The Thinking Reed

In the Stalin era the attitude to art was totalitarian in the most precise sense of the word. Not only content and ideas but also style, form and artistic images were subjected to control. If an artist was allowed aesthetic independence, then he might later demand political independence as well. There could therefore be no concessions to creative individuality, or it would escape from control. As subsequent experience has shown, this attitude was, in its way (from the standpoint of the bureaucracy’s interests), the only correct one. ‘If we start from such premises,’ a Canadian scholar has rightly observed, ‘any policy which claims that a little artistic nonconformity does no harm to anybody appears foolish and suspicious.’115 The Stalinist bureaucracy’s endeavour to reduce art to politics, ignoring the specific character of artistic creativity, was capable of engendering only unartistic works. Theodor Adorno wrote, in his time, that essentially it was as unthinkable — or, rather, fruitless — for art to be devoted exclusively to problems of social and political struggle as for art to try to ignore that struggle. Artistic creativity can develop only ‘between the two poles of involvement and non-participation, inclining now to one pole, now to the other, but never coinciding with either’.116 The failure of the bureaucrats’ attempts to make the question of form a political question — and thereby to create a state literature which should be reliable in all respects and yet which should really be literature — proves the correctness of this idea a negativo. The statocracy was compelled increasingly to lift its control, allowing greater freedom for intellectual activity and retreating from Stalin’s totalitarian principles. But this process was slow and painful.

A peculiarity of totalitarian society is the existence of official ideals and norms applicable to every sphere of life. These ideals and norms are proclaimed by the ruling statocracy and guarded by the state, and deviation from them incurs sanctions. As Soviet society has evolved from the totalitarian to the authoritarian phase, ‘free zones’ have appeared where such norms and principles are absent. In these zones an opposition is formed. Most of these ‘free zones’ appeared after Stalin’s death, in everyday life and in art, because it was hardest to pursue a unified policy in these spheres. Stalin, incidentally, understood this; that was why he tried to submit these hard-to-control spheres as much as possible to the state. ‘The great leader’ was quite right, from his point of view, to distrust the intelligentsia. However, in the policy of the statocracy towards the intelligentsia there were always two closely interconnected aspects. On the one hand the intellectuals had to be made to serve the regime; on the other, their independence had to be undermined by all possible means.

The ‘Stratum’ Concept

The bureaucracy fostered in every way an image of the intellectual as an inferior being compared with the worker and, still more, with the official — a ‘whimperer’, a ‘crybaby’, an unstable and cowardly person who needed to be looked after. Ushakov’s dictionary gives this definition of the intellectual: ‘a person whose social conduct is marked by weakness of will, waverings, doubts…’117 The weak-willed ‘intellectual’ needed, as has been explained, to be guided by the bureaucrat.

At the theoretical level this policy was expressed especially in the concept of the ‘stratum’. The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, second edition, tells us: ‘Being a stratum and not a class, the intelligentsia cannot play an independent role in social life.’118 The illiteracy of this formulation is obvious. In the first place, we wonder what is meant by a ‘stratum’? What is the class nature of the intelligentsia? If it is not itself a class — which is correct in principle — then to what class does it belong? After all, social strata exist within classes. If the intelligentsia exists only ‘between’ other classes, then it must be an independent class. Thus the ‘stratum’ theory is inherently contradictory, a circular square, and such a formulation is absolutely contrary to the very elements of Marxist theory.