The Thinking Reed

1 The New Cultural Context1

When, in the spring of 1985, the third ceremonial funeral in three years took place in Moscow, most of the intelligentsia were in a state of apathy and pessimism. This was due, not to regret for the passing of the CPSU general secretary, Konstantin Chernenko, but to quite different causes. The Brezhnev epoch of Soviet history was described by the ideologists of that time as ‘an era of stability’. Later they took to calling it ‘a time of stagnation’. There is an element of truth in both appraisals, but the main problem in the early eighties consisted not in knowing whether Brezhnevism had been good or bad, intrinsically, but in the fact that this policy had now exhausted itself. The country’s economic situation was steadily worsening. Cultural life, based on the ideas and controversies inherited from the sixties, was in profound crisis. Brezhnev’s passing had clearly ‘come too late’, and with it also the change of course. The accession to power of Yuri Andropov in November 1982 aroused in many the hope of seeing radical changes, but unfortunately he was to outlive Brezhnev by no more than fifteen months. In that space of time not only was he unable to carry out any serious changes in the economy and the political sphere, he could not even exert any influence on the general psychological climate. When Andropov was succeeded by Chernenko, whom Brezhnev himself had regarded as his successor, it became obvious that the hopes were not to be realized.

At the beginning of 1985 the most widespread view among the liberal and left-wing intelligentsia was that ‘Brezhnevism without Brezhnev’ would be the country’s fate for ages to come. Some of the traditional spiritual leaders of the intelligentsia had died (Vysotsky, Trifonov), while others had emigrated (Lyubimov, Tarkovsky). Those who were left were sunk in deep pessimism. However, the times did change. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with the firm intention of implementing the changes that Andropov had not lived to accomplish. The balance of forces in the Party leadership altered to the advantage of the reforming and technocratic tendencies, which dissociated themselves from Brezhnevism. The restructuring that now began was bound to affect all spheres of life in Soviet society.

In their profoundity and scale the changes can be compared only to the policy of de-Stalinization pursued by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s. Such a comparison, however, reveals both similarities and differences. When in 1956 Khrushchev came out with his exposure of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress, most of the population suffered shock. Among the intelligentsia the turmoil soon gave way to a reformist euphoria. Left-wing intellectual tendencies were formed and became active very quickly, even though they often based themselves upon rather naive notions. Thirty years later the Twenty-Seventh Congress, under Gorbachev’s leadership, featured no sensational revelations. The changes in the country were not at first so abrupt, although they went considerably deeper. Unlike in Khrushchev’s time, it was now not a matter of ‘correcting mistakes’ in the political sphere but of an extensive ‘restructuring’ that affected economics, politics and culture.

The intelligentsia, in its turn, took some time to overcome its apathy. Just as before, everything began with a re-examination of history. Even before the Party Congress Moscow’s theatres had presented Mikhail Shatrov’s play The Dictatorship of Conscience and A. Buravsky’s Speak … The former, by an author who had been popular in the sixties, was dedicated to Lenin, and its main purpose was to revive the liberal ideas of Khrushchev’s time. The latter came from the pen of a young writer who subjected these ideas to ruthless criticism from the left. In Speak … the action takes place in the provinces in the early fifties. Stalin dies and Khrushchev comes to power. The local leaders are also replaced. The new ones sincerely want to improve the situation, to better people’s lives. But until the masses take their fate into their own hands there can be no real changes. And when rank-and-file working people begin talking openly about their rights, putting forward their own demands and electing their own leaders, the progressive officials take fright no less than the conservatives. The initiative assumed by the lower orders appears as ‘insubordination’ and ‘mutiny’.

There is no place in the eighties for the illusions of the fifties. This is a sign that society has matured, but a sober awareness of the difficulties standing in the way of change holds many people back. It is now harder to decide on serious actions and to work out a line of conduct than it was in the earlier period. Yet, after the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, changes really did take place. Television became considerably more interesting, the powers of the censorship were sharply restricted, the influence of the Ministry of Culture on artistic creativity declined to a marked degree, and books began to be published which had previously been banned.

Reading the newspapers became a fascinating occupation. In Sovetskaya Kultura a column headed ‘Direct Speech’ allowed well-known artists and writers to talk frankly about problems that worried them — about censorship and freedom to create, about the democratization of society, and about social injustice. Similar contributions also became a feature of Literaturnaya Gazeta, even though that paper’s editor-in-chief, A. Chakovsky, was himself in no way a supporter of the changes. It emerged that Gorbachev and those around him not only read these articles but also paid them quite a lot of attention. For example, an article by the playwright Aleksandr Gel'man about conservative resistance to the reforms (the writer aptly called the opponents of the new course ‘the new dissidents’) was mentioned by the General Secretary in one of his speeches. There was also a big change in television. Whereas in Brezhnev’s time they had taken care to pre-record and transcribe every programme, so that the authorities could check for anything seditious, more and more live broadcasts began to take place in 1986. Although this has mainly applied in the less controversial areas, it is now becoming difficult to define which programme deals with political problems and which does not. Even in the variety programme Morning Post the compère now and then allows himself to crack a joke about bureaucratic control of the media.

The most interesting innovation in television is probably the monthly programme for young people entitled Twelfth Floor. Its millions of viewers have had shown to them many of the acute social and psychological conflicts in our society, the processes at work among our young people, the changes in mass consciousness and behaviour which had come about by the beginning of the eighties. Those taking part in the programme — both experts invited to the studio and young people from the streets — converse honestly and sharply about the inefficiency of the state apparatus, about people’s need for freedom, and about the spiritual crisis and conflict between generations. Important officials are obliged to answer irritated and sometimes abusive questions put by young people who are evidently trying to vent the social protest which has built up.

The editors of Twelfth Floor do, of course, try to soften the overall effect by resorting to all manner of technical and editorial devices and cutting some of the more barbed comments. But on the whole the picture is objective enough, and what ultimately matters for the viewer is not particular utterances by particular individuals but the general impression that is left. It is especially important that, through Twelfth Floor, the general public has got to know the leaders and ideas of the new movement among young people. Bit by bit, much of what is talked about on Twelfth Floor is taken up by the press, and serious discussions are started on problems which, until recently, people preferred to keep silent about.

A situation has arisen in which a newspaper is sometimes more interesting to read than a novel, and a TV discussion evokes more interest than an artistic film. This is giving rise to a sort of crisis in art. But it should be said that the responsibility is borne not only by the journalists or sociologists who have begun to write more honestly — which is not true of them all, incidentally — but also by the creative intelligentsia itself. It is significant that what most excited the public in the mid eighties were not new works but old ones that had been suppressed in an earlier period. As those bans were lifted, the aesthetic that had been held back was at last given satisfaction. New works conspicuously failed to compete with films or novels inherited from past years. The satirist Mikhail Mishin asked maliciously in the autumn of 1986: ‘What shall we do when everything that used to be forbidden is permitted?’

The most popular films of 1985-87 — German’s Road Test, Panfilov’s Topic and Abuladze’s Repentance — were all ‘taken down from the shelf’: Road Test had lain there for fifteen years until the ban was lifted under Chernenko. The publishing of works by Nabokov, Gumilev and other twentieth-century writers — which for political reasons had been struck out of the official history of literature — met with particular interest among readers, as did the appearance of unpublished writings by the recently deceased Trifonov and Vysotsky, or materials concerning them.

Not always, of course, was the screening of a film banned in Brezhnev’s time a genuine cultural event. A long film by Shatrov, made in 1969 and shown for the first time in 1987, signally failed to move the audience. Formerly, one of the main reasons for banning it had been that its makers depicted Bukharin in a sympathetic light, whereas today talk about Bukharin is quite widespread. What is really important, however, is that Shatrov’s oversimplified view of the events of the Revolution — Lenin always right, and those who disagreed with him (Mensheviks, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Left Communists, etc.) not villains but sincerely deluded people — is nowadays without much appeal to many. For some the history of the Revolution is no longer interesting and they have no time for the niceties of Shatrov’s polemic with official party historiography. Others, who were pondering the lessons of 1917 all through the Brezhnev years, have come to the more profound conclusion that the grandeur of the Revolution does not exclude a tragic element, and that none of its leaders was ‘a machine for taking infallible decisions’ (an expression of Trotsky’s). Incidentally, the absence of Trotsky from the screen also seriously undermined public confidence in Shatrov’s film.

On the other hand, Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat, which is also devoted to a historical problem — Stalin’s terror and the life of Soviet society in the thirties — was at the centre of the battle of ideas even before the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress. Bound up with it were hopes for renewed criticism of Stalinism and a fresh surge in social progress. For this very reason conservative circles did all they could to prevent the novel from being published. Yet Children of the Arbat was begun by the author as far back as the sixties and is principally an item in literary history.

The main body of the intelligentsia proved to be unprepared for change, and incapable of providing either new ideas or new forms. The ‘revival of spiritual life’ — of which the leaders of the liberal wing in the official writers’ and artists’ unions spoke so gaily — turned out in practice to be no more than the recovery of positions that had been lost in the seventies. Besides, many cultural personages were gravely compromised. Some who, not long before, had been full-throatedly glorifying Brezhnev now went all out to show themselves in the van of the supporters of change. As though in response to a word of command, they all set about denouncing ‘shortcomings’ of every kind. Criticism of social practices sometimes seemed to have become a kind of conformism, and discourses on freedom in the Gorbachev era called to mind the panegyrics to stability we had heard in Brezhnev’s time. As a typical example one can take the poet Rozhdestvensky, who censured Abuladze in Literaturnaya Gazeta on the grounds that his film Repentance did not expose Stalinism thoroughly but preferred to use the language of allegory and mythological imagery. A rather serious charge, especially if one considers that the Georgian director made the film at a time when Rozhdestvensky was penning eulogistic odes to Stalin’s heirs. However, Rozhdestvensky does not lay claim to the role of spiritual teacher to the intelligentsia. He is simply endeavouring ‘not to be left behind by progress’. The position is a great deal more complicated in the case of persons who do claim to be leaders, or at least patriarchs, of the forward movement of society.

The well-known actor Mikhail Ul'yanov, who in 1986 became a leading figure in the Russian theatrical union even before the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, appeared before Western journalists to attack Yuri Lyubimov and Andrei Tarkovsky, who had left the USSR. He said repeatedly that none of the productions put on by Lyubimov had ever been banned. Yet Ul'yanov himself knew very well indeed what had really happened. The reason why Lyubimov departed for the West was that, over a period of several years, the Ministry had refused to authorize a single one of his productions. Not only is Ul'yanov not ashamed of his lie, he is calling for a moral clean-up and talking of ‘a harsh and unconcealed struggle’ against conservative forces. True, he does at the same time stress that ‘the crisis phenomena have not been created by the system itself’, that particular individuals are responsible for them.2 In the last analysis such calls for struggle turn into efforts to redistribute power ‘upstairs’ between different organizations and individuals.

Someone who compromised himself even more gravely was the playwright V. Rozov, who openly declared against democratizing the theatre. In his time Rozov had brought about a revolution in Soviet drama, by refusing to write plays in accordance with formulas left over from Stalin’s time. Rozov’s works in the sixties were models of truthfulness: he took as his subject not the grandeur of the state but the experiences of the individual. In the eighties, however, Rozov proved to be one of yesterday’s men.

The opportunity for his declaration was provided by the death of the director A. Efros and the conflict in the Moscow Art Theatre. Efros had come to the theatre on the Taganka after the Ministry of Culture forced Lyubimov to quit the USSR. Efros’s company did not accept him, and the productions he put on at the Taganka were pretentious and feeble. An outstanding director, Efros was stricken, so to speak, by creative impotence as the price for his moral surrender. But when Efros died suddenly in early 1987, the tragedy was used by Rozov as an illustration of how fatal it is for actors not to submit to their director. It was all clear to him. Efros was a victim: the company, which had been unwilling to accept the man assigned by the Ministry, was the villain. The conflict between the majority of the Moscow Art Theatre company and chief director Efremov produced the result that when, for the first time in our history, an elected council was formed to lead the collective. Efremov failed to get elected. Rozov understood: the time had come to put a stop to ‘the saturnalia of the contemporary mob’.3 His position was quite simple. There is ‘good’ democracy, which consists in unrestricted freedom, not bound by the will of the majority, for the creative personality to impose their correct decisions upon the ‘mob’. And there is ‘bad’ democracy, when everyone is free to say what they think and decisions are taken on the basis of the views of the majority. In the latter case, democracy is carried to its ‘most repugnant extremes’ and the Ministry of Culture has to intervene so that ‘a catastrophe does not occur’. It is typical that, despite such absolutely anti-democratic opinions, Rozov and his like still regard themselves as patriarchs of the spiritual renewal and — what is most lamentable — to some extent do play that role.

When everyone is hailing liberalization, it is hard to make out who is sincere and who is not. The sportsman and writer Yu. Vlasov maliciously remarked on television that there is nothing more repulsive than ‘collective recovery of sight’. In his view, what the country needs is not general talk about freedom, but Marxist analysis of the social causes of lack of freedom, a struggle to change social conditions and not just the political conjuncture. Vlasov’s address, which was shown twice on television, became one of the most important events in our spiritual and social life towards the end of 1986. The TV station received a tremendous flood of letters. Essentially it was a question of finding a radical cultural alternative, a fresh, more sober way of seeing society. However, a different mood prevailed among prominent members of the creative intelligentsia. While Rozov stood on the extreme right flank of the renewal movement and Vlasov demonstrated the vitality and necessity of the ideas of its left wing, the majority of the ‘renewal’ intellectuals preferred to remain somewhere in the middle, more or less faithful to the traditions of the Khrushchev period. This enabled them to preserve an appearance of unity. Rozov’s statement evoked no serious protest, apart from an article in Moskovskie Novosti, which had become, under its new editor-in-chief Yakovlev, the mouthpiece of the radicals. As a rule, people wished to enjoy the new freedoms without effort, instead of thinking about far-reaching reforms. But the actual course of events was placing such reforms on the order of the day.

As Gorbachev himself has acknowledged, the economic reforms came up against vigorous and successful resistance from the bureaucracy, who were defending their privileges and power. The traditional measures for influencing the apparatus did not yield results. Orders were not carried out: on the one hand, many decisions taken in the localities were concealed from higher instances, while on the other hand resolutions adopted under the influence of Gorbachev and his supporters were hedged round with so many instructions and explanatory documents that their original significance was obliterated. Without some freedom of criticism it was proving impossible not just to smash but even to expose such ‘bureaucratic sabotage’. Hence the logic of the economic reforms insistently called for intensified liberalization. The new leadership showed interest in, and began to encourage, certain manifestations of freedom of thought. In this situation what was needed was not only a relaxation of the censorship but also more serious transformations.

The film people were the first to appreciate this fact. At the Fifth Congress of their union, in May 1986, they threw out their old leaders and elected a new set who, in most cases, had been put forward as candidates without prior ‘agreement’ with the Party organs. Many participants in the congress spoke of what happened as a ‘revolution’, and in fact nothing like it had been seen before in the entire history of the cultural unions in the USSR. In Khrushchev’s time speeches no less radical had sometimes been made, but it had never been possible to oust the bureaucracy from the leadership of an organization. The new ruling body of the union, headed by Elem Klimov, undertook to prepare a fundamental structural reform of the whole system of film production. Klimov set new tasks before the union: not just to defend film-makers against the censorship, but to fight for decentralization of the industry’s administration.

The debates at the writers’ congress, in June 1986, were even fiercer. Liberal and left-wing authors criticized the censorship, corruption in the union leadership, and incompetent interference by state officials in cultural matters. However, thanks to the votes of provincial delegates, the conservatives managed to hang on to the key union posts. To ensure that provincial writers voted ‘the right way’, Party functionaries had been brought up to Moscow from certain towns to keep an eye on ‘their’ delegates, and although the presence of these outsiders was noticed at the congress nothing could be done about it. The progressive tendency later got its own back at the Russian theatrical union’s congress in December, when the old bureaucracy and persons connected with the Ministry were excluded from the key posts in the union that was formed at the congress itself to replace the All-Russia Theatrical Society.

Thus, the left and liberal intelligentsia not only became politically active but won control of two of the three leading cultural unions. This achievement soon had its effect on the general course of events. Tarkovsky and Lyubimov were invited to return to the USSR. The invitation, to be sure, came too late: Tarkovsky died in Paris while pondering whether to go back; and Lyubimov, who had established himself rather well in the West, said that he had already signed contracts for several years ahead and, in any case, would not be able to work in Moscow in the immediate future. (It is quite possible that what lay behind his reply was also a wish to wait and see how the situation developed in the USSR.) At the same time there was a marked change in film-hire policy. Tarkovsky’s films again appeared on our screens, and works by outstanding Western masters which had been considered ‘too complicated’ for the Soviet cinemagoer (such as Fellini’s 8 ½) were shown to a wide audience.

In these changes a very great role was played by the secretary of the Central Committee, Aleksandr Yakovlev, whom Brezhnev had appointed to take charge of culture and propaganda. Yakovlev had subsequently fallen into disgrace when he spoke out against Russian nationalism and upheld the traditions of the Khrushchev period — actions which led to his removal from the Central Committee apparatus and a posting as ambassador to Canada. But Yakovlev returned to Moscow under Andropov and emerged as one of the most energetic and consistent leaders of the reform movement. Such successes as progressive groups in the intelligentsia achieved were due in no small part to the fact that Yakovlev gave most resolute support to their demands.

In February 1987 the Central Committee of the CPSU and the USSR Council of Ministers adopted a joint resolution enlarging the rights of the cultural unions. This document was drawn up by the Party and Government apparatus together with the leaders of the relevant unions and on the basis of their expressed wishes. Some questions, however, were not dealt with at all — for example, the organization of a publishing house for the film-makers’ union. It was regrettable, too, that intervention by higher authority was requested to secure an increase in the number of pages in the newspaper Sovetskaya Kultura. Such matters can and should be decided by the editorial board itself. Structural reform of the cultural organizations was not obtained, because their leaders, with the exception of Klimov, had no clear-cut programme for change. Most members of the governing body of the Writers’ Union simply feared change, and activists in the theatre union concentrated most of their efforts on getting jobs for themselves in the Ministry of Culture. Thus, despite the exceptionally favourable circumstances, supporters of the liberal tendencies among the intelligentsia achieved relatively little.

Meanwhile, the ‘new dissidents’ were not wasting any time. As early as autumn 1986 a number of conservative activists began openly to criticize the changes that had been made. Chakovsky, editor-in-chief of Literaturnaya Gazeta, speaking at a session of the secretariat of the Writers’ Union, accused the supporters of change of ‘surrendering ideological positions’. Before Abuladze’s film Repentance was shown, several attempts were made to have it banned or cut. Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat was the focus of acute political conflict over a long period. One moment they decided to publish it, the next they demanded that it be rewritten. ‘How do things stand with Rybakov’s novel?’ became almost a ritual question in intellectual circles, a barometer of the political weather.

The process of cultural renewal proved to be far more complex and contradictory than it might have appeared to be at first sight. The principal problem, however, from the very outset, lay not in the stubborn resistance of conservative forces (nothing else was to be expected) but in the weakness of the positive programme put forward by the liberals.

The chief banner of the ‘children of the Twentieth Party Congress’ remains the criticism of Stalin. Abuladze’s Repentance, which was shown in all the major cinemas in the capital, ought, so to speak, to have given the signal for a new wave of anti-Stalin publications in the press, compelling the public to face up to the problems which had concerned the generation of the sixties. Unfortunately Abuladze’s film, for all its good qualities, was poorly suited for this role. The director had created neither a denunciatory pamphlet nor a realistic narrative of the terror, but instead a film-parable about the heirs of the murderers. The main theme is not the story of Varlam (a double of Beria) but the fate of those whose prosperity was based on the results of the terror. Varlam and his circle are murderers and executioners. His son and the children of his associates are transformed into complacent and almost respectable bourgeois. His grandson revolts not so much against Varlam’s evil deeds as against the hypocrisy and dissimulation of his father, who has built his bourgeois prosperity upon contempt for the victims of the terror and defence of the practices established by Varlam. In short, what we see is the revolt of the young generation, directed against the present rather than the past.

Most of the critics concentrated solely on the image of Varlam, seeing in the film no more than an allegorical account of the terror of the thirties in Georgia. It became quite impossible to criticize Abuladze’s work, which was far from being irreproachable in all respects. Since any reference to its weaker parts was taken by Moscow’s liberal circles as an attempt to rehabilitate Stalin, there could be no discussion of the film from either the creative or the political angle. Abuladze had every reason to be proud of its success. But many liberals had hoped for more when they had sought to ensure that Repentance was seen by the largest possible number of people. The revolution in public consciousness failed to occur — nor could it have done so.

Liberalization of culture proves most effective when the public is presented with works on subjects which, generally speaking, have not been openly discussed before. Such works invariably arouse great interest, regardless of their degree of merit. In society everything is less and less subject to taboos. Previously, for example, it was unthinkable to write a satirical play about the morals of the ruling upper crust. In the late seventies, when Rozov tried to do something of this sort in A Nest of Woodgrouse, the result of censorship and self-censorship was a failure from which the public simply stayed away. However, in the 1986-87 season two plays on this subject were put on at the same time in Moscow. Zorin’s The Quotation was a frank imitation of Griboedov’s comedy Woe from Wit, which all of us remember by heart from our schooldays. In this play the places of the serf-owning landlords of old Moscow are taken by high-ranking officials. All the characters speak in verse, combining traditional high-flown style with bureaucratic jargon. At the end some images from the Bible suddenly appear. The high-ranking official Baltazarov is quite unable to grasp the meaning of a quotation which he has himself hung up in his office, and is still less able to discover who wrote it. At last light dawns: he has unintentionally put up a text from the Bible distorted by bureaucratic slang — ‘The dead seize hold of the living.’ The ancient saying proves to be absolutely to the point. The whole story of the quest for the author of the quotation assumes new meaning. The incomprehensible slogan on the wall is a reminder of the letters which appeared before King Belshazzar, presaging his doom.

Another play about bureaucratic morality was Radzinsky’s Sporting Scenes of 1981, which shows the corruption, alienation and lack of spirituality prevailing ‘among the elite’, the degeneration of the grandchildren of the powerful leading figures of Stalin’s time. In the form it takes, Sporting Scenes frankly recalls the plays of Edward Albee. Radzinsky does not hide this. Everything that happens in the play is quite absurd. Unfortunately, though, all the absurd situations are taken from life and the spectators recognize them. Many people are shocked by the cynical conversations about sex, the purchasing of articles in foreign-exchange shops and all sorts of intrigues. For the first time the unattractive aspects of the life led by the upper circles have been depicted on the stage, and this even in disgusting detail.

Both plays, The Quotation and Sporting Scenes, are brilliantly written, but neither opens up a new prospect. Instead, they sum up the lessons of the past, talking about things one wanted to discuss many years ago but was never allowed to. The appearance of several more works on the same theme might have undermined people’s interest in it. What is much more important for people today is how relations are developing between the opposing social forces in the process of change — the anatomy of new political conflicts, so strange after eighteen years of Brezhnevite stability. The political scientist Burlatsky has made an attempt to answer these questions, choosing, for the sake of clarity, the unexpected form of a dramatic dialogue. Burlatsky’s Two Views from One Office was first published in Literaturnaya Gazeta and then shown on television, the collocutors being played by the excellent actors Boltnev and Vel'yaminov. If we are to judge Burlatsky’s success by the number of people who watched his work, his triumph is beyond any doubt. The production aroused enormous interest. But has the author answered the questions he posed?

By resorting to the dialogue form, Burlatsky remained true to himself. Previously he had written a book about Macchiavelli in which the attentive reader could easily note the resemblance between hero and author. Now, imitating his hero, Burlatsky chose a typically Renaissance form to set out his views. The trouble is that by doing so he merely demonstrated the unsuitability of the tradition of the sixteenth-century ‘treatise in dialogue form’ for an exposition of present-day problems. In Burlatsky’s book the Florence of Macchiavelli bears a suspicious resemblance to Moscow in the early seventies, but one obviously needs to converse with today’s Soviet reader otherwise than with the readers to whom Macchiavelli, Bruno or Campanella addressed themselves.

The participants in Burlatsky’s dialogue are the progressive First Secretary of a regional Party committee and its conservative Second Secretary. The author obviously set out to refute the arguments used by opponents of change in their debate behind the scenes. In the upshot, however, it is Burlatsky’s positive hero who proves the clear loser in the contest. The conservative speaks frankly about the dangers to the system with which the changes are fraught, about the destruction of established and more or less viable bonds and ties on which a great deal depends, and about the contradiction between the new slogans and the old ideological dogmas with which the people’s heads have been stuffed for decades. In reply all the progressive can do is repeat general statements about the splendid future, the necessity of progress and the need for changes. Over many years most of our people have formed the habit of distrusting general talk and promises about the future.

The crisis of traditional concepts and of the old liberal-intelligentsia culture has found expression in prose literature no less than in drama. The fashionable books published in 1986 (Rasputin’s Fire, Astaf'ev’s The Doleful Detective, Aitmatov’s The Executioner's Block) bear witness not only to the disappearance of many censorship restrictions but also to the decline of analytic thought. None of these writers is sparing with dark colours in their description of numerous outrages and injustices, acts of cruelty and social defects of all kinds. When we come to the question of who is guilty, the answers are most unexpected. Rasputin blames everything on European civilization and urbanization; Astaf ev sees the root of evil in the Jews; and Aitmatov seeks to show the devil’s hand behind it all. Each of these writers is convinced that men are bad because they have lost God. But where, then, is he to be found?

The anti-semitic pronouncements of Astaf'ev in The Doleful Detective could not have failed to provoke protests from many cultural figures. Eidelman, a historian fashionable among the Moscow intelligentsia, sent a letter to Astaf'ev in which he exhorted him to renounce his views. But the author of The Doleful Detective wrote back that we need to put an end to the activity of the Jews in Russian culture, to ‘the seething pus of Jewish super-intellectual arrogance’, and so on. The Jews must pay for having killed ‘our last Tsar’. A position at which The Doleful Detective only hinted was thus given its ultimate development. Lamentations over the woes of the Russian people turned into a call for pogroms. Eidelman began to justify himself: it was not we who killed the Tsar, ‘most of those who did it were Ekaterinburg workers.’ Astafev’s letter, which had been sent as a private communication and not intended for publication, was duplicated by the historian and circulated by hand. Although, of course, one cannot put the two participants on the same level, it is plain that Eidelman did not come off the better. A critique which repeated general truths to the effect that it is bad to be a racist and an anti-Semite could hardly change Astafev’s position, while the unprejudiced reader would simply find nothing new in it. The misfortune of the liberal intelligentsia of the eighties lies in their lack of fresh, original ideas and their unwillingness to proceed from mere declarations to more profound analysis of the historical situation that has come about. Persons who claim the role of spiritually leading the renewal — Aitmatov, Eidelman, Shatrov — offer each their own recipe, but all their ideas are alike in being directed towards the past. Some talk of a return to Christian values (Aitmatov), others of the traditions of nineteenth-century liberalism (Eidelman), yet others of a rebirth of true Leninism and the heritage of the Twentieth Party Congress (Shatrov and the group around the paper Moskovskie Novosti); and sometimes these ideas are quaintly interwoven. The future turns out to be the hostage of the past.

Yet the young generation’s frame of mind is, as a rule, much more radical. In the last days of 1986 the television showed an encounter between Leningrad youngsters and some singers known as ‘the bards’. In the sixties the ‘bard’, the man with the guitar, was the symbol of spiritual independence, freethinking opposition to the Establishment. The leader of the ‘bard’ movement, Vladimir Vysotsky, actually became a national hero. Vysotsky died, however, and the movement has evidently lost its original radicalism. Those present at the meeting reproached the ‘bards’ for having stopped singing about social problems, about freedom, about how the masses live today. What we need now, they argued, are ‘songs of protest’, ‘songs that lift people above themselves’. The popularity of some rock groups is to be explained precisely by the fact that, in one way or another, they have managed to strike a note that accords with this mood.

The ‘Aquarium’ group, led by B. Grebenshchikov, has had enormous success in seeking to assert new positive values. Towards the end of the Brezhnev era Grebenshchikov was expelled from the Komsomol and sacked from his job on account of his songs. Only in 1986 did it become possible for ‘Aquarium’ to appear on television, and its first record went on sale still later. Nevertheless, Grebenshchikov conquered his audience: they learnt his songs by heart and put them on cassette. To the surprise, it may be, of his enemies and of Grebenshchikov himself, he became one of the leaders of the new youth culture which slowly took shape underground in the late seventies and early eighties, and then burst vigorously on to the surface of social life.

Crowds queued to buy tickets for the Latvian film Is It Easy To Be Young? It is very unusual for a documentary to enjoy such sensational success in our country. The explanation, in this case, is to be found mainly in the subject of the film — young people talking openly about their problems, admitting that they need a lot of money, questioning the values of society, protesting against official requirements or simply asserting their right to be unlike other people. Among those who appeared on the screen were punks and adherents of the Hare Krishna sect, as well as men who had fought in Afghanistan. The film is very beautifully made, and even the scene where a morgue orderly is cutting up corpses is shown in a highly refined way: the cameraman obviously spent a long time selecting the best angles and compositions. One cannot help thinking that the makers of this fashionable film would have photographed a murder no less professionally.

In themselves, the interviews with young people are rather monotonous, and there is no attempt at analysis. Twelfth Floor offers a much fuller presentation of the views of the new generation. But it is the beautiful, professional images of the Latvian film that stay in one’s memory. Its picture of the youth culture comes over in an indistinct way that fails to excite the spectator. The interview with Afghanistan veterans is used to show that war in general, regardless of its purpose, is a dirty business — but one in which somebody has to engage all the same. Somebody has to do ‘the dirty work’ — cut up corpses, shoot Afghan rebels. (It is interesting that people who fought against the Germans for the liberation of our country during the Second World War reasoned quite differently.) The film’s objectivity is based on cynical indifference. With such an approach one inevitably ends by putting on the same level truth and lies, criminals and their victims. And yet the culture of youthful radicalism is a protest against just such a view of the world. There are, of course, cynical and indifferent people in every generation, but they are not the ones who create cultures.

In the opinion of youth movement activists, rock groups are persecuted first and foremost not for their music but for their ‘striving to get away from ordinary forms of life, their fear of sinking into philistinism’, their ‘rebellious tendency’, their protest against social injustice.4 A movement of ‘metallists’ has been formed around the ‘heavy metal’ rock groups, with its own symbols, structure and leaders. At first the official organizations reacted with bans, and a list was compiled of 73 Western and 37 Soviet groups whose records were not to be played at discotheques or any other institutions for young people under Komsomol control. But after Gorbachev came in, this list, whilst not cancelled, simply ceased to be operative. It was just ignored. The ‘banned’ groups ‘Mosaic’ and ‘Aquarium’ were allowed to appear on television, and songs of the ‘Kino’ group began to be quoted in newspapers. It had been admitted by official personages that the movement of the ‘metallists’ and other informal youth groups constitutes ‘a challenge to the Komsomol’.5 To suppress them or drive them underground is simply not considered possible in the new conditions, even though many Komsomol officials would prefer just such a course. The changed relation of forces at the top and the new social situation have forced the legalization of informal youth groups. In 1987 in the Sevastopol district of Moscow a club of ‘metallists’ was registered for the first time. The rebels were permitted to speak openly about their feelings and their views.

What do the new radicals want? Up to now they have not formulated their ideas quite clearly. What is predominant is just moods, and they obviously lack a clear-cut platform. However, their moods are eloquent enough in themselves. For example, many people criticize Grebenshchikov because his lyrics are too abstract and his work too replete with mythological and even heraldic imagery. All the same, the singer’s main idea reaches his audience all right: it is a call to emancipate human feelings, to unite with nature, to protest against alienation and cynicism. The name of the ‘Aquarium’ group harks back to the Beatles’ famous song about people looking out from inside a glass onion, and Grebenshchikov is constantly stressing the link between his group and the traditions of the Liverpool quartet.6 The lyrics, the music and the style of performance of ‘Aquarium’ remind many of Latin-American song culture, and even more of the best examples of Western youth counter-culture in the sixties, with its close connections to the ‘New Left’. Paradoxically, despite the similarities in fashion and their interest in American music and the latest Western films, young Soviet people today are more reminiscent of the Western generation of the sixties than of their contemporaries in Italy or the United States.

This is quite natural. The well-known sociologists Nazimova and Gordon have pointed to the structural similarity, in a number of parameters, between social development in the West in the sixties and in the USSR in the eighties. Such a coincidence explains a great deal and opens some ground for optimism. The country which Gorbachev has inherited is already not the same as the one that came into Khrushchev’s hands. It is an urbanized society with a large number of hereditary townspeople and skilled workers. A whole number of ‘intellectual’ processes have acquired a mass character and have simultaneously become devalued. Young people have no memory of the poverty of the forties, but react acutely to any threat to lower their present standard of living. Problems of personal freedom and responsibility have come to the fore. People are tired of Brezhnevite ‘stability’. Protest against corruption and alienation of the personality calls forth a keen demand for new, democratic forms of collectivism.

So sing the ‘Kino’ group, and such songs are encouraged under the conditions of Gorbachev’s perestroika. But the crux of the matter is that many young rock groups, including some in the provinces, had begun to sing about the need for freedom and renewal even before Gorbachev came to power. Their initiative was not a response to any appeal from above. Independently of the will of the leadership, a new cultural milieu began to be formed already in the first half of the eighties. A group of young admirers of Marx gathered around a rock ensemble — that would have been hard to imagine ten years ago. This actual case illustrates very well the processes which have taken place. As in the West in the sixties, interest has increased sharply in both Marxism and utopian socialism. Some are interested in Kropotkin, others in Narodnik ideas about the free commune, others still in the theory of alienation.

The cultural mosaic of the ‘new protest’ is a great deal richer than anything the ageing ‘children of the Twentieth Congress’ can offer. It is clear that without Khrushchev there would have been no Gorbachev, and without the intellectual movement of the sixties the current changes would not have been possible. But every epoch has to find its own means of self-expression. Renewal of the ‘high culture’ of the professional intelligentsia will depend on its ability to comprehend the impulses coming from the spontaneously formed counter-culture of those down below. Historical continuity is inconceivable without the reinterpretation of accumulated experience.

Interest in the past is no less characteristic of the eighties generation than it was of those who participated in Khrushchev’s thaw. ‘In order to stand I must stick to my roots’, sings Grebenshchikov. The point, however, is that the new historical awareness that has spread so quickly among our young people has little in common with the ordinary ideas of cultural liberalism. The editor-in-chief of Moskovskie Novosti, Yegor Yakovlev, considers that the most important task of the day is criticism of Stalinism and, possibly, the rehabilitation of Bukharin. Yet an ever larger number of people are inclining to think that, instead of exposures and rehabilitations, what we need is a full, many-sided and objective interpretation of our historical past in all its contradictoriness. Society must find its memory again: not a selective but a complete memory.

In a programmatic article entitled ‘Freedom to Remember’ the left journalist Gleb Pavlovsky sharply criticized the liberal idea of selective rehabilitation: ‘Today people are talking so much about the truth. But strange as it may seem, there is more selectiveness as well. Old names are being pulled out like rabbits from a hat. I suspect that under the banner of “the restoration of truth” publicists are preparing for a mass exhumation, but it will be selective like their own memories. In this gigantic literary morgue the remains will be laid out in rows, and the publicist-generals, orders in hand, will start marching along them. Yes, now is the time to get ready, so as not to miss the opportunity to engage in that traditional Russian “business” — turning repentance into gain…. And when the truth becomes a form of career, then again, as a classic writer predicted, “the boot will come down on the face of humanity”.’7 In Pavlovsky’s view, any selectiveness with historical facts is impermissible. By eliminating references to Stalin from historical publications, Khrushchev was paving the way for his own defeat. He himself was forgotten ‘on command’ in just the same way that Stalin had been forgotten on Khrushchev’s orders. And today the question arises: is the partial rehabilitation of Bukharin enough in order to understand the deepest roots of Stalinism? In truth, turning ‘evil renegades’ into ‘true Leninists’ with a stroke of the pen will hardly allow us to grasp the real tragedy of those people, their services and their responsibility before the nation, as well as the inseparable link between the two. Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat has appeared. Gumilev is being published in the mass-circulation magazine Ogonyok. The appearance of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is due. But not a word has been said about Vasili Grossman’s great novel Life and Fate, which came out in the West after the author’s death and is to this day unknown to the Soviet public.8

There is a close link between freedom and memory that is well understood by representatives of the youth movement. In 1986, when it was decided in Moscow to demolish the seventeenth-century Shcherbakov Palaces, a group of students and schoolchildren, led by Kirill Parfenov, occupied the building and held it for two months. As a result, not only were the Shcherbakov Palaces saved but they remained in the hands of the ‘invaders'. Parfenov himself appeared on the TV programme Twelfth Floor and spoke of the need to carry on the struggle to preserve the capital’s historical aspect. The official society for the protection of historical and cultural monuments (VOOPIK) itself came under critical fire. The point was that, at the end of the Brezhnev era, right-wing Russian nationalists and anti-Semites secured complete control of this society, and the defenders of the monuments had shown that the leaders of VOOPIK were more interested in combating Jews and freemasons than in preserving and restoring the heritage. The spontaneous movement for the defence of monuments which arose in the eighties found that it had to confront not only the bureaucratic and technocratic groups responsible for destroying the city’s environment but also, to a significant extent, VOOPIK as well. Despite the difficulties (perhaps even because of them), the activists of the spontaneous movement chalked up some real successes, in Moscow at least, and have become a real alternative to the official body.

The fight to preserve the historical aspect of our towns is closely associated with the movement to defend the environment generally. In 1986 the ecological lobby, which included the literary critic Academician Likhachev and the prominent writers Zalygin and Rasputin, secured the cancellation of the project to divert our northern rivers southward. This was a major event in social life, a proof of the power of the ecological movement. But the position was much worse where positive ideas and constructive proposals were concerned. The youth groups, unlike the eco-lobbyists of the older generation, were oriented towards a new conception of social development. Young architects set up a public laboratory, ‘The Town of the Future’, trying to combine ecologism with a new historical awareness in their practical work. When, in 1987, there was talk of the Government allowing free cooperatives to be established, the question also came up of alternative ways of organizing production and ‘clean’ technology. The Moscow Club and the Club for Social Initiatives (KSI), as well as some other clubs, which stepped up their activity after Gorbachev came to power, forged close links with the new social movements and informal youth groups, helping them to go over from protest to the elaboration of their own plan for society.

The changes are gradually ceasing to be the concern only of leading figures and veterans of the Khrushchev period. Thanks to Twelfth Floor, Parfenov has become known throughout the country. The talented publicist G. Pavlovsky has at last gained access to a wide readership. It was he who, at the end of the Brezhnev period, edited the samizdat periodical Poiski [Quests]. In those days the appearance of Poiski was an important event in the life of the opposition, its pages containing not only criticism of official practices but sober considerations on the defects and weaknesses of the dissident movement. Poiski showed how left-wing tendencies had grown stronger in the ranks of the opposition. One of the most determined spokespersons for these new moods was Pavlovsky himself. In 1982 he was arrested and sentenced for ‘slandering the Soviet power’. When he returned from imprisonment, after Gorbachev’s accession to power, he was given permission to live in the capital and later allowed to take up a job as a journalist — this time on the official periodical Vek XX i mir.

In Pavlovsky’s view the movement for change stands in acute need of a renewed socialist strategy — not one artificially constructed by theoreticians but one that has grown out of our history, out of the everyday experience of the masses (just as in the first Russian Revolution). Socialism, wrote Pavlovsky, is

One must not suppose, of course, that it is only the progressive forces that are becoming active. Liberalization created new legal opportunities not only for left-wingers but also for the extreme right. For the latter the centre of attraction became the Pamyat' [Memory] and Rodina [Homeland] clubs which established branches in Novosibirsk, Moscow and Leningrad, together with VOOPIK as mentioned above. Their leaders do not hide their anti-semitic and antidemocratic views: they dream of a strong state and the revival of the true spirit of the old Empire. They have taken root in a number of the temperance clubs formed in the course of the campaign against drunkenness that was launched by the authorities in 1981-86. In the area around Moscow a semi-spontaneous movement has arisen called ‘the Lyubers’ (from the Lyubertsy suburb). Their programme is simple in the extreme: to beat up Muscovites, everybody who wears foreign clothes, to drive out the ‘metallists’ and to cut the hippies’ hair. The ‘Lyubers’ belong to the same age-group as the admirers of ‘heavy metal’, but they represent, so to speak, two different epochs. The psychological basis for the Lyubers’ activity is nostalgia for Stalinism. As the editor-in-chief of the youth magazine Smena, A. Likhanov, put it, they ‘want to model their “behaviour” on the most distressing period of our history.’10

At the end of 1986 the Public Prosecutor’s office began to investigate the doings of the Lyubers, since what was involved was a systematic and malevolent violation of public order. However, the investigation was not completed. After a demonstration in Moscow on 22 February 1987 by two thousand supporters of the youth movement, to demand that the activity of the Lyubers be stopped, some newspapers suddenly declared that Lyubers do not exist, any more than the Abominable Snowman. Literaturnaya Gazeta informed its readers of the demonstration, while stressing that there were no grounds for it since rumours about the Lyubers had been exaggerated by irresponsible journalists. The paradoxical feature was that this article was written by the well-known reporter Shchekochikhin, who had been the first to write about the Lyubers. Quite obviously, certain forces were not at all interested in mobilizing public opinion against this threat. Something else was obvious too — that the anonymous influential protectors of the Lyubers were one and the same with those opponents of Gorbachev’s liberalization who were keeping quiet for the time being.

The strategy of the new right is to use the expanded legal opportunities so as to combat liberalization itself (just as the ‘Black Hundreds’ did in the period of the 1905 Revolution). The inevitable difficulties and contradictions of the process of change, the unsuccessful economic experiments, the costs of reform — all can be exploited by the reactionary groups in the hope that the course of events will inexorably bring the country to a ‘critical point’, when the ‘restoration of order’ and ‘normalization’ will become the slogans of the day. The economic strategy of the reactionaries presupposes a sharp reduction in demand, to provide the means for renewing productive equipment, introducing new technology and so on. The well-known economists Selyunin and Khanin aptly described this plan as a ‘second edition’ of Stalin’s industrialization in the thirties.11 Their problem is to find an ideological and cultural-psychological justification for such a policy in present-duy conditions. Soviet society in the late twentieth century is different from what it was in the thirties, when Stalin carried through his ‘revolution from above’. The way of life has changed, and so too have the social structures. Nevertheless, there does exist a certain nostalgia for the past, for ‘totalitarian’ order, and not just among people of the older generation. Erich Fromm once wrote of the ‘flight from freedom’: certain social groups in Western society saw in the development of democracy a threat to their firm traditions, way of life and security, and these were not only the privileged strata but also a section of the lower orders. After the January 1987 Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which proclaimed the need for more thoroughgoing liberalization, the editors of Soviet newspapers began to receive letters from readers who doubted the need for changes. Sometimes these letters also contained open threats to the journalists.12 The disposition to flight from freedom is evidently characteristic of a certain section of the population; although, we must suppose, the strength of such feelings is not as great as the reactionaries imagine. In any case, the Lyubers’ actions are not mere hooliganism, but constitute an alarming cultural-psychological symptom.

One should not think that the new Right are like the orthodox, bureaucratic, conservative admirers of Brezhnev. Their ideal is a strong master, such as Brezhnev never was, and their ideology is in the nature of a synthesis of patriarchal nationalism with the traditions of totalitarianism. Such a synthesis is quite feasible, since Stalin, in the last years of his life, was clearly gravitating towards Russian nationalism. In the present context Astaf ev’s ideas assume rather obvious significance. Hatred of Jews, Muscovites, Western influence, spiritual freedom, the intelligentsia and the Left unite this well-known writer with the Lyuber hooligans. Astaf'ev quickly became an ideal hero for the supporters of reaction. Whether Eidelman wished it or not, his correspondence with Astaf'ev helped the new right to consolidate, whereas traditional liberalism increasingly lost influence.

An effective alternative to Russian nationalism (and to the anti-Russian nationalism of the minorities which has arisen parallel with and in reply to it) is offered not by the heritage of the sixties but by the new culture which has sprung up or emerged from clandestinity. In essence the activity of the young rock groups, or the discussions organized by rebel architects protesting against the destruction of our old towns, may prove to be more important cultural events than the publication of The Executioner’s Block and The Doleful Detective.

The new Left looks on the liberalism of the sixties as a heritage from the past. In their opinion, many ‘children of the Twentieth Congress’, who have now attained a respectable age, have failed to draw the lessons from their mistakes. Sixties liberalism was indifferent to social problems and, as a rule, felt no particular interest in the masses. There were, of course, exceptions to this rule (for example, Ovechkin’s sketches, published in Khrushchev’s time, provided material for Buravsky’s play). In the last analysis, however, the masses were not affected all that much by the ideas of the Twentieth Congress, and the intelligentsia did not take much trouble to change this attitude. In the eighties, on the contrary, the changes that are being made affect directly the lives of the majority of the Soviet people, and it is on the activity of the lower orders that the fate of the new political course will ultimately depend. Objectively, the process of change has already gone much further than under Khrushchev. This provides grounds for optimism.

The chief weakness of the new Left is the persistent gap between ‘high’ culture and the ‘low’ culture of the youth. Among the representatives of ‘high’ culture the ideas and the people of the sixties predominate. So long as there is no synthesis, or at least dialogue, between the two cultures, liberalism will inevitably retain hegemony. Radical moods by no means always engender constructive programmes. From protest to alternative ideas the road is long and complicated, especially when what is involved is not the settling of some partial question but the transformation of a culture. The new Left has no press organs of its own, whereas the ‘children of the Twentieth Congress’ were able to group themselves around the journal Novy Mir, which became in the sixties a real headquarters for the radical movement. The radicals and youth leaders who are outside the bounds of that milieu do not enjoy the same authority as was possessed by the Novy Mir group.

Lakshin, who once directed the literary criticism section in Novy Mir and figured as one of the ideologists of the Left in the sixties, has acknowledged that many members of his generation have failed to appreciate the true dynamic of the process that has been taking place, and that they display a characteristic ‘lack of feeling for their times’.13 It seems to the ‘children of the Twentieth Congress’ that their hour has come at last. The new Left fear that people who already missed their chance twenty years ago are liable to repeat that unfortunate experience. Everyone argues about how long the present ‘thaw’ will last, and echoes of these debates have already been heard on television. On 16 March 1987, for example, viewers were able to see how the political columnist Pozner — who made his name in discussions with his American colleague Donoghue — was obliged to defend himself in the face of aggressive questioning from young people who were not very confident of the effectiveness and durability of glasnost'’. But only a few are giving thought to the question of what can be done to provide structural consolidation for the changes that have begun, how to make firmer the ground under their feet.

‘How much time is left?’ people ask each other. Hypnotized by their own question, they fail to realize how much depends on society itself, on themselves. Writers hasten to ‘force’ into print their old novels which could not previously pass the censor. But this vanity of theirs merely destabilizes the situation. One wants to shout: ‘Stop! Think of the present, try to understand the tasks of today!’ Up to now, however, the heritage of the past has had priority over ideas addressed to the future. This is why, already in its first stages, the social movement bears within itself elements of internal crisis. And this crisis can be overcome only when the new Left formulates its positions more precisely and constructively and wins the influence among the intelligentsia that it still does not have.

On 1 March 1987 Moskovskie Novosti published an article by L. Karpinsky, ‘It Is Silly To Hesitate Before An Open Door’, which dealt with the dissidents, or, more exactly, with those among them who hold left-wing views. The writer was himself once expelled from the Party for propagating the ideas of the ‘Prague spring’, so he is able to speak from knowledge in this matter. Karpinsky stressed the similarity between the way Brezhnevism was criticized from the Left in the seventies and the conclusions drawn officially by the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress and the January 1987 Plenum of the Central Committee. According to Karpinsky, most dissidents hold progressive views, and the socialist opposition ought now to take an active part ‘in the practical work of building a new reality’. Criticism of the past must be combined with work for the future, on the basis of the revolutionary formula: ‘More socialism, and therefore more democracy’.

When Karpinsky’s article appeared, the release of Academician Sakharov from exile was still being discussed: Sakharov had been for many years the actual leader and symbol of the dissident movement. Political prisoners were returning home one after another. Activists of the socialist youth groups remained in the camps, as before, but their release in the near future was also expected. True, Karpinsky was dissembling a little when he wrote that the dissidents adhered to the ideals of the left-wing movement. Most of the well-known dissidents of the seventies were either indifferent to the question of social organization, being concerned exclusively with the provision of guaranteed civil rights, or else were supporters of free enterprise. But the Moskovskie Novosti article had to provide an ideological basis for the liberal decisions of the reforming leadership, to show that in freeing Sakharov and other dissidents the country’s leaders were acting not only wisely but in accordance with principle.

The real problem, however, lay elsewhere. For the representatives of the Left opposition, there could be no question of whether or not to participate in the changes. Every one of them who was at liberty was already doing all they could, without Karpinsky’s advice. The problem was, how to participate. If Karpinsky’s logic meant simply that one should support the liberal initiatives from above, there could be no particular significance in such support. The trouble with the liberal intelligentsia was that it showed itself quite incapable of any constructive initiative of its own, preferring just to applaud Gorbachev’s decisions. The louder the applause, the more energetic the support. However, an acute need for new ideas, a new culture, had arisen in society; what was wanted was criticism not so much of the past as of the present, not so much of others as of ourselves, and a rejection of liberal dogmas no less resolute than our rejection of any others. The events which have taken place in our country are important not only for us. The wave of conservatism which swept over the world in the early eighties is beginning to subside. The need for radical reforms is beginning to be realized by ever wider circles in countries of every type. Socialist ideas may once more become attractive to public opinion in the West. How well the progressive forces in the USSR cope with their new role will determine more than their own future. The present state of things is not as wonderful as one might have wished, and events are developing less smoothly than some journalists make out. Yet there are no grounds for pessimism. We shall hope for the best.

2 Glasnost', the Soviet Press and Red Greens1

3 Manifesto for Change

4 The Soviet New Left: Alexander Cockburn Interviews Boris Kagarlitsky1