The Thinking Reed

in the development of Soviet art and literature. More than anyone else, Stalin defined the great humanistic significance of literature as a force for the education and re-education of man in the spirit of Communism, calling writers the engineers of the human soul. Stalin discovered and established theoretically the method of socialist realism in Soviet literature, and developed Lenin’s teaching on the partisan character of Soviet literature. Stalin inspired all the Party’s decisions on questions of literature. He directed the progress of Soviet literature, animating it with ever new ideas and slogans, and exposing its enemies, while carefully fostering cadres of writers, criticizing and inspiring them.33

This passage was by no means something put in for the censor’s benefit, or a product of hypocrisy. In this sense the eulogy of Stalin was categorically different from the subsequent, thoroughly hypocritical panegyrics to Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Fadeyev actually said what was thought by a considerable section of the intelligentsia and the overwhelming majority of the people. Stalin still seemed sinless: propaganda had done its work. It was not accidental that V. Bukovsky — the same Bukovsky who was later to devote his whole life to combating the system — wrote that in 1952 ‘for every single one of us, Stalin was greater than God.’34

But ‘cosmopolitanism’ had sowed doubt in the minds of the intellectuals. This doubt did not yet touch Stalin, but later events quickly clarified the picture. Even before the exposure of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress a large number of cultural figures, who were to play no small role in the next decade, had already taken up their position in relation to Stalinism. Strictly speaking, even before March 1953 many intellectuals felt no particular love for Stalin, but they respected him. The general grief which followed the news of his death involved even many critically thinking people. As early as 1953, however, a vague sense of change was in the air.35

The attitude to Stalin became cooler and cooler, and early anti-Stalinism began to take shape. As we shall see later, this position was not entirely consistent, but nevertheless one can say that a patent break in Russia’s spiritual history happened in the 1950s. ‘The death of Stalin,’ writes Tucker,

like the death of Nicholas I, was the end of an era and posed the problem of internal change and reform. In both instances the autocratic system revolved around the autocratic personality, and the situation towards the end of the reign assumed the aspect of a profound national crisis, a crisis of paralysis and compulsion.36

The first wave of liberalization, which began after the fall of Beria, created a paradoxical situation, when it seemed impossible to make out what was still forbidden and what was already permitted, what was punishable and what would merit encouragement by the authorities. The statocracy itself had not yet decided on its new line, and a struggle for power was going on at the top. At that moment there appeared in Novy Mir V. Pomerantsev’s brilliant article ‘On Sincerity in Literature’, which marked the beginning of a spiritual break with the past.

Tvardovsky was later to suffer a good deal for that article and was even temporarily removed from the editorship of the journal. The article had been published by I. Sats in the absence of the editor-in-chief, and it was approved by Tvardovsky only post facto. Like many others he was not yet anti-Stalinist; his position was undefined. New ideas made their way into literature by degrees, casually or accidentally, so to speak. But a logical historical tendency was cutting a road for itself by way of these ‘chance cases’.