The Thinking Reed

Preface

‘Manuscripts don’t burn!’ These words from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita were destined to prove prophetic. For several generations of the Soviet Russian intelligentsia they became a kind of formula for hope: what has been written will return to us, thought cannot be killed.

The history of our culture provides some wonderful examples to confirm the truth of what Bulgakov wrote. Vasily Grossman’s outstanding novel Life and Fate was seized from its author as far back as in Khrushchev’s time. It was supposed that all copies of the manuscript had been confiscated, and the chief state ideologist of those days could tell the writer, with absolute conviction, that this work would not be published for the next two hundred years.

Grossman indeed did not live to see the publication of his novel. Nevertheless, even in Suslov’s lifetime, at the beginning of the 1980s, a copy of Grossman’s manuscript which had secretly been saved from destruction was in the hands of foreign publishers, and in the summer of 1987 the Moscow periodical Oktyabr' announced its intention to publish the novel in its pages. ‘Manuscripts don’t burn!’

This is also true, to some extent, of the present book, most of which was written as long ago as in Brezhnev’s time. I was arrested in April 1982 just as I had, as I thought, completed the work, and had handed it over to be read by my friends. And so while I was in prison under Brezhnev, while, under Andropov, they were deciding whether to release me, and while, in Moscow’s kitchens, people were arguing about how long Chernenko could survive, my manuscript was passing, through channels unknown to me, in and out of several publishing houses, to end up, in Gorbachev’s time, in the hands of the editors of New Left Review — one of the periodicals for which I have the greatest liking and esteem.

Those five years saw more changes in the USSR than just the succession of four General Secretaries. The social situation altered, with the emergence of a new generation for whom changes were just as natural as ‘stability’ had been for their predecessors. When I wrote the first chapters of my book an intense propaganda campaign was being waged in our country against ‘Eurocommunism’; the newspapers were full of praise for Brezhnev’s wisdom and literary talent; and drunkenness had become the only permitted form of protest against the demoralizing official reality. The epoch of stagnation was an epoch of drunken stupor.*

Five years later, when I learned from my British friends that The Thinking Reed was about to be published, I was able to rejoice not just on my own account. Interest in our country and demand for books about it had been evoked by the real changes that had taken place in the USSR. Whatever may have been the social and political basis for these changes, they are reflected directly in people’s lives. Books formerly banned are being published and heretical ideas discussed. Left-wing groups are allowed to function openly. In August 1987 these groups were able to organize, on their own, an actual conference at which an All-Union association of left-wingers was set up — the Federation of Socialist Public Affairs Clubs (FSOK). In October representatives of the Federation were able to hold a press conference for Soviet and foreign journalists, on the premises of the official news agency Novosti, and at the end of that month a gathering of editors of literary and political samizdat periodicals took place openly in Leningrad, and was attended by correspondents of the official press.

Izvestiya has published an interview with the surrealist Salvador Dali, whose pictures were until recently treated as an example of ‘the decadence of Western culture’. In the subway at Pushkin Square tickets are being sold for performances at the avant-garde Skazka Theatre, which has put on plays by French exponents of the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’. All this is becoming part of everyday life, although only recently it would have seemed unthinkable. Nobody is surprised when poets from the ‘Direct Speech’ club, which has joined the FSOK, call for the reorganization of that ‘offspring of Stalin’, the Writers’ Union of the USSR. Students collect signatures to a petition calling for the rehabilitation of Aleksandr Galich, a poet and playwright who died in emigration. Representatives of Central Television film the assemblies of unofficial groups.

To many people the changes that have taken place seemed a miracle they had never expected to happen. However, miracles do not occur in history. We were able to convince ourselves of that in November 1987, when the fall of the First Secretary of the Party’s Moscow City Committee resulted in a real political crisis. Speakers at the plenary meeting of this committee accused their former leader of all the mortal sins, resorting to the rhetorical methods of the period of Stalin’s purges. Millions of people who read the report in Pravda felt that behind the speeches of many participants in the plenum lay a real Stalinist threat.

Activists of the FSOK who were collecting signatures in the streets for a perfectly loyal letter about the granting to citizens of access to political information found themselves arrested by the militia. A gathering of the Club for Social Initiatives (KSI), one of the leading elements in the Federation, was broken up at the very moment when the television people were filming it. Some activists and leaders of the clubs complained that they were being closely shadowed.

By the end of November, of course, the situation had been stabilised, and the activity of the Left clubs resumed its normal path. After a fortnight’s crisis glasnost' had come into its own again. The attempt to force the left-wingers back into the underground, or to make political ‘outsiders’ of them, had not succeeded. Yet the November crisis demonstrated once again the contradictory character of the processes under way, the tenacity of the forces of Stalinism and their readiness to oppose any democratic initiative.

A few days before the events connected with the Yel’tsin affair, the Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, Patrick Cockburn, wrote that, to all appearances, the intelligentsia’s influence in the life of our country was ‘likely to diminish at the very moment when they have largely obtained the freedom of expression denied them for so long’ (3 November 1987). Actually, the rise in the level of education and political awareness of the Soviet population has perceptibly quickened in recent years. The Soviet Union of the mid-1980s was already not what it had been under Stalin or even under Khrushchev. The profound modernization of society which went on throughout the Brezhnev period constituted, in fact, one of the most important social preconditions for Gorbachev’s perestroika. However, this does not mean, in the least, that the Stalinist past has been completely overcome. As before, there exist in our country influential forces which are interested in a return not just to the state of affairs under Brezhnev but, so far as possible, to the way things were in Stalin’s time. The struggle going on in society assumes, to a considerable extent, the form of a cultural confrontation between those groups which appeal to traditional authoritarian ‘values’ and the supporters of socialist democracy. In these circumstances a very important role on the Left is being played, as before, by the ‘intelligentsia factor’. Society is changing, and culture with it. New problems and new possibilities are arising. But it is quite clear that the mission of Russia’s radical intelligentsia, traditionally hostile to authoritarian and bureaucratic structures, and coming forward as custodians of democratic and socialist ideals, is far from exhausted.

Without a radical design for the future there can be no revolutionary practice. And such a design is, in its turn, impossible without the development of a new political culture, without a change in social consciousness. This task cannot be accomplished by politicians and social activists alone. Without help from writers, playwrights and poets they will not win their battle.

The intelligentsia is changing along with society. The future of culture is the future of the country. Many generations of Russia’s best people have given their labour and their lives so that this country should be free. A defeat for the present movement for socialist democracy would not only be a catastrophe for our society, it would mean the downfall of all Russian culture, with its historic values, its continuity and traditions. The outcome of this struggle is by no means dependent on the intelligentsia alone, but, as before, the role they have to play is an important one.