After 1968, time seemed to stop. While officially nobody revoked the decisions made by the 20th Congress, in practice they were frozen along with the very subject of Stalin’s repressions. As Alexander Yakovlev wrote, the policies of those years amounted to a ‘creeping rehabilitation of Stalin’.50 The main political battles for the future of the country shifted from the corridors of the Kremlin to the pages of literary magazines. Tvardovsky’s Novy Mir, which refused to endorse the invasion of Czechoslovakia and continued to defend the line of the 20th Congress, came under fierce attack from nationalists and Stalinists who gathered around two literary journals Oktiabr (October) and Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guards). They lashed out at a devious intelligentsia corrupted by Western influence that posed a threat to the ‘unique’ Russian spirit and way of life. ‘There is no greater threat to Russian people than the lure of a bourgeois welfare,’ wrote Molodaya Gvardiya, advising the Kremlin to rely on a simple Russia peasant.51
The liberals close to Novy Mir deployed the language of Marxist internationalism and the equality of nations to fight back. But the attack on Tvardovsky was sanctioned by the KGB that had rightly sensed a connection between Novy Mir and the ‘bourgeois’ ideas of personal freedom both in thinking and in the economy. The illustrated weekly Ogonyok (Little Flame) – the bastion of collective party-mindedness – which was edited by Anatoly Sofronov, a cheerleader of a late 1940s hate campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ (a euphemism for Jews) and a master of conflictless comedies, joined in the attack on Tvardovsky by publishing a ‘collective’ letter by anti-Semitic hack writers dubbed as ‘gunmen’.
Unable to quietly fire Tvardovsky, who was protected both by his fame and by his status as a candidate member of the Central Committee, the Kremlin forced him to resign by firing his key deputies. On 12 February 1970, the same day that Tvardovsky signed his resignation, he received a telephone call from the Central Committee informing him that he would continue to receive a generous salary, would remain attached to the ‘special’ Kremlin clinic and would be provided with ‘special’ Kremlin food supplies. In addition, his selected poems would be printed in a ‘special’ expensive-looking edition. ‘So, instead of a journal which “reigned over the mind” – a Kremlin feeding, a 500 rouble sinecure and the perspective of a jubilee,’52 Tvardovsky wrote in his diary.
The articles in the foreign press about his resignation reminded Tvardovsky of ‘funeral bells’. Tvardovsky himself did not survive the violation of his magazine. The conflict between Tvardovsky, a decorated Soviet poet and candidate member of the Central Committee, and Tvardovsky, a national Russian poet, had become irreconcilable. National poets could not live on a Kremlin diet. The dissonance between the ideal of personal freedom and Communist ideology caused tremendous stress. Soon after losing Novy Mir, he was diagnosed with cancer and died less than a year later.
Dukhobor
The fight over Novy Mir pushed the conflict between Stalinists and liberals within the party into the open. One of the main protagonists in this fight was Alexander Yakovlev, a short, round-faced balding man with a limp, a potato nose and clever, smiling eyes under bushy eyebrows. He was formally in charge of the press and wrote both the parting Pravda leader about Khrushchev and the first greeting speech for Brezhnev, but did not participate in the most odious attacks on the dissidents. Yakovlev, who began his political career under Khrushchev, was the main opponent (and target) of the nationalists and Stalinists in the Central Committee.
When Tvardovsky fell, Yakovlev struck back. In internal memos for the Central Committee, he identified Russian nationalism and chauvinism as the greatest threats faced by the country. He used all his weight and bureaucratic dexterity to get the editor of Molodaya Gvardiya fired. In 1972 he published an article in Literaturnaya gazeta with the headline ‘AGAINST ANTI-HISTORICISM’. Splashed across two full pages it was a head-on attack on the Russian nationalists, anti-Westerners and anti-Semites who constituted an informal group within the higher echelons of the Communist Party.53
Yakovlev’s article was couched in Soviet phraseology and accused the nationalists of deviating from the Marxist-Leninist principle that states the superiority of class over ethnicity. The old patriarchal ways of life, which the nationalists eulogized, stood in the way of socialist progress and split the unity of Soviet society, Yakovlev wrote.
None of this coaching could conceal the seriousness of the target which Yakovlev had chosen. ‘You know that they will probably fire you for this article,’ the editor of Literaturnaya gazeta told Yakovlev. ‘I don’t, but I can’t rule it out,’ Yakovlev replied.54 The stakes were high. Yakovlev recognized the dangers of Russia’s own home-grown fascism emerging from the alliance between nationalists and Stalinists. Stalin, who had swapped the ideas of internationalism, proclaimed by the Bolsheviks, for the resurrection of the empire, exploited nationalism and the Orthodox Church during the Second World War, invoking the spirit of its warrior saints, such as Alexander Nevsky. At a Kremlin victory reception held for the generals in 1945, Stalin had raised a toast to the Russians as the ‘elder brother’ of all Soviet nations. ‘I should like to propose a toast to the health of our Soviet people… and above all the Russian people… the most outstanding nation of all the nations comprising the Soviet Union.’ Soon Stalin launched his campaign against all things foreign and against ‘rootless Cosmopolitans’.
Anti-Semitism, which was rife among the White Army emigrants, was reimported into the Soviet Union from Germany after the Second World War and served as a common ground between Stalinists and nationalists: both saw Jews as agents of Western influence and enemies of the traditional Russian faith and the Russian state. Although nationalists rejected communist ideology, they considered the Soviet regime and its Iron Curtain as some protection against the spread of liberalism into Russia which they saw as an even greater threat.
As a German SS officer explains to an Old Bolshevik in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate – a novel which openly drew parallels between Stalinism and fascism:
When we look one another in the face, we’re neither of us just looking at a face we hate – no, we are gazing into a mirror. That’s the tragedy of our age… Today you’re appalled by our hatred of the Jews. Tomorrow you may make use of our experience yourselves… You know, as well as we do, that nationalism is the greatest force of our century. Nationalism is the soul of the epoch. Nationalism is the soul of the era.55
Yakovlev was almost certainly familiar with Life and Fate. Grossman finished the novel in 1959 and submitted it to one of the literary magazines. The KGB instantly raided his apartment, seizing all copies, notebooks and even the ribbon from his typewriter. The book, however, was read by members of the Politburo and in Suslov’s department for ideology where Yakovlev served. But Yakovlev’s resentment of Stalinism and fascism was not acquired from books; instead it was engendered by his own life and fate.