The point is, though, that Marxism does not merely have to be separated in people’s minds from the bureaucratic class and counterposed to the rulers. We find in Marxism the basic principles on which to rely in the fight against the statocracy. It is no accident that book after book repeats that proposition which Marx and Engels themselves repeated — that the new society must make the free development of each the guarantee for the free development of all.
Freedom remains the criterion of progress, the measure of development of human society. T mean’, wrote Tsipko,
the growth of real freedom, the practical manifestation of which, according to Marx, is labour. To achieve real freedom, Marx considers, it is not enough to perceive that one is free or to possess the right to act freely, to enjoy the possibility of freedom, though this is important in itself: it is further necessary to possess real possibilities to act freely, to be free in work, in political life, freely to develop one’s abilities and inclinations. Without that, progress is inconceivable.143
This means that both democracy in production and political rights are needed. ‘Paramount attention must be accorded’ to increasing social and political liberties.144 But this signifies not only the victory of workers’ self-management over bureaucratic tyranny, but also the triumph of culture over barbarism. Without culture there can be no lasting democracy. Without democracy culture cannot triumph. Nowhere and never were Engels’s words so true as in Russia: ‘Each step forward in civilization was a step towards freedom.’145
Conclusion
‘Artistic production (and intellectual production in general) cannot be normalized, but one might well wonder whether any creative project isn’t necessarily but unwittingly normative’1. So wrote Régis Debray in his book on cultural problems in France. In short, his view is that although creative work cannot endure external control, it is itself fraught with the danger of authoritarianism: the creative personality who possesses new ideas is inclined to impose them on others. Debray’s ideas, often formulated in the style of Pascal’s aphorisms, must bewilder anyone brought up in the traditions of Russian culture. A genuine ‘creative project’ cannot be authoritarian because the artist or the scholar, unlike the engineer, does not carry out a project conceived in advance, but pursues a quest. The creative personality does not know exactly, beforehand, what it is he or she will create. What Debray calls a ‘project’ is merely the direction or the object of the quest. The ‘project’ acquires some definite outlines in the process of creation. Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky, nor Lenin, nor Solzhenitsyn carried out a ‘realized project’. In the creative process project and realization are not ‘two’ stages, they are one. Moreover, the ‘realized project’ does not precede creation, it can be seen clearly only ex post facto, so that it is not so much the departure point of the creative process as its culmination. After he had written Anna Karenina, Tolstoy understood what he had wanted to write this novel about. It may be that in the creative consciousness of a rational Frenchman everything happens somewhat otherwise than in our Russian heads, but there can be no doubt that any ‘normative’ project finds itself overtaken by the spontaneity, unpredictability and dialogicality of the creative process.
These thoughts about Debray are brought in here not so as to mention yet another foreign name, but in order to emphasize that art, science — everything that we mean by ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ — are indissolubly connected with freedom. Nowhere and never have such efforts been made by a government to create an unfree culture as in Russia, but our country’s experience has proved that this is impossible. In the course of cultural history any normative restrictions, internal and external alike, are overcome by the development of creative thought.
The history of the cultural-political struggle in our country, the history of the Soviet intelligentsia’s cognition of its society and its role therein, has not yet been written. These essays cannot give a complete idea of the full richness of this many-sided and complex process. Outside the limits of my work lie a great deal of illegal literature, the problems of the non-Russian national cultures, and much else.
Nevertheless, some conclusions can be drawn. Despite all the negative consequences of the breakdown of the united cultural front of the sixties, the delimitation between different tendencies and schools can be seen as extremely positive and valuable. It was in the seventies, which seemed to be a period of spiritual crisis and stagnation of thought, that the cultural and political pluralism necessary for any progress towards a democratic society came about. In comparison even with Khrushchev’s time, that was a big step forward.
Undoubtedly much, also, was lost, but one ought not to exaggerate the importance of those losses. Many liberals of the sixties became officials in the cultural sphere, but that should not surprise us. What is very much more important is that a significant section of those who came to the forefront during the ‘thaw’ remained loyal to their ideals. The epoch which began after 1968 was for our intelligentsia, on the whole, a time of disenchantment with socialism, like that which came upon the contributors to Vekhi after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution. But it became apparent that the ideology of disenchantment was unproductive — or, more precisely, that it could not provide concrete answers to the burning questions of social development. At the same time, a demand for practical conclusions and realistic solutions increased, along with the deepening of the statocracy’s crisis.
People have grown disenchanted with disenchantment. Interest in democratic socialism has begun to grow again, aroused by events in Eastern and Western Europe and penetrations of the idea of neo-Marxism from the West. An opponent of socialism, K. Burzhuademov, wrote in 1974: ‘Unfortunately, socialist-democratic ideas are widespread today, and not bourgeois-democratic ideas, as ought to be the case.’2 Actually, it was in the seventies that the prestige of socialism declined in our country to a lower level than ever before. Yet Burzhuademov’s admission shows that disenchantment with progressive ideas was not so profound as it sometimes seemed. His statement about socialist ideas being ‘widespread’ ought not to make us complacent. They are still far from being spread as widely as Burzhuademov apparently supposed. But what is much more important is that they are widespread and, we may hope, the day is not far off when they will become the real banner of our time. It is not a matter of returning to Marx or to the hopes of the sixties, but of carrying forward the struggle to renew the socialist idea.
In statocratic countries, wrote A. Michnik, one of the leaders of the democratic opposition in Poland, the Lefts
find themselves in an exceptionally difficult position. They have to defend their socialist ideas against an antipopular totalitarian government which manipulates socialist phrases in demagogic fashion. But just because of that fact, this defence has to be firm, consistent and uncompromising, free from sectarianism, dogmatism and outworn schemas. Left thinking must be open to all ideas of independence and anti-totalitarianism — and, therefore, also to Christianity and all the richness of the Christian religion.3
Soviet society has changed since the seventies. Those were years of political equilibrium at the top, but the country’s economic and social development did not mark time. The numbers of the engineering intelligentsia increased markedly: