This is a political age. War, fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship your thoughts will be about sinking ships.6
In theory there can be two ways out of this conflict. Either, in a totalitarian society, politics absorbs and completely subjects to itself all forms of spiritual life; or, in a society of democratic socialism, politics itself is, in the last analysis, dissolved in the general ‘ideological’ process (I do not, of course, refer to political ideology in the narrow sense). For Marx, already, political activity, both theoretical and practical, was a kind of applied philosophy.
In the present work, therefore, we are concerned not to consider politics ‘and’ culture, but to study politics as part of culture or, contrariwise, culture and art as political factors. Finally, we have the question of the evolution of the political culture of our society as a whole. The cultural-political process is such that we cannot draw a precise line of demarcation between politics and philosophy, politics and religion, art and politicized philosophy, and so on. In the frontier zone at which we are looking they do not only interact: they interpenetrate, becoming transformed into a single entity; furthermore, one of them can appear in the form of another.
The significance of the cultural-political process for the life of society, for its future, is much greater than could be supposed on the basis of vulgar Marxist or positivist schemas. Marx’s general formula to the effect that social consciousness, belonging to the sphere of the ‘superstructure’, reflects and interprets the ‘base’ — that is, the relations which take shape in the process of production — is absolutely correct as a fundamental law; but it explains particular cases just as little as the universal law of gravity explains the trajectory of the flight of a shell travelling at such and such a speed, with such and such a wind blowing, and fired from such and such a gun, and so on. In every case many laws and factors come into play. Merely referring to a general historical law means no more than refusing to explain. This is all the more so because in society it is living people who are acting, and they cannot be reduced to any schemas. Thus consciousness, as one of Marx’s happiest formulations has it, does not merely reflect the world, it also creates it. This means, incidentally, that the ‘superstructure’ does not simply influence the ‘base’: it penetrates and sometimes becomes it. For man, with his illusions, his political views and even his aesthetic preferences, is himself a very important productive force. Marx and Engels understood this very well. Lenin appreciated it too, and for Gramsci it possessed central significance. H.H. Holz, in his work on present-day socialism, wrote:
The basis is in Marxist theory defined through production. The latter consists, however, not only of material things, embodied in productive forces, but also of the people who work with the aid of these productive forces, and these productive forces are organized in accordance with those people’s ideas. These ideas are defined, naturally, by the development of the productive forces, but they are also formed by traditions of theory and practice, prevailing usages, the philosophical and religious doctrines assimilated by the people concerned, the works of art that they like — in short, people’s self-awareness as objectified in culture.7
The truth of this can be judged, for example, by the many failures suffered by European (especially Soviet) specialists in the countries of the Third World when they have tried to make local workers use up-to-date equipment. This attempt failed (or did not fully succeed) because the necessary level of culture was absent or, more precisely, because the workers’ type of culture was different from what the engineers required.
As can be seen from its subtitle, the present work makes no claim to be an all-embracing and exhaustive examination of the problem of cultural-political development in the USSR. That would be quite impracticable given the huge amount of material, the many aspects of the problem and the extremely few serious (especially Marxist) studies that have been devoted to it. The task of this work is to pose and formulate the questions in a clear-cut way rather than to provide a conclusive answer to them.
It is well known that it was the intelligentsia of the humanities who, between the 1950s and 1970s, were the principal — or among the principal — bearers and exponents of social protest against bureaucracy in Soviet society. It is not accidental that Wolfgang Leonhard, in his article on the development of the class struggle in the USSR, where he lists the potential gravediggers of the bureaucracy, puts the artistic intelligentsia second after the scientific and technical intelligentsia, while the working class appears only in fourth place.8 This schema does not, of course, reflect the real power of any social group or class, but indicates the level of its political activity.
Leonhard writes that writers and poets play a bigger political and moral role in the USSR than in the West, and are taken more seriously there.9 As M. Agursky has pointed out, ‘no serious analysis of Soviet society is possible without profound study of present-day Soviet literature and art, which have become the field of political battles.’10 This situation is to be expected in a country where the cultural-political process was almost the only form of political development over many years. The Russian tradition of independent oppositional thought has its roots in the nineteenth century, and perhaps even in a much more distant past. In the post-Stalin epoch many Russian intellectuals have made heroic efforts to revive this tradition. We may now hope that in future the democratic tradition will not be extinguished and that critical thinking will find the correct answers to the burning problems of our society.
It is customary to end a preface with thanks to people who helped the author in his work on the book. I, alas, am unable, for a number of reasons, to name the many friends, comrades and colleagues without whom my work would have been simply inconceivable. It remains only to express the wish that a time will soon come in Russia when scientific research and political discussion will no longer be treated as anti-state ‘sedition’.
1
The State and the Intelligentsia in Russia
‘For a people deprived of civic freedom, literature is the sole tribune from which it can make heard its cries of indignation and conscience,’ wrote A.I. Herzen. ‘The influence of literature in such a society acquires a dimension long since lost in the other countries of Europe.’1 Nearly a century later, Roy Medvedev’s Politicheskii Dnevnik [Political Diary] repeated Herzen’s words almost verbatim:
Under conditions where political thought is deprived of free expression, where political discussion and argument are impossible, the role played by literature and art is inevitably enhanced: these more complex forms in which reality is reflected enable the questions which interest and worry society to be posed all the same.2
The coincidence of the two quotations is not accidental.
Those words spoken in the middle of the nineteenth century continue to be applicable, in their fullest extent, to present-day Soviet society, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s. This fact leads us to two kinds of reflection. First, that Russian culture in general and literature in particular are rich, to this day, in living traditions of social criticism. Second, that these traditions, founded in one period of history — the early and middle years of the nineteenth century, when Herzen wrote ‘On the development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia’ and ‘The Russian People and Socialism’ — have blossomed in another period in a state which has proclaimed, at least in words, a break with that past which so angered Herzen. General references to the fact that suppression of individual freedom is characteristic of both regimes are not enough. A number of circumstances were needed for the social-critical tradition in culture to revive almost unchanged after several decades. First and foremost, the structure of the ruling power against which persons of culture set themselves must have retained a certain element of continuity. What and why?