The Thinking Reed

Once again, an embattled little minority of intellectuals is determinedly resisting the power of a mighty state; the hallowed tradition of literature as an instrument of dissent has been resurrected; lives are being shattered by prison, exile and emigration. Even such specific government responses as the detention of dissidents in lunatic asylums have their historical precedents, for this approach to nonconformist thought was foreshadowed as far back as the 1830s by Nicholas I’s treatment of Peter Chaadaev. With justification, many parallels have been drawn between dissent in Tsarist times and in the post-Stalin period.56

Old debates were renewed and old problems came up again.

The Terror

It has to be said that the old tradition of Russian culture — its humanistic, critical and anti-authoritarian (and so anti-governmental) political tendency — contributed to no small extent to the acuteness of this conflict. It is well known that tradition in general matters more to the intelligentsia than to any other social stratum. The question to be asked, though, is a different one: How had Russia’s intellectual tradition been preserved after the intelligentsia had suffered, first the severe consequences of the civil war, and then the ferocious repression under Stalin? Between 1917 and 1937 the old Russian intelligentsia had been literally destroyed.

The strictly Stalinist attack on the intelligentsia was waged systematically, beginning at the end of the twenties. One can even distinguish several stages in it, each with clearly defined tasks. The first mass-scale blow (‘partial’ repressions, not aimed against a particular stratum in its entirety, went on all the time, almost without interruption) was struck at the old engineers, the technical intelligentsia, those whom Bukharin had once suspected of dangerously propagating ‘the old culture’ within the new society. They were now openly accused of being ‘wreckers’. Roy Medvedev writes:

The serious mistakes made during collectivization and industrialization lowered the workers’ standard of living, disrupted the supply of food and manufactured goods, and weakened the alliance between the city and the country. Strict rationing had to be reintroduced in the cities. Discontent grew. It was hard to ascribe all these shortcomings only to kulaks and ‘subkulaks’. Another scapegoat had to be found for Stalin’s faults. And such a scapegoat was found: the specialists, the intelligentsia, who had been tainted before the Revolution.57

There began a real witch-hunt of the old specialists. The official organs wrote that ‘between 90 and 95 per cent of the old engineers must unquestionably be regarded as having a counter-revolutionary attitude.’58 But not only the engineers were involved. The second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia asserted plainly that wrecking ‘is possible not only in the economic sphere but also in the spheres of science, literature and art.’59 A group of Ukrainian intellectuals were even charged with ‘wrecking on the front of the development of the Ukrainian language, its terminology, spelling and alphabet’.60 The matter did not stop at accusations. Sentences duly followed…

The Communist historian Boffa, who has carefully studied the material on the trials of the ‘wreckers’ which appeared in the Soviet press, came to the conclusion that not one of the charges brought was justified: