Brovman seemed to be a very practical critic. What he implied was that he admired Dudintsev, but the writer could have bowed ever so slightly to the rules of socialist realism without sacrificing his principles, in this way avoiding the avalanche of official criticism. Lopatkin could still have been portrayed as an individualist while he was inventing his centrifugal gadget, but once or twice over an eight-year period he could have checked in with the collective, the party, and then in effect done what he wanted. In such circumstance the party would have been stripped of grounds for criticizing Dudintsev. “Play the game,” Brovman seemed to be urging.
I always felt that though Khrushchev denounced Not by Bread Alone, he could have lived with it as a published best seller. Khrushchev, like Brovman, was not a stickler for form. He didn’t care whether the book was written in the style of socialist realism or not. He was not much of a reader. For him as a communist leader, books such as Not by Bread Alone could be published as long as they did not jeopardize the communist system he ruled—a pragmatic, if short-term, vision. Apparently he did not really understand, nor did he want to understand, that over the long term books such as Dudintsev’s did in fact jeopardize the communist system. When writers could write what they wanted, when books could be published on merit alone, when freedom could prevail in an open marketplace, then communism as practiced in the Soviet Union would not, indeed could not, exist. But such a scenario was for another day.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Uvarov, Sasha, and Stalin’s Ghost
In January 1957, before leaving my assignment at JPRS, I spent two weeks in Leningrad The city, often called the cultural capital of Russia, was founded in 1703. It was christened St. Petersburg in honor of Czar Peter the Great, the name it retained until 1914, the start of World War I. Then it was renamed Petrograd to endow the Russian war effort with a special patriotic glow. In 1924, when Vladimir Lenin, the head of the Bolshevik Revolution, died, St. Petersburg became Leningrad, the name it was to hold until 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated. New postcommunist leaders arose, and they decided that the city ought once again to be known by its original name of St. Petersburg. So it was renamed, and so it has been ever since.
It was Peter the Great’s favorite city, built in the early eighteenth century in the swamplands of northwestern Russia, where the winding Neva River flows into the Bay of Finland. St. Petersburg was Peter’s “window on the West,” as it was often called. Like no other city in Russia, it looked and felt Western. Its narrow alleys and broad boulevards could have been transplanted to any Western European capital, and you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. Inspired by Italian architects, many of the buildings, yellow and light green in color, decorated with tall classical columns, reflected the emerging imperial power of Peter’s Russia and Catherine’s later in the century. During my winter stay in Leningrad—just 450 miles from the Arctic Circle—the sky was often pitch black, except during the high noon hours, when the sun would occasionally peak through the charcoal-gray clouds. Ne sluchayno, as the Russians would say—“It is not an accident”—that many Russians were known to commit suicide during the winter months, so unremittingly bleak were the short days and long nights.
Despite the winter dark and cold, Leningrad had its magic. No matter the weather, the St. Nicholas Cathedral, with its aqua-colored walls and golden domes, inspired the people with song and prayer. On the first floor, small groups gathered around special candlelit icons; on the second, crowds of the young and old, huddled in heavy overcoats, listened to the melodious choir and the deep bass voice of the elderly priest. Together they composed a scene reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s novels or Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. Now many were deeply enveloped in prayer, but during World War II the people of this city were trapped in a merciless Nazi siege lasting 999 days. Many died, victims more of the bitter cold and hunger than of tanks and rockets, leaving deep memories.
Nevsky Prospekt, the Fifth Avenue of Leningrad, glistened with a sort of subdued excitement—for those with rubles to spend. The shops were open. Trading seemed vigorous. I enjoyed visiting the old Duma, the czarist parliament, and the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library (where Uvarov was once an assistant librarian), and I was amazed by the Russian crowds—how they maneuvered around the city’s icy snow drifts in aimless panic, rushing somewhere or perhaps nowhere. The eye-catching statue of Peter the Great, brave and brazen on horseback, located in a vast park in downtown Leningrad, remained a magnificent magnet not just for the occasional winter tourist but for Russians as well, those who lived there and those who visited.
For anyone familiar with Russian history, Leningrad was a must-see stop. I could not have visited Kiev and Vladimir and missed Peter’s “Window on the West.” There was another reason, too, for me to visit Leningrad. A number of Moscow librarians, knowing of my interest in Uvarov, had told me that his private papers—letters, documents, family albums—were archived in Leningrad. Maybe, they hinted, I’d be given access to them. I felt I had to make the effort. I did, and I met with modest success.
One day, while hopping from one library to another, I spotted an advertisement on a poster in front of the Pushkin Drama Theater for Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths and immediately bought a ticket. Lower Depths was a modern classic, a controversial play written in 1901 but not performed in the Soviet Union since the late 1930s. Stalin did not like it, probably because its theme, similar in a way to Dudintsev’s in Not by Bread Alone (1956), focused on the individual’s indomitable spirit rather than on the collective’s presumed strengths. It was again the individual against the collective, and it struck a powerful emotional chord among many in the audience. Time and again they interrupted the performance with sustained bursts of applause and shouts of approval. “Truth! Truth!” one man screamed, as he leaped to his feet. “Man is the only truth,” another cried. “There never has been another truth, and there never could be.” By implication, they were proclaiming their belief that truth, not the state and its know-it-all ideology, represented an ultimate goal of society. These were powerful words, and on this evening in Leningrad they apparently resonated with every man and woman in the audience. They stood up and applauded so vigorously that the performers returned for ten curtain calls. The actors blew kisses at the audience, and the audience blew kisses back. I left the theater feeling that Khrushchev’s thaw had clearly planted deep roots in Peter’s capital. Even as it was being rechilled in Moscow, it seemed to be warming to the moment in Leningrad. Or was it?
On the morning after the memorable performance of Lower Depths, while heading toward the Saltykov-Shchedrin Library, where I hoped to charm the docent into letting me see some of the Uvarov treasures, I passed the Central Lecture Hall on Liteiny Prospekt. A bell rang in my mind. The attractive old mansion, once the home of a Russian nobleman and his family, was the inspiration for many of Pushkin’s most notable scenes from his short story “Queen of Spades.” The building was now devoted to state-sponsored lectures. One was scheduled for 1:00 p.m., and I decided to attend. The sponsor was the Leningrad Division of the All-Union Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge (the Soviets were masters at creating long, sometimes baffling, titles), and the subject was “The International Position of the USSR.”
While waiting for the lecture to begin, I learned that the originally scheduled speaker, a local communist official named V. D. Smirnov, was being replaced by K. P. Voshchenkov, a more senior, presumably more trusted, party spokesman from Moscow. It was an important subject, and Moscow wanted to get it right. The audience seemed handpicked: although there were some young people, restless in their view that change was inevitable, most in the audience were older, probably members of the Communist Party, serious apparatchiks, the kind who took notes and applauded dutifully.