The dissidents attracted enormous attention in the West during the Cold War, and their ideas and writings were well known in the Soviet intelligentsia. Some other intellectuals supported them but the dissidents had no popular following. Nevertheless the authorities saw them as a threat to their utopian conception of a unified society, exiling Solzhenitsyn to the West in 1974 and Sakharov eventually to Gorkii (Nizhnii Novgorod), east of Moscow. Needless to say their works were published only underground or in the West, and they were never mentioned in public. More serious was the general sense that the country was somehow on the wrong track, a feeling that crystallized with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. The most common reaction to the invasion was neither patriotism nor indignation, but the sense that the leadership had made a serious mistake. For most people the Soviet Union remained a legitimate state, but one that was most definitely in the hands of incompetent and short-sighted leaders.
In 1982 Leonid Brezhnev died. The generation that he represented, the young party leaders promoted in the late 1930s, was now a group of elderly men who simply could not understand why things had not come out as they had expected or even how bad the situation remained for the mass of the people. The world had also changed outside the USSR and they failed to grasp the challenge created by mass prosperity not only in the United States but also in post-war Europe and Japan. On Brezhnev’s death the Central Committee put in his place Yurii Andropov, the head of the KGB since 1967. Nearly seventy and in poor health, Andropov never had time to formulate a new policy, but he did bring to Moscow Alexander Iakovlev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other future reformers. On Andropov’s death in 1984, the CC appointed the seventy-two year old Konstantin Chernenko to succeed him. Chernenko had been Brezhnev’s director of personnel for decades and the appointment allegedly came against Andropov’s wishes. If Andropov really did prefer Gorbachev, his wishes were fulfilled in 1985 when Chernenko died in turn, and Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party. He was to preside over its demise.
22 Soviet Culture
With the end of NEP and well before the war, the Soviet Union entered a new period of its history, with profound cultural implications. The first phase of that new period, from about 1928 to 1932, saw major upheavals in every area of culture, science, art, literature, and the humanistic disciplines. It was a “cultural revolution” in the phrase of the time, though one neither so deep or thorough as the much later Chinese events that borrowed the name. For the people involved, it was certainly traumatic, for it was not merely a new ideological campaign. In those years the party authorities carried out a systematic attack on the leaders of virtually every field of culture, accusing them of failure to live up to the demands of “socialist construction” and of harboring old-regime views and hostility to the new order. These attacks came in the press and in meetings held in various institutions and workplaces, where mostly young and enthusiastic Communists were encouraged to attack their elders and teachers in the name of the revolution. In addition, the OGPU carried out systematic arrests of leading intellectuals – historians, engineers, writers, and some scientists. Most were accused of participation in various, presumably mythical, underground organizations aimed at undermining or overthrowing Soviet power. Compared to later times, the treatment was relatively mild: some were executed, more went to prison camps, but many were simply exiled to provincial towns to teach or work in local institutions. Some professions suffered more than others: the scientists were less commonly victims, but even for them there were consequences. At the same time as the old authorities were removed, all sorts of radical super-Marxist notions achieved brief fame and dominance, along with the ideas of various cranks who presented themselves as new proletarian voices.
For the writers this period meant the virtual monopoly of the Proletarians connected with the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP in Russian) and their leader, the critic Leopold Averbakh. The Proletarians assailed nearly all of the major writers of the 1920s as counter-revolutionary, particularly those from the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia and the “fellow travelers.” Many major writers, including Evgenii Zamiatin and Mikhail Bulgakov, were the objects of furious attacks. Zamiatin was allowed to leave the country, but Bulgakov was not and for a while had almost no possibility to work. Other writers like the poets Akhmatova and Pasternak, escaped attacks because they published little or nothing during those years. The Proletarians were almost as savage with Communist writers who did not toe Averbakh’s line. What the Proletarians wanted was a literature that engaged itself in the struggle for the building of socialism, and in this sense some of their productions were quite critical of bureaucratism and passivity in the party and the state. Their ideal novel featured heroic workers overcoming tremendous obstacles to construct a new town or collectivize a village, changing themselves in the process. In reality, these stories were rarely successful, and the only readable works to come out of the movement were about the Civil War and were mostly written before 1929. The best by far was Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Don, and the RAPP leaders were uncomfortable with this volume.
Music as well had its proletarian radicals, who attacked the young Shostakovich and virtually every other composer, whatever the aesthetic. For the Russian Association of Proletarian Music, the only “proletarian” musical culture had to be “mass songs,” performed by semi-amateur choruses, preferably made up of workers. The proletarian musicians relied on the network of factory clubs and other amateur organizations to spread their work and doctrines, but most of their songs found little favor with the workers, who preferred a more traditional repertory. The Proletarians were allowed briefly to rule the conservatories, but in 1932 the party ended their monopoly as it did for the proletarian writers.
Even in the sciences meetings took place in research institutes, meetings that would have ominous consequences later on. In Nikolai Vavilov’s botanical institute radical graduate students criticized his leadership, political views, and scientific work. In the sciences these attacks were not yet primarily ideological, the chief charge being that the scientists were “cut off from life” and paid insufficient attention to the implications of their work for technology and thus “socialist construction.” It was at this time that Trofim Lysenko, a Ukrainian plant breeder, first came to the attention of the public and the authorities with his theories about breeding strains of wheat that were resistant to cold. Lacking the proper scientific training needed to develop his occasional practical insights, Lysenko was more of a crank at first, but he quickly learned to drape his claims in references to his plebeian origins and assertions that his was “proletarian” biology. The party authorities listened to him because his discoveries, real and imagined, seemed to promise much greater harvests very quickly, something the Soviet Union desperately needed.
After several years of chaos in many fields, the campaign came to a swift end in 1932. The exiled scientists and historians returned to their jobs, some returned from the camps, and generalized public attacks on the intelligentsia gradually ended. Thus began a new phase, one in which the party leadership, which increasingly meant Stalin alone, constructed the framework for what they considered a Soviet culture. In literature the Proletarians had alienated the party leaders, and in 1932 all literary groups were banned, a move mainly directed at Averbakh and his Proletarians. The pressure on non-party writers like Bulgakov and Pasternak eased. Bulgakov went to work for the Moscow Art Theater, writing original plays and adaptations that provided him with a livelihood even though they were often banned. He continued working on his masterpiece The Master and Margarita in private. Pasternak published prose and poetry in those years, becoming one of the country’s best-known poets, in spite of being out of step with Soviet ideology. In the new situation Stalin set up a single Writers’ Union, which met for the first time in a Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. It was to include writers of all types, non-party member writers and Communists in one group, again a move in large part directed at taming the Proletarians. The Writers’ Union was the prototype for a series of unions of creative intellectuals, for composers, painters, architects, and others, that dominated the daily life of Soviet literary and artistic culture until the end, in many ways parallel to the structure for the natural and social sciences and the humanities found at the Academy of Sciences. The Writers’ Union had two functions. One was to provide ideological and artistic direction to the writers. At the head of the union was a committee whose membership was chosen by the Central Committee cultural apparatus and cleared with Stalin himself. These were the men who were to declare the party line in art and enforce it. The other function was to take care of the needs of writers in daily life. The Writers’ Union controlled apartments and dachas in the countryside, had a privileged distribution center for scarce consumer goods, and the best restaurant in Moscow. Its headquarters was a nineteenth century Moscow palace supposedly the prototype of the Rostov house in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Similar unions of artists and composers were formed and took on similar functions.