In the 1960s this pact allowed the growth and survival of a new party elite which could pursue its own goals. Its members were happy – not with Stalin’s death as such, but with their own youth, their hopes and their strength and, above all, just with being alive. Khrushchev opened up the Kremlin – both physically and figuratively – to a new generation which had been too young to serve under Stalin.
As Alexander Bovin, one of the young communist reformers in the Kremlin, wrote in his memoirs: ‘A critical mass started to form, a mass which a quarter of a century later blew away the mightiest totalitarian regime of the twentieth century.’28 An invisible shift of the generations – the engine of all big social changes in Russia – was taking place.
Members of the generation empowered by the 20th Congress of the Communist Party did not seek to destroy the system, they tried to work their way into it in order to seize its tools and aim them against the old Stalinists. The denunciation of Stalin did not undermine the shestidesiatniki’s faith in socialism. On the contrary, it reinforced their belief in its self-cleansing quality. Stalinism was seen not as the ultimate manifestation of the Soviet regime but as a distortion. The goal, as Yakovlev’s generation understood it, was to improve the system of proofs rather than to throw out the theory. As Yegor reflected:
We would disrespect the memory of those who innocently suffered [from Stalin’s repressions] if we were to equate Stalin’s cult of personality with the regime… No, the cult of personality was never part of our socialist order, but emerged despite it… The greatness of the revolution is not just in the fact that the workers took power into their hands, but in the creation of an order which would inevitably reject everything that is alien to it.29
It is usual for the sons to reject the experience of the fathers. But the untimely deaths of the old Bolsheviks at Stalin’s hands meant that their children saw their duty in clearing and redeeming the names of their fathers and carrying on their socialist cause. Yegor’s generation lived with Hamlet’s complex: his urge to redeem and carry out his father’s commandments while reconciling his actions with morals. Hamlet, a play that was effectively banned under Stalin, returned to the Soviet stage after his death when these men graduated from universities and entered active life. In 1954, the first post-Stalin Hamlet was full of vitality, strength and determination: as he delivered ‘To be or not to be’, Hamlet viciously shook the iron bars of what looked like a prison gate.
By the right of their revolutionary fathers, who had started the socialist experiment, the children were the Soviet princes, or patricians empowered by a sense of entitlement and personal responsibility for their country. They were the Soviet aristocracy. They did not try to escape the Soviet reality either physically or mentally, and never considered emigrating. It was their country – they were entitled to it – and they wanted to change it according to their own needs and views of what was right and wrong. ‘If only I was at the top’ was the thought that Yegor and his generation lived with. They were born for active life, had the strength for it and were constantly looking for a cause to which they could apply their energy.
Private Thoughts
The removal of terror also opened up space for individual thought and action and Russian artists, writers and journalists were quick to take advantage of it. Their work formed the consciousness of those who, thirty years later, would launch Perestroika. The word ‘thaw’ – which the writer Ilya Erenburg used as the title of his novel published in 1954 – gave a name to an entire period in Russian culture, and captured the sensation of new life breaking through the ice. One of the main discoveries and joys of the post-Stalinist years was that the nation, exhausted by collectivization, shattered by the war, tortured by the Gulag, managed to preserve some healthy instincts and lively qualities.
While the Soviet system still barred private ownership of land and property, it allowed space for privacy, for intimate feelings and thoughts. Khrushchev’s main urban projects of building five-storey-high apartment blocks throughout the country transformed the living space of millions of people who moved out of communal flats with one kitchen and one bathroom for up to ten families into small, individual apartments each equipped with its own kitchen and bathroom. These apartments were cramped and inconveniently designed but they were separate from one another. The impact of the transformation from communal into private living can hardly be overestimated. Individual tape-recorders and individual television sets now populated individual flats. With them came artists, poets and bards who filled up the intellectual space of that era. Their works were designed for an intimate audience rather for the echoing public halls.
Normal human feelings were cultivated by theatres and literature, but nowhere more so than in a journal called Novy Mir (New World). ‘All of us in those years – I mean the people of my circle – worshipped Novy Mir, we lived according to Novy Mir,’ Yegor recalled.30 Whereas Pravda (Truth) appealed to the mass consciousness, Novy Mir appealed to private minds.
The Bolsheviks did not just nationalize private land and assets, they also nationalized humankind and individual consciousness. And while physical assets were expropriated by means of physical violence, minds were claimed through ideology and the media. The paternalistic state was supposed to take care not only of the livelihoods of its citizens but also of their morals. The aim of the media had been to standardize the minds of their readers by treating them as one collective body, feeding it the same (mis)information so that it would also think collectively. In the 1960s Novy Mir, which had a circulation of 130,000 copies, countered the very principle of a collective mind, restoring the individual as an entity. After the 20th Congress, the yearning for such an individual approach became a mass one.
At the head of Novy Mir stood Alexander Tvardovsky, a Russian poet from a solid peasant family whose father, brother and sisters had been ‘collectivized’ and exiled as kulaks (well-off peasants with their own land). His own consciousness was formed by his peasant background. His father was the son of a soldier who bought a patch of land with the earnings he had made as a blacksmith. ‘From a very tender age our father impressed on us the love for this sour land, mean and unkind, but our own – our “estate” as he called his farm jokingly.’31 C. P. Snow, an English author and essayist who met Tvardovsky in London, described him as ‘an honest and rooted man. He stood like a rock, exceptionally subtle in his emotional nature, strong and simple in his intellect.’32
Tvardovsky, who was appointed the editor of Novy Mir by the Central Committee, gained his national fame as the author of a connected cycle of poems in which the central character is Vasily Tyorkin – a folk-style Russian private soldier, life-loving, instinctively patriotic, with an acute sense of duty and camaraderie, who never loses heart and defies death with his wit and courage. The rhyming poem, made up of scenes from Tyorkin’s own life, reads like a comic book. It was easy to remember and easy to tell to others. There was a folkloric sound to it – as though it was specially written to recite during short breaks in the trenches.