54 The Social Structure
A
t the beginning of the thirties M. once said to me: "You know, l if ever there was a golden age, it was the nineteenth century. Only we didn't know."
We really didn't know and understand many things—and we paid a heavy price for our ignorance. Why do people always have to pay so dearly for their attempts to build the perfect society? Recently I heard someone say: "It is well known that everybody who has ever tried to make people happy only brought total disaster on them." This was said by a young man who does not want to see any changes now, in case they only bring new misfortune on him and others. There are large numbers of people like him nowadays—among the more or less well-off, needless to say. They are mostly young specialists and scientists whose services are needed by the State. They live in inherited apartments of two (or even three or four) rooms, or they can expect to get one from the organization in which they work. They are horrified at what their fathers have wrought, but they are even more horrified by the thought of change. Their ideal is to pass their lives quietly working at their computers, not bothering their heads about the purpose or result, and devoting their free time to whatever gives them pleasure: reading, women, music, or vacationing by the Black Sea. Victor Shklovski put it well when he was moving into his new apartment. "Now," he said to the other lucky persons who had been allotted space in the same building, "we must pray God there won't be a revolution." He could not have said a truer word: they had achieved the height of good fortune and wanted nothing more than to make the best of it. All they needed was just a little peace to enjoy it, just a little peace. This is something we have never had.
The young specialist opposed to change couldn't have expressed himself better: it is quite true that the pursuit of happiness can lead to disaster. I was recently struck by an admission from an elderly and very experienced man of a quite different kind who in his day was an active fighter for the "new order" (but not in this country, which is why he still feels responsible for what happened): "Once in our lives we wanted to make people happy, and we shall never forgive ourselves." But I think he too will be able to forgive himself and will not renounce the material rewards due to him for the services he has rendered. In the meantime the "masses," about whom so much nonsense has been written (by Blok, for instance, with his idea that they are untouched by "civilization" and embody the "spirit of music"), are concerned only to try and eke out their wages and get through life as best they can. Some of them spend what little money they have on their homes, or on clothing and footwear; others are more interested in drink. How do they get the money to stupefy themselves with vodka? I remember one of my neighbors in Pskov, a house painter and former partisan who is still a die-hard Stalinist. Every day he came home swearing obscenely and shouting in the corridor of our communal apartment about how good things had been under Stalin. Then his wife would drag him off to the room where they lived with their two children, but we could still hear his drunken praise of Stalin: "He gave me an apartment, he gave me a medal, he gave me my self-respect. . . . You know who I mean. . . . He lowered the prices. . . ." On holidays they were visited by the wife's sisters and their husbands. They sat together staidly reminiscing about collectivization, during which the women had managed to get away from their farm in good time and find work as domestic servants. The house painter's wife had been the most enterprising of them—during the war with Finland she had worked in an MGB canteen at the front line, and she still talked about "those wicked Finns." They drank to Stalin's memory and kept saying how much better off they had been in his day, whereas now there was nothing but shortages. . . . The house painter's wife helped me with my housework all winter and then in the spring, from force of habit, reported to the police that her neighbor, the woman from whom I rented my room, had an unregistered tenant. Later she wept bitterly and asked my forgiveness, and went to the church to pray for her sins. She is part of the formidable past that we are now gradually living down. The only change such people might want is to go back to their younger days—they pine for the time when life was reduced to a few such simple formulas as "Thanks to Comrade Stalin for our happy life." Now they even have the "spirit of music" too— no home is complete without a television set. As to the "happy life" bestowed on us, nobody feels sorry about that.
I suppose it was at the beginning of the twentieth century that people decided the time had come to create a perfect, ideal society which would really ensure universal well-being and happiness. This notion grew out of nineteenth-century humanism and democracy, which, paradoxically, could only hamper the creation of a new order
The Social Structure ^ 5 S
based on social justice. The nineteenth century was therefore denounced as an age of rhetoric, compromise and basic instability, and people now looked for salvation in a rigid order and authoritarian discipline. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this, people craved for an "organic" system and a unitary idea to embrace the whole of their thinking and behavior. Free thought—the favorite child of humanism—only undermined authority and had to be sacrificed to new ideals. A rationalist program of social change demanded blind faith and obedience to authority. The enthusiasm for the resulting dictatorship was quite genuine—a dictator is strong only if he can rely on followers who blindly believe in him. Such followers cannot be bought—that would be too simple—but once they exist, there are always plenty of venal people ready to swell their ranks, especially if they have no choice. But every grand idea eventually goes into a decline. Once this has happened, all that remains is inertia —with young people afraid of change, weary middle-aged ones craving for peace, a handful of old men horrified at what they have done, and countless petty myrmidons repeating by rote the phrases they were taught in their youth.
M. never renounced humanism and its values, but he had come a long way if even he could say that the nineteenth century was a "golden age." Like all his contemporaries, he had taken stock of the last century's legacy and drawn up his own balance sheet. I think that a great part in the formation of M.'s ideas was played by his personal experience as an artist—which, like the mystic's, powerfully affects one's view of the world. M. also sought harmony in social life, and the integration of the parts with the whole. This was consistent with his view of culture as the underlying idea which imposes order on the historical process and defines its structure. The nineteenth century repelled him by the poverty, not to say wretchedness, of its social structure—as he says in some of his articles. In the Western democracies, of which Herzen spoke so scornfully, M. did not see the harmony and grandeur he wanted. He wanted a society with a clearly defined structure, a "Jacob's ladder," as he put it in his article on Chaadayev and in The Noise of Time. He sensed the presence of such a "Jacob's ladder" in the organization of the Catholic church and in Marxism—he was simultaneously interested in both as a schoolboy. He wrote about this in The Noise of Time and in a letter from Paris to his teacher, V. V. Gippius, in the days when he was a student there after finishing the Tenishev school. In both Catholicism and Marxism he felt the presence of a unifying idea that bound the whole structure together. I remember him saying to me in 1919 that he suspected the best form of social organization would be something like a theocracy. For this reason he was not frightened by the idea of authority, even when it was translated into dictatorial power. The only thing that worried him in those days, perhaps, was the Party organization. "The Party is an inverted church," he said. What he meant by this was that it had the church's hierarchical subordination to authority, but without God. The comparison with the Jesuits was not yet so obvious in those days.