The Thinking Reed

But at the same time voices made themselves heard demanding the abolition of the autonomy of culture, and most importantly, precisely this view — akin to Stalin’s conception of art as a form of political propaganda — became increasingly widespread in the Party, ousting the liberal ideas of Trotsky and Bukharin. In 1925, when the Bukharinists were still in power, the Central Committee’s resolution ‘on Party policy in the sphere of belles-lettres’ mentioned the need for a ‘tactful and cautious attitude’ to non-Communist literature, but at the same time condemned inadequate attention to ‘the struggle for the ideological hegemony of proletarian writers’.78 While the trend of the resolution was liberal, the very fact that the Party was now concerning itself with a number of questions with which it had not previously dealt was ominous.

Supporters of a hard line invoked Lenin’s idea about ‘partnership’ in literature. This was, however, unsound. For Lenin there was no contradiction between freedom for the writer or the journalist (what he said obviously had no bearing on fictional writing) and his partisanship, for what he had in view was adherence to an opposition party in a society with elements of a multiparty system.79 It is characteristic that during the period when he was in power Lenin never once referred to the idea of ‘Party literature’. His article had been written in a different period and in a different connection. But Stalin and his henchmen were extremely clever at making use of Lenin’s casual remarks. ‘Thus, a year and a half after Lenin’s death, his successors brought to triumph a point of view he had expressed in 1910,’ writes a Canadian historian, ‘although he himself, on coming to power, had not thought it appropriate to confirm that approach by decree.’80

The final crushing of Trotsky, whose line was declared to be ‘anti-Leninist’, ‘counter-revolutionary’ and ‘reactionary-capitulatory not only on questions of literary policy but also on creative matters’,81 and then the fall of Bukharin in 1928-29 led to the final establishment of totalitarian rule by the statocracy, in the cultural sphere as in others. Literary groups were dissolved and a single Writers’ Union formed, which was absolutely subject to the Party and even spoke of ‘the fruitfulness of the Party’s guidance’ in the very years when the persecution of the intelligentsia was well under way, with the badgering of Bulgakov, the exiling of Zamyatin, and so on.82 Other ‘creative unions’ were formed, on the pattern of the Writers’ Union, with the task of controlling every aspect of creative activity. These professional associations were not in the least supposed to protect the interests of their members although, it must be admitted, something was nevertheless done in that direction. Their main task was to organize creative ‘production’ under state control. They wrote quite frankly about this, speaking of the creation of ‘a single production-creation collective’.83

In 1936-39 the Writers’ Union willingly sanctioned the extermination of its own members. ‘It is impossible’, writes Roy Medvedev, ‘to list all the writers arrested and destroyed in 1936-39. Some calculations put the number in excess of 600, almost one-third of the Union’s total membership.’84

The Limits of Control

Despite these measures, the intelligentsia managed to retain a certain cultural continuity with the democratic and humanist Russian tradition of the nineteenth century. At first sight there is even something mysterious in this. ‘Tyranny’, writes Edward Shils, in a study of the laws of development of the intellectual tradition in different countries,