The Thinking Reed

The contradictions between the above-quoted statements by prominent Bolsheviks — Trotsky, Pokrovsky, Bukharin — are not accidental. They reflect the contradictoriness of the Bolsheviks’ actual attitude to culture (and also to democracy, individual freedom, and so on). On the one hand, culture (like democracy) was recognized as a very important, fundamental social value; while on the other the very logic of the class struggle made it permissible for the sake of future democracy, future culture, future freedom, to destroy the elements of culture or democracy that actually exist today. Regarding these contradictions in the ideas of Trotsky or Lenin one can, of course, moralize and engage in talk about ‘doublethink’ and so on. But that would be to contradict Russian history itself. We should not launch into reflections on whether the Bolsheviks were right or wrong, concretely, in this or that action, but observe that the choice before them was not easy. In any case the Russian Communists, who considered civilization and education to be very important preconditions for socialism, had need of an intelligentsia.

On the one hand attempts were made to start a dialogue with the old intelligentsia, while on the other they quickly began to create a new one. In 1925 there were more students in the USSR than in 1914 -167,000 as against 112,000.112 The revolution had opened wide access to cultural activity for the children of the workers and for members of the national minorities. The relative freedom of the press and a certain degree of trade-unions independence give grounds for Giuseppe Boffa’s description of the NEP period as a time when ‘germs of pluralism’ appeared.113 There was not only a revival of spiritual life in the country after the bloody nightmare of the civil war, but a new upsurge. The elements of civil society were taking shape in Russia, and the sphere in which the greatest individual and social freedom prevailed was that of culture.

Smena Vekh

In the 1920s there appeared among the intelligenty who were cooperating with the new rulers a special ideology of their own: ‘left-wing Smenovekhism’. The authors of the symposium Smena Vekh, published in Prague, criticized the pre-revolutionary publication Vekhi. One of them, Yu. Potekhin, declared that if members of the intelligentsia were guilty before Russia it was not for ‘their excessive revolutionariness’ but on the contrary for ‘their inability to accept the great Russian Revolution in the popular forms which were alone available to it.’114

Although the symposium Smena Vekh, which gave a name to a whole tendency (or, more precisely, to two tendencies at once), was published abroad, it very quickly became well known to the public in Russia. ‘Smenovekhist ideas were popular among the intelligentsia and military men who were obliged to serve under the Bolsheviks,’ writes Agursky in his work on ‘national Bolshevism’.

Already at the very outset of the revolution they needed an ideology to justify this service. The appearance of Smena Vekh proved to be a powerful catalyst in the relations of this group with the Soviet power… the journal Smena Vekh and the newspaper Nakanune were freely sold in Russia, and sold well. Soviet sources which have no interest in overstating the influence of Smenovekhism provide us with the following facts. Out of 230 engineers who were questioned in 1922, 110 held Smenovekhist views — which does not mean that the remaining 120 did not share those same views, merely that 110 persons considered it necessary to announce the fact.115

Smenovekhism, moreover, received official encouragement. Pravda wrote that the Smenovekhists retained their old prejudices, but ‘life teaches, and they are capable pupils. The logic of life will compel them to advance farther and farther along the road of rapprochement with the re volution.’116 The new tendency received all the more support from the Bolsheviks, writes Boffa, because ‘in the frightful isolation of 1921 the declaration of the Smena Vekh group had to be welcomed as a positive fact.’117 Consequently the Bolsheviks recognized at once that the symposium published in Prague was ‘a major event not only in literature but in life itself’.118