Zamyatin was not alone. The painter Kazimir Malevich, one of the world's first abstract artists, insisted on the independence of the arts.
All social and economic relations do violence to art. ... Whether a portrait is being painted of some socialist or some emperor, whether a mansion is being built for a businessman or a humble dwelling for a worker—these differences cannot be taken as the starting point for art. ... It is about time we understood at last that the problems of art and the problems of the belly are extremely remote from one another.240
The old Russian writer Vikenty Veresaev also complained: "Our creative work is being done more and more on two levels—one that we write for ourselves, the other for publication."241 Even Aleksandr Zharov, the bard of the Young Communist League, who was more devoted to the party than anyone, expressed regret: "I'm not allowed to sing sad songs. A mark would go against me on my party card."
By the the mid-1920s voices of protest became less frequent and more discreet. It was harder for them to break into print, but the voices praising the policies of the party and the shackling of literature grew louder and more triumphant. At his last public appearance, Alexander Blok, still very hesitantly, pointed to a phenomenon he found astonishing. He contrasted the youthful volubility of the radical critic Belinsky, who continued Pushkin's rebellious tradition in Russian literature, to the polite restraint of Chief of Gendarmes Count Benckendorff, who on behalf of Tsar Nicholas I helped harass Pushkin and drive him to his grave. Blok said that he always believed the Belinskys were totally opposed and totally hostile to the Benckendorffs and it would be terribly painful if that turned out not to be so.242 But Blok was not mistaken. The Soviet Belinskys were turning into Soviet Benckendorffs, and although they did not have the polite voice of the chief of gendarmes, they outstripped him by far in the techniques of repression.
A leading Soviet literary critic of the early 1920s, Petr Kogan, declared:
For a long time to come the revolution must forget about the end for the sake of the means, must get rid of the dream of freedom so that discipline will not be weakened. A splendid yoke, not of gold but of steel, solid and organized—that is the new element the revolution has brought in for now. Instead of a yoke of gold a yoke of steel. Whoever does not understand that this is the only road to emancipation does not understand anything about current events.243
Kogan sang the glories of the yoke of steel in full seriousness, not knowing that Zamyatin had already predicted such things in his novel We. The Only State had launched a spaceship with the following assignment: "Your mission is to subject to the beneficial yoke of reason all unknown beings in inhabiting other planets, beings perhaps still living in the wild state of freedom. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy."244 Petr Kogan is the same literary critic who noted with approval the "exceptional interest the imaginative literature of today is showing in the Cheka and the Chekists," that is, the security police agencies and their agents.245 'The Chekist," Kogan said, "is a symbol of an almost inhuman decisiveness, a being who does not have the right to normal human feelings, such as pity, love, and doubt. He is an instrument of steel in the hands of history."246 With this instrument of steel a party could carry out its historical task— forcing people to be happy.
The year 1925, which was marked by the death of another writer, the suicide of Sergei Esenin, was the high point of the NEP in culture as well as politics and economics. Through the force of inertia the powerful wave of innovation in the arts begun at the turn of the century continued. Besides that, social cataclysms have always been fertile ground for literature, and it would be difficult to imagine greater cataclysms than the combination of war and revolution from 1914 to 1922. Another factor favorable to the arts was the internal dispute in the party, which occupied the attention of the leaders and diverted them from working out a single clear line for bringing culture to heel.
The conjunction of all these factors created opportunities for development in the figurative arts, theater, the cinema, and literature that were never to occur again. The experiments in form, language, and subject matter of the writers Andrei Bely and Velemir Khlebnikov and the renovation of the literary language carried out by Remizov and Zamyatin, in combination with numerous topics not dealt with before in literature, produced such remarkable prose writers as Boris Pilnyak, Isaac Babel, and Vsevolod Ivanov, and such poets as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva. In the theater this was the age of Meyerhold, the herald of an October-style revolution in the theater; Tairov, the proponent of what he called chamber theater; and Forreger, the film experimentalist, and his prot6ge, Sergei Eisenstein. Likewise, Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov created a new kind of poetics for a new medium, the cinema.
After 1925 Stalin's position as top leader of the party was no longer in doubt. More attention was now paid to literature, and a general line was proclaimed in cultural matters. In February 1925 the Moscow Committee of the party called a conference to take up the question of the intelligentsia. This was the last occasion on which members of the intelligentsia were able to express their views publicly and have an exchange of opinion with the party leadership. Lunacharsky and Bukharin represented the party, and the intelligentsia was represented by Academician Pavel Sakulin, a renowned literary historian, and Yuri Klyuchnikov, a writer and supporter of the changing landmarks point of view. The fate of the intelligentsia and freedom of thought were the topic for discussion. Lunacharsky presented the main report and indicated that the party had "no fixed and final, indisputable, ready-made opinion on the fate of the intelligentsia."247 The party had a goal, "to persuade or to force" the intelligentsia to work with the proletariat. Lunacharsky quoted Lenin, "If persuasion does not work, force must be used."248
Academician Sakulin responded first of all that the better part of the Russian intelligentsia could never regard the revolution as alien because the intelligentsia itself had "nurtured the dream of political freedom and social equality."249 Secondly, he hoped that "during the time when war communism was dominant, before it was terminated by the course of events, the position of the intelligentsia was very difficult."250 By this he did not mean their material situation but the ideological and methodological dictatorship which the Central Committee had proclaimed over education and scientific research.251 Addressing the party and the government, Sakulin then presented the main demand of those intellectuals who wanted to work with the revolutionary authorities: 'There should be no claim to a monopoly on the truth. ... The essence of the truth is that it requires freedom in education and research, and competing schools of scientific thought."252
Klyuchnikov presented a different position, the changing landmarks view: "Since the Soviet government is fighting for its ideals under conditions of tremendously hostile encirclement and since it can transform ruined Russia into a mighty power only if its ideals are victorious," the intellectual outside the party has "no alternative but to recognize that his fate must be to submit."253 Klyuchnikov contended that for the intellectual to do creative work he must be placed in an appropriate environment enabling him to be creative. But political freedom was not necessary. 'To give that to us intellectuals outside the party, even those who are marching firmly in step with the Soviet authorities, would be dangerous. We would just shoot off our mouths."254 The stenographic record at this point records applause. The intellectuals present in the great hall of the Moscow Conservatory apparently agreed that they would all just shoot off their mouths if they were given political freedom.