The Thinking Reed

Western scholars are often puzzled as to why a certain work has been banned. After all, some things that are sharper politically have been published! Many speak of a bureaucratic lottery, explaining such phenomena by mere chance. As a rule, though, bans are well motivated. There is method in this madness.111 ‘In most cases,’ writes Claude Frioux, author of one of the best works on the Soviet intelligentsia published in the West, ‘these works do not contain direct attacks on the regime. But they contain evidence of those aspects of history and reality which the censorship does not allow to be mentioned.’112 As an example we can take the play The Sailor's Rest, by Alexander Galich, in which there was nothing anti-Soviet. The subject was the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War. For some time this had been a proscribed subject for writers, as the authorities considered that mention of such facts would arouse sympathy for the Jews and so hinder the pursuit of their anti-Semitic policy (restriction of access to institutions, to jobs, and so on). The play was banned. Galich became a dissident, and died in emigration.113

The censorship of subjects — or, more precisely, the index of forbidden subjects — decides what can and cannot be talked about. This ‘taboo’ often affects art more painfully than direct political censorship. But there is yet a third censorship — the censorship of form. The state declares that art must be accessible to the masses. Since the masses are unable — because they are not allowed — to express their views for themselves, the nomenklatura speaks on their behalf. In this way the aesthetic concepts of the ruling elite become the general norm. Accessibility to ‘the masses’ is in reality accessibility to the ruling circles, although it must be said that the artistic taste of the actual masses changes and develops rapidly, whereas the ruling statocracy shows bureaucratic conservatism in this sphere as well. This means that what is pursued in the guise of a struggle for ‘popularity’ in art is an anti-popular policy, a policy of imposing certain aesthetic norms and views on the people. Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of the bureaucrats that ‘the tastes of the pre-revolutionary petty bourgeoisie seemed to them to be the canons of beauty.’114 There is nothing surprising in that if we consider the petty-bourgeois origin of the present ruling elite. The stability of the statocracy’s artistic principles is also quite natural, for owing to its well-defined organizational structure and artificial selection (only ‘people of the same sort’ are accepted into the nomenklatura), the mentality of this class has changed a great deal less in forty years than the consciousness of society as a whole. This results in exacerbated conflict between the higher and lower orders, in the cultural sphere as well.

The bureaucracy has its own notion of ideal form and of accessibility — of what is more and what is less admissible, both for artists and for viewers or readers. Consequently, the creative intelligentsia (except for the bureaucrats’ servants who consciously work to please them) fight for their rights in constant conflict with the censorship of form. It is in this very sphere that the bitterest battles have been waged. In the post-Stalin period this censorship has weakened considerably, but this was achieved only after prolonged struggle.