The Thinking Reed

In 1949-53 the destruction of culture — or, more precisely, of what was left of it — was in full swing, and we cannot tell what the end would have been had Stalin lived two or three months longer. In any case, the incompatibility of culture with the bureaucracy had never been more obvious. The personalist Emmanuel Mounier wrote: ‘Il y a des gens qui sont “aveugles à la personne” comme d’autres sont aveugles à la peinture ou sourds à la musique.’

30 If Mounier had had to deal not with the French bourgeoisie but with the Stalinist statocracy, he would have expressed himself more harshly. Those who destroyed millions of people in the concentration camps were fully capable of trying also to destroy culture as such. Of course it was necessary to retain some appearance

of culture, and when even that appearance vanished the statocracy got worried. Hingley writes that the crisis in culture in 1949-53 was so striking that even Stalin and his clique ‘began to show mild signs of dissatisfaction with what they had wrought.’31 It was not accidental that Stalin had issued quite a liberal constitution. We were to have everything — a parliament, elections, guaranteed rights. But not real ones, just shams. In the same way we now had to have Soviet satire, Soviet lyric poetry, Soviet comedy and even Soviet tragedy. It was on the basis of the contradiction between the formally existing laws and what actually happened that there arose later among us the movement for civil rights, which claimed to uphold… the Stalin Constitution of 1936. Similarly, the official willingness to permit the writing of satirical verses or tragic plays created an ideological chink through which dissidents soon contrived to push themselves.

Paradoxically, through Stalin’s death in March 1953 the struggle against ‘cosmopolitanism’ had a final effect which differed from what had been intended. Without having destroyed the new intelligentsia it prepared them for a future clash with the rulers, aroused discontent, and engendered doubt in the minds of people who had grown up under Stalin and believed his dogma.

The Quest for Sincerity

Stalin had not succeeded in carrying through his anti-intellectual campaign to the end. He died at the very moment when the anti-Semitic hysteria had reached its climax in connection with the case of the doctors who were supposed to have been going to kill him (‘a group of corrupt Jewish bourgeois-nationalists’, recruited ‘by a branch of American intelligence, the international Jewish bourgois-nationalist organization “Joint”’, who attempted to murder prominent political personalities,32 and so on). After Stalin’s death the case was immediately discontinued and the investigator shot. The difference between this frame-up and other Stalinist cases which were no less frame-ups was merely that this time the organizers suffered fiasco. But because it had exacerbated relations between the rulers and the intelligentsia, this campaign prepared and facilitated the rapid movement of the bulk of the intellectuals into definitely anti-Stalinist positions in 1955-56.

This turn did not, however, make itself felt immediately. After the dictator’s death Novy Mir, edited by Tvardovsky, published an article by A. Fadeyev with the expressive title ‘The Humanism of Stalin’. In this article it was said that, even against the background of Stalin’s splendid achievements in the political sphere, his contribution to the development of culture was incredibly important. ‘Comrade Stalin’s role was absolutely exceptional’, wrote Fadeyev,