Glasnost in Action (Routledge Revivals)

Cultural Renaissance in Russia

Alec Nove

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136629129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 1991, Glasnost in Action: Cultural Renaissance in Russia is a comprehensive portrait of a society in transition as Professor Nove reflects on the changes taking place in the USSR at that time. While in English, Glasnost means 'openness', the author questions what 'openness' actually means in the USSR. How is Soviet culture – their art, literature, theatre, music and social life – affected by the new freedom of speech and thought that resulted from Glasnost? Was it Gorbachev's power and charisma that propelled Glasnost or would it build up enough momentum in Soviet society to continue independently? Professor Nove uses examples from each area of Soviet life in his exploration of the new openness, referring to the release of previously banned films, writings, plays and works of art, while reflecting on the newfound honesty about the country's Stalinist past and the problems faced today.

Chapter 1
Introduction: What Was

To understand the scale of change, it is necessary to paint, however briefly, a picture of the status quo ante. This is no easy matter. Since Stalin's death the Soviet cultural scene has gone through one false spring, the Khrushchev "thaw", before shifting into the disappointingly grey period of Brezhnevite stagnation. However, we must not oversimplify. Under Brezhnev too there emerged some challenging and original material, while many matters now freely discussed remained taboo even at the height of Khrushchev's "liberal" period. And even under Stalin's despotism certain types of critical material could see the light of day.

Let us begin with the theory of "socialist realism", which emerged from the first writers' congress in 1934, and which dominated official doctrine for close to fifty years. In its original form it could be interpreted simply as realism (e.g., opposition to abstract art and symbolist poetry) combined with socialist commitment. However, it was linked with partiinost', rendered variously as "Party-spirit" and "partisanship", and with what Lenin is alleged to have written in 1905 about "Party literature". It seems to me that Lenin (not for the first or last time) was misquoted: he did indeed insist on Party members producing literature of value to the Party, but he wrote this at a time when non-Party members (the vast majority, of course) were busy producing non-Party literature, which he neither wished nor was able to ban. There is another misunderstanding linked with Lenin. In conversation with the German communist Klara Zetkin, he is alleged to have said, "Literature should be understandable by the people" (ponyatna narodu), which was interpreted as meaning that it should be at a level at which people would understand it without difficulty. However, it seems that what he did say was that "literature should be understood by the people" (ponyata narodom), which implies that the people should raise their level of understanding, rather than that authors should lower themselves to the existing level. Applied to music, it would mean that Shostakovich could be allowed to write preludes and fugues, and not be criticised for not writing hummable tunes. Alas, in 1948 it was the narrower view that prevailed—and it is a sobering thought that the then secretary of the musicians' union, Khrennikov, a mediocrity who then attacked Shostakovich and Prokofiev for "formalism", should still be secretary of that union forty years on (no doubt now making "sincere" speeches about "perestroika"; such men are weathercocks with no views of their own). E, Ryazanov (Moskovskie novosti, 4 Sept. 1988) cites a good definition of "socialist realism": "It is an artistic style that tells the bosses what they want to hear in a form they can understand."

Under Stalin, "socialist realism" became further distorted because of the yawning gap between what was and what should be, between the official representation of reality and real life. It became necessary to be optimistic. Music had to be in a major key; in literature there was even a theory of bezkonfliknost', of a homogeneous society without contradictions or serious conflicts. Real miseries and tragedies were not to be mentioned. Just as Stalin, in 1948, announced that Moscow had "abolished slums", at a time when overcrowding and neglect of the housing stock had reached an all-time high, so the peasants' misery had to be portrayed as prosperous happiness. Two examples of such "realism" will suffice. One was told me by a colleague who swears that he witnessed it himself. In Moscow in 1952 a film was shown, Cavalier of the Golden Star, in which well-dressed peasants were feasting at a well-stocked table. Sitting in front of him were two peasants. When the film ended, one of them asked: "Where is all this supposed to be?" The other peasant replied: "Dunno, probably somewhere in America."

But the reductio ad absurdum of "socialist realism" I saw myself. On my first visit to Russia (since my early childhood) in 1955, hotels and public buildings were still decorated with "Stalinist" pictures and statues. One painting, repeatedly copied by the hack-painters, showed Stalin in a napoleonic pose, with, in the background, electric tractors, which were powered by long cables attached to longdistance transmission lines (the sort which stretch from pylon to pylon). Not only were there no electric tractors (of this or any other kind), but at this period collective-farms were barred from obtaining electricity from the public grid!

Culture suffered acutely under Stalin from the arrests and killings of such admirable creative writers and theatre directors as Mandelshtam, Kharms, Babel, Pilnyak, Meyerhold, Tairov, Klyuev, Yasenski. Talented poets, for example Zabolotsky, survived years of prison and camp. The highly original poet Marina Tsvetayeva returned to Russia from Paris in 1937: her husband was shot, her daughter arrested, and she hanged herself. Anna Akhmatova, surely among the finest poets of the century, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, a uniquely gifted humorist, were denounced in 1946 in foul language by Zhdanov, and silenced. Akhmatova's husband and son were sent to the Gulag, though by some freak of fate Stalin had her evacuated from besieged Leningrad. Such great writers as Mikhail Bulgakov were almost totally censored (though Stalin reportedly saw his play Days of the Turbins, known here as The White Guard, fourteen times). He died in 1940 of natural causes. His masterpiece, Master and Margarita, first reached the public in 1967 under Brezhnev. Another great prose writer, Andrei Platonov, remained almost unknown; his major works stayed under wraps until the era of glasnost'. Great were the losses through self-censorship. Talented writers such as Konstantin Fedin reduced themselves to the level of Party hacks. They and their like were then to act as a barrier to originality and talent also after Stalin died.

It must be stressed that the general policy toward the arts reflected the tastes and prejudices of the official class, and since the official class which came into its own in Stalin's time was recruited predominantly from the ranks of ordinary people, they did reflect the ill-educated popular taste. Party intellectuals of an earlier generation—Lunacharsky, Bukharin, Trotsky—were far more tolerant of, and interested in, intellectual production and artistic originality. The taste of Stalin's cultural commissars was probably little different from that of provincial councillors in Britain or America. The difference was that these provincial councillors had neither the power nor the duty to interfere in artistic production. (One could add some thoughts about the taste of Hollywood cinema moguls, or television network bosses, but this takes us too far afield.) In the USSR, through a (distorted and vulgarized) "Marxism-Leninism" the political commissars led by Stalin claimed total control, refused to recognise cultural autonomy in any sphere, denounced art for art's sake. It is a question worth putting, and no attempt will be made to answer it: How far was this a straitjacket imposed by the despot on his unwilling subjects, or how much was due to the trahison des clercs, zealots, or time-servers rushing in to do what they believed was the despot's bidding, denouncing their more independent-minded colleagues?

Science and technology were also severely damaged. The tragic fate of the great geneticist Vavilov and the triumph of the ignorant charlatan Lysenko have been much written about. Less well known was the fate of such highly talented men as the aircraft designers Tupolev and Petylakov and the rocket specialist Korolev; they were all arrested in 1937, but then, on Beria's order, they were set to design aircraft in a special prison and so they survived. (This is described by a former fellow prisoner, L. Kerber, in Moskovskie novosti, 20 Nov. 1987.) There were some ignorant attacks on Einstein's theory as contrary to dialectical materialism, but physics was protected because even Stalin understood its potential. However, especially in the postwar years, the campaign against "kowtowing to the West" was accompanied by the condemnation of many Western scientific theories, the forced isolation of Soviet science, absurd declarations to the effect that Russians had invented everything from the steam engine to radio. (A whole category of Soviet jokes exist on this theme, under the general rubric of "Russia—motherland of elephants". One example: "Russian watches go faster than any other watches." In Stalin's time, this joke could cost the teller ten years.) This may be the place to mention two semicomic eipsodes, both relating to the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia and to the year 1953. The volume, containing a portrait and laudatory article on Beria, had appeared the previous year. When he was arrested, all subscribers (including Glasgow University Library) received a note to the effect that the pages concerned were to be cut out with scissors or a razor blade, and pages enclosed with the note substituted. These pages were devoted to the Bering Straits! The other instance related to a short entry on an eminent medical scientist named Zelenin. He was arrested just when the volume with the letter Z (seventh in the Russian alphabet) was already on press. A hasty substitution occurred: Zelenin was replaced by a short note on Zelenaya lyagushka, "green frog", thereby providing the only known instance of a professor actually turning into a frog. Readers will be glad to know that Zelenin was released, and the "green frog" disappeared from subsequent editions of the encyclopaedia!

Was there then no criticism in the Stalin era? There was, but it was limited in two basic ways. "Official" criticism presaged, or more often followed, the fall of the individual criticised or the demise of his or her policies. And criticism of specific deficiencies could and did appear: thus some shoes were of poor quality, some managers produced goods which were too heavy to fulfill a plan in tons, some bureaucrats behaved bureaucratically. Scapegoats abounded. But all this could never be seen as a criticism of the system, as distinct from the performance of specific, usually low-level executants.

Workers on the "artistic front" (they loved military terminology!) were supposed to act as "engineers of the human soul", to help the Party to remold Man—and to ensure his loyalty and obedience to the Party and to its one and only leader, the greatest genius of mankind, Joseph Vissarionovich, the father of his people, "the Lenin of today".

There was one odd exception. In the last months of Stalin's rule, Valentin Ovechkin was allowed to publish the first installment of Rayonnye budni (in Novyi mir, No. 9, 1952), wherein he generalized about rural Party secretaries who ignored peasant interests and requisitioned crops ruthlessly "for the needs of the state". We will have occasion to refer to Ovechkin in a more recent context. How did the then editor dare to publish him in 1952?

Stalin died in March 1953. There followed a "thaw", and one must note both the similarities and the contrasts with what happened after 1985. The first "swallow" that almost made a summer was an article by Pomerantsev in Novyi mir of December 1953, with the innocent-sounding title "On Sincerity in Literature". His suggestion that sincerity, and not just following the Party line, was a key requirement for artistic production caused a furor—and the dismissal of Tvardovsky, the editor! But better times were ahead. The state of the peasantry—and it was a sorry state indeed—led to a whole crop of critical sketches and stories: Ovechkin again, then Abramov, Yashin, Dorosh, and Mozhayev (see my "The Peasants in Soviet Literature", reprinted in Was Stalin Really Necessary?, Allen & Unwin, 1963). Since action was to be taken to remedy such notorious "minuses" as overcrowded housing, shoddy consumer goods, and the miserable conditions of the peasantry, these could be more freely commented upon. Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone made a sensation, and was subject to attack, because it did touch, however obliquely, on the privileges associated with power and its abuse. Economics too awoke from its long enforced sleep. Stalin's last work was on economics (a recent article in Pravda referred to economics as "Stalin's last victim"). In 1955, a leading survivor-economist, V. Dyachenko, expressed himself as follows: "Until recently, dogmatism and scholasticism (nachyotnicbestvo) showed itself quite openly in quotationism. Instead of independent and deep economic research, the authors of many works busied themselves with a selection of, and commentary on, quotations. Facts were selected and presented merely to illustrate and to confirm the assertions contained in the quotations. Matters went so far that the number of quotations was regarded as an indication of the author's erudition. An economist who found a quotation which had not been used many times in the works of other economists considered himself a creative researcher. After serious criticism of dogmatism and scholasticism in the Party press, quotationism diminished, but only on the surface. In many instances matters went no further than the omission of quotation marks, editorial redrafting of the quotations, but in essence things remained unchanged." He went on: "The elaboration of key problems of political economy is most backward. For many years not a single solid theoretical work in this field has been published." And, even more significantly: "Since the economic discussions of 1951, it has become customary in every work to refer to the objective character of economic laws of socialism, yet not a single work thoroughly examines in what the objective character of this or that law finds expression, how its requirement shows itself, in what respect and how breaches of these requirements can be identified" (Voprosy ekonomiki, No. 10, 1955).

This was before Khrushchev's so-called secret speech to the 20th Party Congress (February 1956), the contents of which (not published in the USSR) were read to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, at closed meetings throughout the country. The period 1955-56 also saw mass amnesties of political prisoners and exiles, and also some overdue social reforms: a minimum wage, improved pensions (previously the ordinary citizen's pensions were derisory; even after an average increase of 80% they remained small), elimination of tuition fees in secondary schools and in higher education, repeal of the law forbidding workers freely to change their jobs, and higher prices for peasant producers.

Against this background, literature recovered its voice. Erenburg's novel The Thaw caught the atmosphere. Since the present book centres on glasnost' of the Gorbachev period, there cannot be the space for a full view of the "Khrushchev thaw". I will confine myself to setting out the limits which, even at its height, it was impossible to transcend.

First, Stalin: as Khrushchev said, he was a good Party man until roughly 1934 (i.e., he was right to defeat various oppositions, and to collectivize the peasantry, and to launch the five-year plans), but then he turned to cruel repression against honest Party members and established a "cult of personality". Innocent victims named included the military (Tukhachevsky and his fellow generals), and such apparently loyal "Stalinists" as Eikhe, Postyshev and a number of secondary political figures were rehabilitated as well. Little was said about the countless "ordinary" victims, and in this respect the publication of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniso- vich constituted a sort of landmark, a high point of "permissiveness" in the 1960s, only because Khrushchev himself intervened, A number of major "cultural" victims were also rehabilitated and small editions appeared of works by Babel and Mandelshtam. However, no formal criticism was made of the infamous "Zhdanov" decrees which condemned Akhmatova and Zoshchenko—though selected works by these two authors did also appear. Hints about the circumstances of the Kirov murder and the so-called Leningrad affair (the killing in 1950 of Kuznetsov, Voznesensky, and many other Party leaders linked with Leningrad) were not followed by any explanation or analysis. The big show trials of "oppositionists" in the thirties were left untouched, the principal victims (Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev) unrehabilitated. Trotsky remained an unperson. No serious history of the Party could be written. Such excellent "labour camp" memoirs as the two volumes by Evgeniya Ginsburg were published only abroad—though the author was not punished for this. Or to take another example: almost all the members of the wartime Jewish antifascist committee, arrested in 1948—49, were shot in 1952. Each of the families was informed in 1956 that this had been so, and also that their husbands and fathers had been innocent. But no public announcement, or any press reference whatever, was allowed.

Nonetheless, the atmosphere grew much less repressive. There was universal praise for Shostakovich; Stravinsky visited his native land and met Khrushchev. Soviet orchestras, soloists, choirs, athletes, and scientists were allowed to travel to the West—subject to many restrictions, to be sure. Western scholars and cultural figures visited Russia. All this did not happen without the odd snag, sometimes a comic one. Thus it appears that one Western scholar proposed the following research subject: "the struggle of the Ukrainian nationalists against the Bolsheviks, 1918-21". This was firmly rejected by the Soviet side, and the following was accepted instead: "the struggle of the Bolsheviks against the Ukrainian nationalists, 1918-21". Soviet scholars were usually sent as "delegations", under discipline. It is said that at one conference (of Africanists) two British scholars differed in their evaluation of the chief Soviet delegate's speech. Asked for his opinion on the session, the Soviet scholar replied: "We have done well. We have succeeded in splitting the British delegation."

These were all parts of a definitely "liberalizing" trend. Interestingly, the most "liberal" were the literary monthlies, notably Novyi mir under its courageous editor, Alexander Tvardovsky (reappointed in 1958), The specialist journals were much more cautious, more in the hands of timid orthodox editors. I has the historian Burdzhalov got into trouble for his first-rate monograph on the revolution that overthrew the Tsar in 1917, which challenged established myths. Or, to take a very different example, the critique of official peasant policy, which included scarcely veiled criticisms of some "campaigns" waged by Khrushchev himself, appeared in the literary monthlies, while the agricultural journals remained dull and orthodox.

There were some setbacks, as when Khrushchev attacked abstract modern art, having been shown some examples at an avant-garde exhibition. He was intolerant of religion. He was also worried about the role of intellectuals in the Hungarian and Polish events of 1956, and sought to set limits on "labour camp" literature. It was during his period of rule that Pasternak was denounced for Dr. Zhivago. (It is a measure of the scale of change that his novel seems so innocent, so harmless, in today's context.) Khrushchev was an inconsistent, willful, well-meaning, unusual character. His fall led rapidly to a counterattack by the hard-liners. It must be stressed that at no time under Brezhnev was there a return to full-fledged "Stalinism". Nonetheless, many advanced "liberal" positions were lost, and many of the most active proponents of glasnost' today are those who had carried the torch of cultural liberty in the best years of Khrushchev.

The rot set in with the prosecution of Sinyavski and Daniel, in 1965, for sending works for publication in the West. Soon the doors were closing in the Institute of History: thus Nekrich's critical study June 1941, which showed Stalin's failure to heed warnings, was first published with the censor's approval, and then denounced as no longer permissible. (There were, however, a whole series of war memoirs by generals, some of which did cast some light on the early disasters.) In the same institute, Danilov and several talented colleagues were tackling the thorny subject of the history of collectivization. They were ordered to stop their work, and the newly appointe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: What Was
• 2 Stalin and Stalinism
• 3 The Rehabilitation of History— Or the History of Rehabilitation
• 4 The Terror
• 5 Religion, Nationalism, Morality
• 6 Literature and the Media
• 7 Politics, Sociology, and Law
• 8 Economic Problems and Issues
• 9 Conclusion: Now What?
• Appendix: A Guide to Soviet Publications
• Index