In 1974, after Gulag Archipelago was published in France, Solzhenitsyn was stripped of Soviet citizenship and expelled from the country. As a parting shot, Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter to the Soviet intelligentsia which he called ‘Live Not by Lies’. It was a mixture of a scathing reprimand and a sermon. It ended with a commandment in capital letters: ‘DON’T LIE! DON’T PARTICIPATE IN LIES, DON’T SUPPORT A LIE!’ ‘In our country’, he wrote, ‘the daily lie is not the whim of corrupt nature, but a mode of existence, a condition of the daily welfare of every man. In our country, the lie has been incorporated into the state system as the vital link holding everything together, with billions of tiny fasteners, several dozens to each man.’59
Solzhenitsyn appealed to the personal dignity and individual consciousness of the intelligentsia – not to the Soviet social class that implied higher education and loyalty to the regime which he despised. ‘The intelligentsia as a vast social stratum has ended its days in a steaming swamp and can no longer become airborne again,’ he wrote. Solzhenitsyn described them by an ugly and derogative term: obrazovanshchina or ‘educatedness’.
His main charge was that the intelligentsia had failed in its most vital task – to speak on behalf of the people suppressed by an authoritarian state. Members of the intelligentsia had become part of the system, allowing themselves to get comfortable in its folds, nooks and crannies. ‘A hundred years ago,’ he wrote in 1974, ‘the Russian intelligentsia considered a death sentence to be a sacrifice. Today an administrative reprimand is considered a sacrifice.’ The educatedness had little in common with the nineteenth-century thinkers who had been wiped out by the revolution and Stalinist repressions.60
At the core of the Soviet intelligentsia, as Stalin conceived it, were the scientists, physicists particularly, who were bred and cultivated by the system with the particular military purpose of producing the nuclear bomb and strengthening the country’s military and industrial complex. The conditions created for the scientists were close to ideaclass="underline" they had status, money, equipment and no distractions. Beria, who oversaw the nuclear project, realized that apart from physical conditions, they also needed a degree of freedom to stimulate their creativity.
Russian nuclear physicists were settled in closed or semi-closed scientific towns, and were often provided with dachas, or country cottages, amid forests. The scientific colonies were well supplied not only with food but also with culture. The political clout that scientists possessed allowed them to invite artists who were barred from giving official concerts. As Andrei Zorin, a Russian cultural historian, argued, Soviet military needs led to an overproduction of all kinds of scientists, matched by a hyper-production of culture. The consumers of this culture were the millions of engineers and scientists who worked in research institutes and construction offices with a postbox number for an address. Throughout the 1970s the size and the economic weight of the intelligentsia increased manifold. The number of people with a higher education doubled from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s to 20 million people. The share of specialists employed in the economy had more than tripled from 9 million to 33 million people.
Solzhenitsyn’s essay was partly a response to Andrei Amalrik, a historian by background and a dissident by conviction, whose essay Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? had been published a few years earlier. Like Solzhenitsyn, Amalrik refused to define the intelligentsia in spiritual or ethical terms and described it as a social stratum, a Soviet version of ‘the middle class’:
Its members have gained for themselves and their families a standard of living that is relatively high by Soviet standards – regular good food, attractive clothes, nicely furnished co-operative apartments, sometimes even a car and, of course, available entertainment. They pursue professions that assure them a position of respect in society… This group includes people in liberal professions, such as writers or actors, those occupied in academic or academic-administrative work, the managerial group in the economic field and so on.61
In the 1970s this urban social stratum became conscious of its own unity; it began to acquire both the physical and the cultural attributes of a European middle class. People started to holiday in the Baltic republics – the Soviet equivalent of the West. In 1970 the Soviet Union bought an old Fiat factory to produce the first middle-class car – the Lada. Over the following two decades car ownership in the Soviet Union went up tenfold. Thanks to the rising oil price, in the 1970s the Soviet people were getting better off. The ownership of flats and houses also increased. Like the middle class anywhere it required certain freedoms, but like any other middle class, it was also risk-averse. In reality, the Soviet economy could not accommodate them alclass="underline" as the Soviet joke had it, they ‘pretended to work and the state pretended to pay’. The large number of educated, intelligent and underemployed people in their thirties and forties with little prospect of moving up the career ladder provided a perfect milieu for brewing liberal ideas. With time, they formed a political class. They were not dissidents and they relied on the state for provisions, but they were fed up with the restrictions imposed by Soviet ideology and they were critical of the system. As Zorin has noted, it was a familiar pattern: the state first creates an educated class, which then gets emancipated and starts undermining the state, which finally collapses and it gets buried under its rubble.
For all its political nastiness, the 1970s was also a golden era for the Soviet intelligentsia – a period of accumulation of knowledge and cultural experience. It produced a cultural layer that sustained the nation for years to come. Real life was happening on stage, on the screen, in libraries, while pretence, boredom and falsehood dominated reality. For those who dealt in reality – as journalists were supposed to – the 1970s were the least productive years.
Unable to write about current life, they turned to history. Latsis used the time in Prague to write a book, preparing for a new opening by accumulating knowledge and ideas. He sought to answer the question that possessed his generation: how had the revolution, which promised universal happiness, turned into universal misery? When and how had it gone wrong? Were there alternatives?
He went back to 1929 – a year which Stalin had called a ‘great break’ (wrongly translated in English as a Great Leap Forward) which marked the end of Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the start of the forced collectivization (or elimination, to be precise) of peasantry. He saw a holy grail in the ideas of Nikolai Bukharin. A charismatic Bolshevik leader executed by Stalin, Bukharin in the late 1920s called on peasants ‘to enrich’ themselves, defended competition between private and state enterprises, and argued that the market was a necessary step towards socialism.
Bukharin provided a point in history which beckoned liberal communists like Latsis with the unexplored, and therefore highly tempting, prospect of correcting the socialist course. Thirty-five years after his execution, Bukharin’s name was still anathema to Soviet ideologists and Latsis’s secret manuscript, seized by the KGB, landed him in trouble. But while Latsis, more academic by nature, found some satisfaction in his intellectual work, Yegor, more energetic and less reflective, felt bored and restless. Work in Prague gave him little satisfaction. ‘He would come home, have supper and go to bed at 9 p.m. He just wanted each day to go quicker,’ his wife recalled.62