Decency and truth demand an owning up to some of the darker pages of Russian history. Just as the younger generation has embraced a kind of philo-Semitism as a means of atoning for the anti-Semitism of past Russian history, so has it adopted a sympathetic attitude toward the small Baltic states, whose periodic despoliation and repopulation by Russian conquerors from Ivan III to Stalin has long bothered sensitive Russians. The term "Baits" was used as a synonym for Siberian prisoners in the High Stalin era; and recent Soviet literature has tended to praise and indeed idealize
this beleaguered region. There is special respect for the Esthonians, whose integrity and fidelity to democratic forms during their brief period of independence between the two world wars won them an admiration comparable to that earned by their cultural kin and northern neighbors, the Finns. The hero of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich devotes a special paragraph to the subject:
Well, it's said that nationality doesn't mean anything and that every nation has its bad eggs. But among all the Esthonians Shukhov had known he'd never met a bad one.80
The rebellion of four youths in V. Aksenov's Salinger-like Ticket to the Stars is told in terms of their plan to flee to Tallinn, the capital of Esthonia and traditional center of Westward-looking gaiety in the eastern Baltic.81 The growing respect for decency and truth can also be measured by the increasing inability of party functionaries to gain support for their periodic campaigns of denunciation. Younger writers seem unlikely to be either fully bought off by the material inducements or fully intimidated by the partial punishments which the regime alternately employs. Sensitive weathervanes of ideological change, such as Ilya Ehrenburg, have unreservedly thrown in their lot with the younger generation. The term "fighter of the first rank" (along with second and third ranks) has been introduced as a kind of informal patent of moral nobility; and Evtushenko has noted that "people someday will marvel at our time when simple honesty was called courage."82 Even Khrushchev felt obliged to sell himself as the benefactor of youthful expectations against "Stalin's heirs," who were blasted with his approval in Pravda by Evtushenko's poem of that name. Khrushchev's successors were, initially at least, deferential if not defensive toward dissident young intellectuals, assuring them that the arbitrary interference of the Khrushchev era would cease and attempting to present themselves as the true friends of "genuine intellectuality" (intelligentnost'). This term became late in 1965 the latest in the long line of normative terms derived from intelligentsia, but when officially proclaimed to be "in no way opposed to narodnosf or partiinost',"83 seemed more likely to remind Russians of the three "ism's" comprising the confining "official nationality" of the nineteenth century than to guide them toward the new world they seek in the late
twentieth century.
A fourth and related reason for insisting on the future implications of the current intellectual ferment is the fact that it has roots in Russian tradition as well as Soviet reality. The more one looks at the younger generation and its search for positive ideals, the more one senses that they are not just opposed to their Stalinist parents (often referred to now as "the
ancestors"),84 but are in many ways seeking renewed links with their grandparents. They are, in short, rediscovering some of the culture which was just reaching new richness in both the political and artistic spheres at the time of the Stalinist blight.
In a short poem written in a Soviet youth magazine in the old folklore form a young Soviet poet seeks to rehabilitate the symbol of Westernization desecrated by Stalin, to free it even of its Leninist name and revolutionary symbols:
Tell us something of St. Petersburg,
For as yet we have not seen it.
Long ago we implored the producers
Please, do not bring us all those miscellaneous films
About lovely, deserted ladies,
But bring us St. Isaac's in a movie
The Bronze Horseman, the old fortress
And all about the vast St. Petersburg.85
Of course, it is impossible fully to appraise-and would be dangerous to underestimate-the crippling effects of a generation of terror and the continuation of tight censorship and control. "Moral convalescence"8* may be a long process. The "silence of Soviet culture" is most insidious in the self-imposed censorship that it subtly encouraged. As the Soviet novelist Daniel Granin wrote in a short story in 1956 significantly entitled "My Own Opinion" (and severely criticized by the party bureaucracy):
Silence is the most convenient form of lying. It knows how to keep peace with the conscience; it craftily preserves your right to withhold your personal opinion on the grounds that someday you will have a chance to express it.87
Yet there can also be a positive side to silence: a depth and purity that sometimes comes to those who have suffered in silence. This quality is often hard to discover in the uninhibited and talkative West, but may be more familiar to those who for so long gave special authority to monastic elders trained by long periods of silence and withdrawal from the world.
"Speech, after long silence; it is right," wrote Yeats.88 Perhaps those who have been so long forced to live with silence may have rediscovered the joy of simple speech or penetrated the mysteries of authentic human communication more fully than many seemingly sophisticated and articulate writers outside. "Music is born in silence," reverently writes one of the best of contemporary Soviet movie directors,89 and one of the best of the young poets has written vividly:
I know that men consist of words which
have embraced them. The word moves. Earth is on fire. Deep feelings rest on silence. Suffering is mute and so is music.90
The respect of so many of the young artists for Pasternak is based on his faithfulness in guarding the integrity of his words, and his faith that a new birth would come out of those regions "where the language is still pure." The most intense and dedicated of young writers seem to have recaptured some of the old monastic sense of writing as a sacred act, the recording of words so that they may be sung aloud with joyful exaltation. Some of them even seem to be suggesting that the Word of the evangelist may offer an antidote to the "words, words, words" of the old intelligentsia and the endless slogans of the new. One poet has written in honor of the great monastic iconographer:
Rublev knew how to fall on his knees before the word.
That is to say
The One that was in the beginning.91
He goes on to point out that Rublev was redeemed and inspired "not by a swineherd symbolizing labor, but quite simply by the Savior."
There is, of course, no way of knowing how deep and lasting the ferment of the Khrushchev era may prove to be, or of evaluating how much and in what ways the young generation will continue to press for reform when tempted by lucrative careers in the official establishment and increasing material prosperity. One recent Soviet story tells how a watchman suddenly discovers on the outskirts of a collective farm Christ in bast shoes saying to the Mother of God: "We have tested men in many ways-by war and hunger… . We must try them now with a good harvest."92 Perhaps with a few good harvests unrest will vanish and the unfulfilled aspirations of Russian culture will linger on only as a kind of wistful memory. All things pass, and the impossibility of knowing what may prove important to the generations ahead is the final fascination and ultimate mystery of history. Perhaps all that the non-prophetic historian can do is make a few last reflections on the historical process itself, and on that part of it which he has examined in search of some final clues to the chapters that lie ahead.