A few days before the events connected with the Yel’tsin affair, the Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, Patrick Cockburn, wrote that, to all appearances, the intelligentsia’s influence in the life of our country was ‘likely to diminish at the very moment when they have largely obtained the freedom of expression denied them for so long’ (3 November 1987). Actually, the rise in the level of education and political awareness of the Soviet population has perceptibly quickened in recent years. The Soviet Union of the mid-1980s was already not what it had been under Stalin or even under Khrushchev. The profound modernization of society which went on throughout the Brezhnev period constituted, in fact, one of the most important social preconditions for Gorbachev’s perestroika. However, this does not mean, in the least, that the Stalinist past has been completely overcome. As before, there exist in our country influential forces which are interested in a return not just to the state of affairs under Brezhnev but, so far as possible, to the way things were in Stalin’s time. The struggle going on in society assumes, to a considerable extent, the form of a cultural confrontation between those groups which appeal to traditional authoritarian ‘values’ and the supporters of socialist democracy. In these circumstances a very important role on the Left is being played, as before, by the ‘intelligentsia factor’. Society is changing, and culture with it. New problems and new possibilities are arising. But it is quite clear that the mission of Russia’s radical intelligentsia, traditionally hostile to authoritarian and bureaucratic structures, and coming forward as custodians of democratic and socialist ideals, is far from exhausted.
Without a radical design for the future there can be no revolutionary practice. And such a design is, in its turn, impossible without the development of a new political culture, without a change in social consciousness. This task cannot be accomplished by politicians and social activists alone. Without help from writers, playwrights and poets they will not win their battle.
The intelligentsia is changing along with society. The future of culture is the future of the country. Many generations of Russia’s best people have given their labour and their lives so that this country should be free. A defeat for the present movement for socialist democracy would not only be a catastrophe for our society, it would mean the downfall of all Russian culture, with its historic values, its continuity and traditions. The outcome of this struggle is by no means dependent on the intelligentsia alone, but, as before, the role they have to play is an important one.
PART ONE
The Thinking Reed
Introduction
This work is an attempt at an examination, as objective as possible, of some pressing problems of the cultural-political process in our country. The reader may judge the degree of objectivity attainable by someone who is not a detached observer or a historian of remote periods, but a contemporary.
However, this question may be asked at the outset: What does the author actually mean by ‘cultural-political process’, or, in other words, what is the book about? This very question confronted me while I was writing, and only, it seems, when I had finished the book did I find — more or less — the answer to it. Consequently, I might quite naturally invite the reader to seek the answer in the book itself, but it would be too cruel to force him or her to traverse, even in a shorter time, the entire path which the author had to follow. So some very important explanations are called for right at the start.
Culture is itself one of the most complex of concepts. Some American scholars who have analysed the different points of view that exist where this question is concerned have arrived at the not very comforting conclusion that there are ‘plenty of definitions but too little theory’.1 Culture is an ‘evasive’ concept — like time, man, or nation. To begin this book with yet another ‘formula’ would be not only hopeless conceit but also a futile procedure. Instead of engendering definitions, a better idea would be to take a closer look at the essence of the problem which is studied in this book.
What interests me in this matter is not the ‘cultural sphere’ in its entirety (philosophy, art, to some extent science and learning, traditions, and so on) but only what in Western sociology is linked with the concept ‘political culture’.2 This means that the ‘cultural sphere’ as such will consequently be looked at from a definite, narrow standpoint.3 Archie Brown, who has written interestingly on this subject, says that ‘political culture’, in the true sense of the term, ‘is not divorced from a “culture” in the widest social sense. On the contrary, it is closely related to cultural values and orientations more generally.’4 It is quite natural, therefore, to consider political culture as a part of culture in general, and political ideology as a part of the total spiritual life of our society — and, contrariwise, to study general-cultural processes in the context of political conflict. ‘Political culture’, writes the American historian R. Tucker, means ‘politics as a form of culture, and political activity related to the larger culture of a society’, and this might
be taken as the central subject-matter of the discipline. Instead of treating political culture as an attribute of a political system, we would then view the political system of a society in cultural terms, i.e., as a complex of real and ideal cultural patterns, including political roles and their interrelations, political structures, and so on.5
Such an approach seems to be highly productive when studying certain processes which have taken place in our society, but unfortunately Western experts (1) analyse political culture as something fairly stable and static, paying less attention to how it evolves, and (2) are much more interested in the culture of the official upper circles of our society than in the oppositional and semi-oppositional trends. For this reason I think it appropriate to use — instead of the Western expression ‘political culture’, which is associated with studies of that sort — the expression ‘cultural-political process’. By this I mean the whole process of spiritual life, in which politics forms a natural constituent element.
Art, criticism, philosophy, history and politics do not exist in isolation from each other. They constantly come into contact and interpenetrate. At the same time they can be regarded, in the broad sense, as constituting a single process of spiritual life and, in the narrow sense, as a cultural-political process.
In my view the different forms of legal — and to a considerable extent also illegal — ‘dissent’ (as the Anglo-American theoreticians call it) belong to the sphere of cultural phenomena, and (still more importantly) a number of processes in legal art, philosophy, history, criticism and the ‘cultural sphere’ in general become politically significant in our country. This ‘political culture’ of the Russian intelligentsia — together with the ‘cultural opposition’ as a whole — deserves systematic study. And although works on this subject also exist in substantial numbers (in their time they helped me considerably), the subject cannot be seen as having been exhausted.
The importance of politics as an object of reflection, as a world-view and as an objective factor in spiritual life has increased steadily since, perhaps, the epoch of the Reformation. There is nothing surprising about this, for society itself has become politicized. This has been particularly marked in the twentieth century. George Orwell wrote: