In Khrushchev’s mind, the Hungarian repression was an unfortunate, unavoidable bump on the road to the ultimate triumph of communism. But it had saved his Eastern European empire, which to him was of fundamental importance. He hoped that it would not destroy the possibility of better East-West relations, but on his list of priorities, what came first was maintaining communist rule in Eastern Europe, a concept that many years later came to be called the Brezhnev Doctrine.
At the time, as fall slipped into winter and Khrushchev’s “year of the thaw” started to refreeze, turning Moscow into an icy center of crackdown and controversy, I noted in my diary that I was living through “dark, frightening, and tragic days.” At least that was how they struck me. The stories in the Soviet press were again filled with Western “plots,” “aggression,” and “conspiracies.” In Gorky Park, where I often went to meet Russians with whom I could have casual conversations, I found fewer Russians willing to stop and chat, as if they too began feeling a familiar chill in the air. Cabdrivers, among my best translators of Kremlin policy shifts, were again turning their attention to the traffic, keeping their opinions to themselves.
At the embassy we were hearing stories of Russian atrocities in Budapest, hundreds of Hungarian rebels brutally slaughtered by Soviet troops. And at JPRS I came upon reports that Molotov, of all people, was the Soviet official charged with telling artists and writers, who had flirted with the concept of freedom, that this flirtation had to end, that loyalty to the “collective,” to the Communist Party, was to take precedence over “individualist” tendencies.
What was happening in different corners of Soviet society helped Khrushchev realize that in his effort to ration democracy one liberalizing step at a time, he was losing control of his dictatorship. To retain personal power and reimpose the Soviet equivalent of law and order, he had to tighten the screws of party authority. But how tightly? Go back to Stalin’s day, which would have invalidated his core policy of de-Stalinization? Or was there perhaps a middle ground, a place where a certain degree of democracy could coexist with a continuation of communist rule? That was Khrushchev’s hope.
But by year’s end he clearly had not found that place, and he retreated to the comfortable cliché that the party knew best, even when the evidence was overwhelming that the party was floundering in uncertainty, one day acting as though Stalin was back in the saddle and the next day acting as though de-Stalinization was still the name of the game.
Into this treacherous political swamp entered a thirty-eight-year-old Ukraine-born Russian writer, Vladimir Dudintsev, whose new novel, Not by Bread Alone, was quickly becoming a test case for the artistic limits of de-Stalinization. That was by no means Dudintsev’s intent. Like many other writers, he had more modest goals in mind: most important, publication and praise—and the perks that would flow from being a successful writer. Had he written a book consistent with the traditional, sleepy norms of socialist realism, with its emphasis on dedicated, muscular workers, he might have achieved his goals. But with Not by Bread Alone, Dudintsev had created a main character, an innocent inventor named Lopatkin, who broke the accepted rules of socialist society by acting like an individualist, more absorbed with self than with the collective, which was forbidden in the harsh lands of socialist realism. In the uncertain climate of post-Hungary Kremlin policymaking, Dudintsev could easily be defined as a troublemaker, and so he was, much to his everlasting regret.
Dudintsev was a lawyer who became a journalist and then a novelist. In the 1930s, when Stalin unleashed his bloody purges, Dudintsev was a dedicated member of the Komsomol, the Young Communist League. He studied writing under Lev Kassil, a noted mentor who ran a literary circle in Moscow, and he studied law at the Moscow Institute of Jurisprudence. But before he got a chance to practice law, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and then the Soviet Union. For the Russian people this was the start of a horrible, costly war. Dudintsev joined the Red Army. Soon thereafter he was badly wounded. After his recuperation he was transferred to Siberia, where he served as a military prosecutor. (In Not by Bread Alone, Lopatkin is tried and found guilty by the same sort of prosecutor.)
Throughout the war, when he was not practicing law Dudintsev read a great deal, developing a special fondness for such writers as James Joyce and Marcel Proust. After the war he plunged into a study of the Russian masters, especially Ukraine-born Nikolai Gogol, determined to learn enough to be able to write a book about some of the major themes of Soviet life. In 1952 he started to write Not by Bread Alone. He finished four years later, shortly after the 20th Party Congress concluded its work. I was told by a Russian friend that Dudintsev had great difficulty finding a publisher, perhaps because the book was considered too controversial. He went from one publisher to another. Each praised the book and predicted that it would be a great success “one day” but refused to accept responsibility for publishing it “now.”
In despair, Dudintsev turned to Konstantin Simonov, editor of the literary journal Novy Mir, or New World. Would Simonov publish Not by Bread Alone, perhaps in installments, dividing the 500-page novel into three parts? Surprisingly, Simonov said yes. In Moscow’s literary world, Simonov was known to be an old party hack, not in any way an editor of excitement or daring. So why did he publish the first part in the August edition, the second in September, and the third in October, thereby making an eye-catching literary statement? Because, Simonov later explained, he regarded Not by Bread Alone to be the literary equivalent of the 20th Party Congress: big, bold, and promising. By publishing it when others declined to do so, he would be seen as the fearless conquering hero of Moscow’s literary wars. His argument was that the 20th Party Congress condemned bureaucracy; so too did the book. The party congress favored initiative and drive; so too did the book. The party congress raised profound social and political questions; so too did this book.
When the first installment appeared, Not by Bread Alone was an overnight sensation. “Have you read this new book? Yes, by Dudintsev” was a commonly heard question among students at the Lenin Library. Among Russians literature has always enjoyed a special place. At that time, writers and poets, when reading their works, would attract huge crowds, numbered on occasion in the thousands. Was Dudintsev another Tolstoy? “No, of course not,” I kept hearing, but another major writer had clearly surfaced on the literary scene and, with him, his sweet, eccentric hero, the inventor Lopatkin.
Like millions of others in the Soviet proletariat, Lopatkin works in a factory, where after eight years of toiling alone he invents a new machine for the centrifugal casting of iron drain pipes. “A what?” many asked, before bursting into laughter. Here was a character out of Gogol’s imagination, so quirky and original, so much the loner, that he has never bothered to check with communist authorities—or with anyone, for that matter—on his road to the “centrifugal casting for iron drain pipes.” He has done it on his own. When Lopatkin finally unveils his invention to factory managers and party officials, they are at first delighted and then weirdly appalled. They accuse him of divulging state secrets and send him to an Arctic prison camp. Here, then, was a story, whimsical in its approach, rich in detail, touching in its portrayal of Lopatkin, that described the deadening effect of the Soviet system on the creative powers of a human being. The book left the reader with many questions about the wisdom of the Soviet state and the unbelievably sad experience of a Soviet inventor.