The Thinking Reed

It is well known that it was the intelligentsia of the humanities who, between the 1950s and 1970s, were the principal — or among the principal — bearers and exponents of social protest against bureaucracy in Soviet society. It is not accidental that Wolfgang Leonhard, in his article on the development of the class struggle in the USSR, where he lists the potential gravediggers of the bureaucracy, puts the artistic intelligentsia second after the scientific and technical intelligentsia, while the working class appears only in fourth place.8 This schema does not, of course, reflect the real power of any social group or class, but indicates the level of its political activity.

Leonhard writes that writers and poets play a bigger political and moral role in the USSR than in the West, and are taken more seriously there.9 As M. Agursky has pointed out, ‘no serious analysis of Soviet society is possible without profound study of present-day Soviet literature and art, which have become the field of political battles.’10 This situation is to be expected in a country where the cultural-political process was almost the only form of political development over many years. The Russian tradition of independent oppositional thought has its roots in the nineteenth century, and perhaps even in a much more distant past. In the post-Stalin epoch many Russian intellectuals have made heroic efforts to revive this tradition. We may now hope that in future the democratic tradition will not be extinguished and that critical thinking will find the correct answers to the burning problems of our society.

It is customary to end a preface with thanks to people who helped the author in his work on the book. I, alas, am unable, for a number of reasons, to name the many friends, comrades and colleagues without whom my work would have been simply inconceivable. It remains only to express the wish that a time will soon come in Russia when scientific research and political discussion will no longer be treated as anti-state ‘sedition’.

Notes

1 The State and the Intelligentsia in Russia

‘For a people deprived of civic freedom, literature is the sole tribune from which it can make heard its cries of indignation and conscience,’ wrote A.I. Herzen. ‘The influence of literature in such a society acquires a dimension long since lost in the other countries of Europe.’1 Nearly a century later, Roy Medvedev’s Politicheskii Dnevnik [Political Diary] repeated Herzen’s words almost verbatim:

Under conditions where political thought is deprived of free expression, where political discussion and argument are impossible, the role played by literature and art is inevitably enhanced: these more complex forms in which reality is reflected enable the questions which interest and worry society to be posed all the same.2

The coincidence of the two quotations is not accidental.

Those words spoken in the middle of the nineteenth century continue to be applicable, in their fullest extent, to present-day Soviet society, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s. This fact leads us to two kinds of reflection. First, that Russian culture in general and literature in particular are rich, to this day, in living traditions of social criticism. Second, that these traditions, founded in one period of history — the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, when Herzen wrote ‘On the development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia’ and ‘The Russian People and Socialism’ — have blossomed in another period in a state which has proclaimed, at least in words, a break with that past which so angered Herzen. General references to the fact that suppression of individual freedom is characteristic of both regimes are not enough. A number of circumstances were needed for the social-critical tradition in culture to revive almost unchanged after several decades. First and foremost, the structure of the ruling power against which persons of culture set themselves must have retained a certain element of continuity. What and why?

The Asiatic State

Before we concern ourselves with the critics, we must form a more precise idea of what it is they criticize. ‘Autocracy’ and ‘Stalinism’ are concepts too general for use as scientific terms. A degree of concreteness and precision is needed here: what do you understand by these words? In Strömungen und Tendenzen in Neomarxismus, Holz wrote: