The Thinking Reed

Thus the conflict between state and intelligentsia, government and culture, traditional in Russia, is revived at a different level. In this connection it is worth recalling once again Lenin’s thought concerning the incompatibility between culture and bureaucracy. The Stalinist nomenklatura, like the Tsarist government, cannot exist totally without civilization. In order to achieve its aims, in order that the country as a whole may be up to contemporary standards and aspire to the role of superpower, civilization is needed. Needed also, consequently, is an intelligentsia. But once more, as in the case of Tsarist Russia, what the state needs is European enlightenment without European democratic ideas. The conflict between the Stalinist statocracy and the new intellectuals is a continuation of the conflict, historically typical of Russia, between an Asiatic ruling power and a European intelligentsia.

In the nineteenth century people spoke of the two Russias. That dualism returned under Stalin. ‘Russia had again become a dual entity,’ writes Tucker.

Despite the spread of literacy and education in the Soviet period, the country experienced a revival of the cleavage of cultures. The culture of official Russia, with its apotheosized autocrat in the Kremlin, its aristocracy of rank, its all-powerful bureaucracy, its pervasive atmosphere of police terror, its regimentation of all activities, its rituals of prevarication, its grandiose ‘construction projects of Communism’, its great new foreign empire, its official friendships and enmities, its cold and hot wars — this was one thing. There was also a suppressed and little-known unofficial Russia with a life of its own.52

The traditions of Gogol and Shchedrin could not fail to come back to life under such conditions. Even in Stalin’s time a small flame of spiritual opposition flickered among the intelligentsia:

For the artist, thinker and writer it often meant an underground creative life over which the state had no control, an escape from the dreary official culture to real self-expression in secret. Among some youthful elements there was a revival of evangelical religion, carried on underground, and the old Populist tradition came alive again when university students at Moscow, Leningrad and elsewhere formed secret circles to discuss among themselves oppositional political ideas with an anarchist tinge.53

Later this flickering flame of protest was to blaze up, startling people who were unfamiliar with Russian tradition. ‘The rebirth of dissent in Russia astonished many observers,’ writes Shatz.54 In the 1950s Western scholars noted that between the old intelligentsia and the new,

a residual element of continuity was much greater than they expected, for the situation of the Soviet intelligentsia was, objectively, in many respects similar to that of the intelligenty in pre-revolutionary Russia.55

The new conditions merely revived an old tradition: