Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who read Vasily Tyorkin during the war, wrote:
Amid the fume and crackle of gibbering propaganda which always accompanied our bombardments, Tvardovsky had succeeded in writing something timeless, courageous and unsullied, helped by a rare sense of proportion, all his own, or perhaps by a sensitive tact not uncommon among peasants… Though he was not free to tell the whole truth about the war, Tvardovsky nevertheless always stopped just one millimetre short of falsehood, and nowhere did he ever overstep the one millimetre mark. The result was a miracle.33
Tvardovsky first heard of Solzhenitsyn in December 1961 when the reclusive schoolteacher from the provincial city of Riazan submitted to Novy Mir his story Щ-854, better known as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. To get it printed, Tvardovsky went straight to Khrushchev, who was moved by the story of a hard-working peasant in Stalin’s Gulag and saw it as a validation of his own attack on Stalin. He allowed it to be printed – ‘a fact’, Tvardovsky recorded in his diary, ‘remarkable not only for my daily life and which, I think, will have a pivotal importance in it, but one that will have serious consequences in the flow of literary (which means not only literary) affairs’.34
Tvardovsky saw One Day… not as a subversive story – as did Solzhenitsyn – but as deeply therapeutic prose which would help to heal a society traumatized by Stalin’s excesses. It was printed in November 1962 and had an impact similar to Khrushchev’s own speech at the 20th Congress. Its novelty and power was not in the description of the Gulag system, but in the choice of the protagonist. Ivan Denisovich was not an inventor, an artist, or a communist. He was a Russian peasant: hard-working, conscientious and self-reliant – a close relative of Tvardovsky’s Tyorkin.
One Day… and Vasily Tyorkin had a common theme: the survival and continuation of life, and its resilience in any circumstances. Be it in the Gulag or the wartime trenches, life – physical and artistic – had its own rights that could not be squeezed out by politics. Both Tyorkin and Ivan Denisovich were survivors and they kept alive the best traits and qualities of the Russian peasantry however hard the system tried to erase them. Solzhenitsyn was invited to attend a reception at the Kremlin and was toasted by Khrushchev as Ivan Denisovich.
But having let thousands of such Ivan Denisovichs out of the Gulag, Khrushchev was not prepared to give them economic power. He allowed individual thinking, but not individual action, private land, or economic freedom. As Alexander Yakovlev wrote, having achieved a spiritual breakthrough, Khrushchev did not dare to touch the economic foundation of socialism.
Otto Latsis, a Latvian by birth and one of the most respected economic journalists and proponents of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, recalled the draconian rules on private ownership in the late 1950s and early 1960s when his father, an Old Bolshevik, was expelled from the Communist Party on the pretext that he had built with his own hands and his own money a country house that did not fit in with the strict limits imposed by the party. The law banned the ownership of a private house that exceeded 60 square metres (51 square yards) of living space, regardless of the number of people living in it. It specified the height of ceilings in cellars and banned fireplaces in country dachas. ‘People were forced to physically bend down to the authorities: a cellar where a person could stand up to his full height was prohibited.’35
The young party elite, which included Yegor Yakovlev, Bovin and Latsis, longed for economic and political reforms and was frustrated by Khrushchev’s failure to deliver either. His ousting in 1964 did not, at the time, spell disaster or the end of an era – at least not straight away. Bovin summed up the mood of the liberally minded part of the elite: ‘In less than ten years Khrushchev had exhausted his positive resources… He started turning into a monument to himself or rather did not stop others from turning him into a monument. The trouble was that Khrushchev was ousted by people of smaller calibre. Khrushchev would not let them have a quiet life. He destabilized them. Not the system, but each one of them. And he paid for it.’36
A coup against Khrushchev was the work of two rival camps in the party: on the one hand, neo-Stalinists and nationalists led by Alexander Shelepin and his protégé and KGB chief Vladimir Semichastny, and on the other hand, the mediocre but less militant regional clan led by Leonid Brezhnev. Brezhnev, who came out on top, oversaw nearly two decades of stagnation. He did not seem like a master of evil. He had been through the war, though not as a soldier, but as a political commissar. He was no reformer, but nor was he a bloodthirsty Stalinist or nationalist like Shelepin. His motto was ‘live and let live’. An obsessive hunter, he preferred shooting game at his country residence to dealing with international affairs in his Kremlin office. A man of little education, he was generally good-natured and not afraid to admit his own ignorance even to his own speech writer, Alexander Bovin.
‘Listen, do you know what “upland game” is?’ Brezhnev asked him after listening to one of the speeches Bovin had drafted for him.
‘Vaguely’, said Bovin.
‘Let’s do it this way,’ Brezhnev suggested. ‘I will tell you about upland game, and you will explain to me what the word konfrontatsiya [confrontation] means. Agreed?’
Bovin, who held a doctorate in philosophy, agreed.37
Unlike Yegor Yakovlev and Otto Latsis, each of whom was born into a family of Old Bolsheviks, Bovin came from a less revolutionary background. His grandfather was a priest, his father a military officer in the Far East. Bovin trained as a lawyer, held two graduate degrees and worked as a judge. His enormous size, hussar-style moustache and side-whiskers, his sense of humour and joie de vivre, made an immediate comic impression on his interlocutors. But behind this appearance was a man of great brain and decency.
In the early 1960s, having spent a few years at the influential journal Kommunist, Bovin became a staffer at the Central Committee, which was a fairly large and diverse body that de facto governed the country. Bovin joined the department that dealt with communist parties in the Soviet bloc and was led by Yuri Andropov. ‘They needed people who on the one hand would give no grounds for doubting their allegiance to the political regime and ruling ideology and, on the other hand, who could look at the world openly and be able to understand and explain the changes that were coming.’38
The biggest change of all was that that the country could no longer be held together by terror, nor could it be completely isolated from the rest of the world. Although the Iron Curtain was still very much in place, it worked more like one-way tinted glass than a brick wall. The Soviet people could not be seen by the West but they could see out to the West.
The system could bar its people and their ideas from travelling abroad, but it could not stop the fashion for mini-skirts, long hair worn loose, songs by the Beatles and films by Fellini from moving in the opposite direction (Fellini’s 8½ received a Grand Prix at the Moscow Film Festival in 1963). Unable to travel abroad, Soviet youths started roving around the country with rucksacks on their backs and guitars in their hands, spurring along the way an entire sub-culture of tourism. Journalism transcended the domain of the official party ideology and became romantic and fashionable.