'The Survival of the Soviet Intelligentsia' was an untitled contribution to 'The State of Europe: Christmas Eve 1989' in New Europe!, the title of Granta 30 (Winter 1990).
Naturally enough, there are some overlaps between the essays, independently composed as they were, over a long period. These I have deliberately not tampered with, in order not to damage the internal structure of each piece.
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, my thanks are due to Strobe Talbott, whose inspired initiative in suggesting the roundtable discussion of this collection of essays provided the timely opportunity to pull it off the shelf, blow the dust away, and put it into final publishable form. Otherwise it might have waited a good deal longer before seeing the light. His splendid foreword adds largesse to beneficence. I am also grateful to Aline Berlin for accepting his suggestion, and its publishing implications.
Andreas Xenachis, Strobe's Assistant, and Serena Moore, my own Assistant, have given all manner of help at all stages. Betty
Colquhoun typed the texts. Helen Rappaport not only compiled the masterly glossary, but also answered numerous queries about points in the text, providing draft notes when requested, with good humour in the face of my relentless pressure to explain every detail. A number of the other participants in the round- table, in particular Rodric Braithwaite, Archie Brown, Larissa Haskell and Harry Shukman, have made valuable suggestions and corrected errors in a draft of the book. Michael Hughes, Archivist of the Berlin Papers at Oxford's Bodleian Library, has kindly winkled out for me some of the background information I draw on above. David King of the David King Collection generously provided the photographs of Osip Mandel'shtam on pages 46 and 47. To all these, and any others whom I have forgotten to mention, I record my grateful thanks.
Finally a word on the dedicatee. Pat Utechin was Isaiah Berlin's secretary from before the time I met him (in 1972) until his death in 1997. For all those years she was endlessly helpful and supportive to me in my work, which could hardly have been done without her. I have long wanted to dedicate one of Berlin's collections of essays to her: this one is a perfect candidate, given her marriage to a Russian whose expertise on its subject-matter is reflected in her own knowledge and interests. Thus I salute her.
henry hardy
Tisvilde Lunde, Nordsj^lland, Denmark, August 2003
THE SOVIET MIND
THE ARTS IN RUSSIA UNDER STALIN
December 1945
the Soviet literary scene is a peculiar one, and in order to understand it few analogies from the West are of use. For a variety of causes Russia has in historical times led a life to some degree isolated from the rest of the world, and never formed a genuine part of the Western tradition; indeed her literature has at all times provided evidence of a peculiarly ambivalent attitude with regard to the uneasy relationship between herself and the West, taking the form now of a violent and unsatisfied longing to enter and become part of the main stream of European life, now of a resentful ('Scythian') contempt for Western values, not by any means confined to professing Slavophils; but most often of an unresolved, self-conscious combination of these mutually opposed currents of feeling. This mingled emotion of love and of hate permeates the writing of virtually every well-known Russian author, sometimes rising to great vehemence in the protest against foreign influence which, in one form or another, colours the masterpieces of Griboedov, Pushkin, Gogol, Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, Herzen, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Blok.
The October Revolution insulated Russia even more completely, and her development became perforce still more self- regarding, self-conscious and incommensurable with that of its neighbours. It is not my purpose to trace the situation historically, but the present is particularly unintelligible without at least a glance at previous events, and it would perhaps be convenient, and not too misleading, to divide its recent growth into three main stages - 1900-1928; 1928-1937; 1937 to the present - artificial and over-simple though this can easily be shown to be.
the soviet mind 1900-1928
The first quarter of the present century was a time of storm and stress during which Russian literature, particularly poetry (as well as the theatre and the ballet), principally (although one is not allowed to say so today) under French and, to some degree, German influence, attained its greatest height since its classical age of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol. Upon this the October Revolution made a violent impact, but it did not dam the swelling tide. Absorbed and inexhaustible preoccupation with social and moral questions is perhaps the most arresting single characteristic of Russian art and thought as a whole; and this largely shaped the great Revolution, and after its triumph led to a long, fierce battle between, on one side, those primarily artistic rebels who looked to the Revolution to realise their own most violent 'anti- bourgeois' attitudes (and attitudinising) and, on the other, those primarily political men of action who wished to bend all artistic and intellectual activity directly to the social and economic ends of the Revolution.
The rigid censorship which shut out all but carefully selected authors and ideas, and the prohibition or discouragement of many non-political forms of art (particularly trivial genres such as popular love, mystery and detective stories, as well as all varieties of novelettes and general trash), automatically focused the attention of the reading public on new and experimental work, filled, as often before in Russian literary history, with strongly felt and often quaint and fanciful social notions. Perhaps because conflicts in the more obviously dangerous waters of politics and economics might easily be thought too alarming, literary and artistic wars became (as they did in German countries a century earlier under Metternich's police) the only genuine battlefield of ideas; even now the literary periodicals, tame as they necessarily are, for this very reason make livelier reading than the monotonously conformist daily, and purely political, press.
The main engagement of the early and middle 1920s was fought between the free and somewhat anarchist literary experimenters and the Bolshevik zealots, with unsuccessful attempts at a truce by such figures as Lunacharsky and Bubnov.1 This culminated, by 1927-8, first in the victory, and then, when it seemed to the authorities too revolutionary and even Trotskyist, in the collapse and purge (during the 1930s), of the notorious RAPP (Revolutionary Association of Proletarian Writers), led by the most uncompromising fanatic of a strictly collectivist proletarian culture, the critic Averbakh. There followed, during the period of 'pacification' and stabilisation organised by Stalin and his practically-minded collaborators, a new orthodoxy, directed principally against the emergence of any ideas likely to disturb and so divert attention from the economic tasks ahead. This led to a universal dead level, to which the only surviving classical author of the great days, Maxim Gorky, finally and, according to some of his friends, with reluctant despair, gave his blessing.
i928-i937
The new orthodoxy, which became finally established after Trotsky's fall in 1928, put a firm end to the period of incubation during which the best Soviet poets, novelists and dramatists, and, indeed, composers and film producers too, produced their most original and memorable works. It marked the end of the turbulent middle and late 1920s, when Western visitors were astonished and sometimes outraged by Vakhtangov's stage;2 when Eisenstein, not yet a film producer, directed his amusing futuristic experiments on stages discovered in the disused palaces of Moscow merchants, and the great producer Meyerhold, whose artistic life is a kind of microcosm of the artistic life of his country, and whose genius is still only secretly acknowledged, conducted his most audacious and memorable theatrical experiments.