The Thinking Reed

in the unenviable position of displaying to the greatest degree the characteristics that most aroused Stalin’s suspicions… It cannot be said that the Great Purge deliberately set out to annihilate the educated elite inherited by the Stalin regime from the Tsarist era, but as it snowballed it came close to doing precisely that.70

After the ‘purge’ of the intelligentsia in 1928-32 came the inner-Party repressions of 1936-37, and then the new ‘purge’ of intellectuals in 1937-39. The historian M.N. Pokrovsky was accused posthumously of having, with his ‘school’, ‘carried out wrecking work in the field of history’,71 and this was followed by a witch-hunt among historians:

In the pages of Pod znamenem marksizma [Under the Banner of Marxism] accusations of philosophical mistakes — mechanism, idealism, agnosticism, subjectivism, Machism, sophistry — quickly turned into various kinds of political accusations, and then to fashionable and highly effective charges of hostile and even terrorist activity.72

Later, after Stalin’s death and the exposures of the Khrushchev period, it became known ‘that in the mid 1930s nearly all the most capable Soviet Marxist philosophers, no matter of which trend, fell victim to political repression. Most of them died.’73 In 1937-38 the devastation of the People’s Commissariats of Education in several of the Union Republics involved the deaths of thousands of teachers.

Mere repressive measures, however, were obviously not enough where the intelligentsia was concerned. Ideological and cultural control over its activity was required. It must be said, to the credit of the Bolsheviks, that in the twenties such control was very slight. In February 1925 Bukharin, who spoke at that time as the Party’s chief theoretician and was at the zenith of his fame, came out categorically against attempts to subject literature to Party control:

I said that no Politburo gave Pushkin any directives on how to write his verses. And if that was so, then think what it means. I said that the question of a new style is a very important and very specific question. It can be settled only when the Party does not clutch everybody in one fist, but allows free competition.74

Bukharin advocated ‘a tolerant attitude’, reminding his readers that ‘there is no need to inflame passions’, and that the Bolsheviks ‘ought to allow maximum scope for competition.’75 He conceived this competition in a rather broad way:

Let there be a thousand organizations, two thousand, let there be… as many circles and organizations as you like. Do you think that the Politburo ought to chase after everyone and attach him to the Agitation Department?76

Accordingly, official recognition was given to the autonomy of art. Bukharin’s position, which was at that time completely official, was summed up in this formula: ‘the problem of culture cannot be solved by means of mechanical coercion’, and in general, the solution was to be found only through ‘free competition between creative forces’.77