The Thinking Reed

The American writer underestimates the most important factor. From the standpoint of Stalin and his closest collaborators, the growth of hope for a softening of the regime was at that time of extremely negative significance, and they had to put an end to such ‘weakness’ and ‘complacency’. Boffa mentions also that the statocracy necessarily feared ‘the new unity between the intelligentsia and the people which had come about during the war’.4

The attack on the creative intelligentsia was headed by Stalin’s ‘loyal pupil and comrade-in-arms’, Andrei Zhdanov. His task was to organize a showdown with what remained of the intellectuals who still preserved continuity with tradition. For this purpose he made a speech at the Central Committee Plenum on 14 August 1946, after which the CC adopted its pogrom-resolution ‘On the Journals Zvezda and

Leningrad’. The victims of the persecution that followed included Zoshchenko, Akhmatova and Shostakovich and, later, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kozintsev, Trauberg, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and many others. The task before Stalin and company was more complex than this, however: it was to destroy, once and for all, the last shoots of genuine cultural life, seen, in Boffa’s words, ‘as a sphere in which critical thinking might emerge’.5

The witch-hunt spread. From literature it moved to music, the new composers being charged with underappreciating Russian national folk melodies. Zhdanov’s death in 1948, at the height of the antiintelligentsia hysteria, did not check it in the least. The crushing of the writers and musicians, which went ahead against the background of the Lysenko debauch in science and the Cold War in politics, led to a final break in cultural ties with the West. ‘It was dangerous even to quote foreign sources,’ writes Roy Medvedev, ‘to say nothing of corresponding with foreign scholars.’6

Zhdanovism and Lysenkoism went hand in hand. The bureaucratic onslaught on spiritual life began with the attack on the journals Zvezda and Leningrad and ended… it is hard to say with what or where it ended, because until Stalin’s death no end to this onslaught was in sight. The fight against ‘kinless cosmopolitans’ in literary criticism was accompanied by the rooting-up of ‘bourgeois genetics’, and the attacks on Zoshchenko’s stories were echoed by curses directed at ‘the pseudoscience of cybernetics’. By 1952 the agenda even included a fight against the theory of relativity, referred to as ‘reactionary Einsteinism’. It was typical that this new campaign was headed by A. Maksimov, who had written very favourably about Einstein in the 1920s,

7 and by G. Naan, who later became a defender of the theory of relativity.8 However, Einstein’s theory managed to withstand the attacks upon it, thanks to the resistance put up by the physicists. After Hiroshima the development of physics was connected with the increase of military might, and the statocracy valued above all others the scientists working in this field. The change of psychological climate in the discussion about the theory of relativity, as Graham notes, ‘began to occur even before Stalin’s death in March 1953.’9

The main blow was struck at literature and the social sciences.

At this time the ideological basis of the bureaucratic reaction became open nationalism. In his pamphlet Concerning Marxism in Linguistics, published in 1950, Stalin divided languages into two categories, the strong and the weak, and wrote, about the crossing of languages:

As a matter of fact, one of the languages usually emerges victorious from the cross, retains its grammatical system and its basic word stock and continues to develop in accordance with its inherent laws of development, while the other language gradually loses its virtue and gradually dies away.10

He added, as though casually, that the Russian language ‘always emerged the victor’.11