograd — said that ‘the development of art is the highest test of the viability and significance of every epoch.’103 Trotsky’s line was that writers who accepted the revolution should be allowed ‘complete freedom in the sphere of artistic self-determination’.104 Later on he was very proud of that phrase, uttered at a time when he was in power, evidently considering it important as a refutation of the view that he began to defend freedom only after he found himself in opposition.105 And in fact, despite his sometimes ‘appalling’ statements, Trotsky remained one of the defenders of maximum toleration in the sphere of literature and an opponent of vulgar-sociological methods in the theory of art. His views, however, were far from being fully shared by Bukharin, who supported the idea of ‘proletarian culture’. As for Zinoviev and Stalin, they thought in altogether different categories. Joel Carmichael writes: ‘In cultural life, too, Trotsky was without a faction! He was simply the spokesman, once again, for abstract ideas, in a situation where such ideas had found no embodiments.’106 This generalization, like most of Carmichael’s generalizations, is quite incorrect. The line advocated by Trotsky was supported by Lenin and for a certain period continued to be official Party policy in the cultural sphere, but within the Party opposing tendencies were already gathering strength.

The liberal Bukharin wrote: ‘We need to have the cadres of the intelligentsia trained ideologically in a definite way. Yes, we must turn out intellectuals mechanically, produce them just like in a factory.’107 According to him, what the Party needed was not an independent group of creators of cultural values but disciplined intellectual functionaries, transmitters of state policy, without any personal initiative. True, in those same years Bukharin spoke in defence of freedom of artistic creativity, but these contradictions merely show his inability to grasp the problem of individual freedom and spiritual independence as a whole.108 Some Bolsheviks came out with antiindividualist statements that were a great deal sharper. ‘For us the individual personality is merely that apparatus through which history acts,’ we read in the works of Pokrovsky. ‘Perhaps these apparatuses will one day be created artificially, just as we now make electric accumulators artificially.’109 This prospect reminds one forcibly of the gloomy picture given in Aldous Huxley’s anti-utopia Brave New World Familiarity with this sort of statement evidently inspired Zamyatin’s melancholy jests of a few years later:

I do not know how many decades it will take, but some day the first pages of all the newspapers will be filled with reports on the international Geneva conference on problems of state anthropoculture: just as now one argues about the calibre of instruments, so in the future one will argue about the calibre of mothers and fathers permitted to bring children into the world. Having organized the material basis of life, the state must inevitably concern itself with problems of eugenics, the perfection of the human race…110

However,

the trouble is that with the use of the machine one can very easily manufacture as many Oedipuses, as much raw material for tragedy, as he likes, but for the manufacture of rare, complex apparatuses, capable of processing this material and its would-be Shakespeares, the machine civilization does not suffice.111