A situation has arisen in which a newspaper is sometimes more interesting to read than a novel, and a TV discussion evokes more interest than an artistic film. This is giving rise to a sort of crisis in art. But it should be said that the responsibility is borne not only by the journalists or sociologists who have begun to write more honestly — which is not true of them all, incidentally — but also by the creative intelligentsia itself. It is significant that what most excited the public in the mid eighties were not new works but old ones that had been suppressed in an earlier period. As those bans were lifted, the aesthetic that had been held back was at last given satisfaction. New works conspicuously failed to compete with films or novels inherited from past years. The satirist Mikhail Mishin asked maliciously in the autumn of 1986: ‘What shall we do when everything that used to be forbidden is permitted?’
The most popular films of 1985-87 — German’s Road Test, Panfilov’s Topic and Abuladze’s Repentance — were all ‘taken down from the shelf’: Road Test had lain there for fifteen years until the ban was lifted under Chernenko. The publishing of works by Nabokov, Gumilev and other twentieth-century writers — which for political reasons had been struck out of the official history of literature — met with particular interest among readers, as did the appearance of unpublished writings by the recently deceased Trifonov and Vysotsky, or materials concerning them.
Not always, of course, was the screening of a film banned in Brezhnev’s time a genuine cultural event. A long film by Shatrov, made in 1969 and shown for the first time in 1987, signally failed to move the audience. Formerly, one of the main reasons for banning it had been that its makers depicted Bukharin in a sympathetic light, whereas today talk about Bukharin is quite widespread. What is really important, however, is that Shatrov’s oversimplified view of the events of the Revolution — Lenin always right, and those who disagreed with him (Mensheviks, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, Left Communists, etc.) not villains but sincerely deluded people — is nowadays without much appeal to many. For some the history of the Revolution is no longer interesting and they have no time for the niceties of Shatrov’s polemic with official party historiography. Others, who were pondering the lessons of 1917 all through the Brezhnev years, have come to the more profound conclusion that the grandeur of the Revolution does not exclude a tragic element, and that none of its leaders was ‘a machine for taking infallible decisions’ (an expression of Trotsky’s). Incidentally, the absence of Trotsky from the screen also seriously undermined public confidence in Shatrov’s film.
On the other hand, Anatoly Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat, which is also devoted to a historical problem — Stalin’s terror and the life of Soviet society in the thirties — was at the centre of the battle of ideas even before the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress. Bound up with it were hopes for renewed criticism of Stalinism and a fresh surge in social progress. For this very reason conservative circles did all they could to prevent the novel from being published. Yet Children of the Arbat was begun by the author as far back as the sixties and is principally an item in literary history.
The main body of the intelligentsia proved to be unprepared for change, and incapable of providing either new ideas or new forms. The ‘revival of spiritual life’ — of which the leaders of the liberal wing in the official writers’ and artists’ unions spoke so gaily — turned out in practice to be no more than the recovery of positions that had been lost in the seventies. Besides, many cultural personages were gravely compromised. Some who, not long before, had been full-throatedly glorifying Brezhnev now went all out to show themselves in the van of the supporters of change. As though in response to a word of command, they all set about denouncing ‘shortcomings’ of every kind. Criticism of social practices sometimes seemed to have become a kind of conformism, and discourses on freedom in the Gorbachev era called to mind the panegyrics to stability we had heard in Brezhnev’s time. As a typical example one can take the poet Rozhdestvensky, who censured Abuladze in Literaturnaya Gazeta on the grounds that his film Repentance did not expose Stalinism thoroughly but preferred to use the language of allegory and mythological imagery. A rather serious charge, especially if one considers that the Georgian director made the film at a time when Rozhdestvensky was penning eulogistic odes to Stalin’s heirs. However, Rozhdestvensky does not lay claim to the role of spiritual teacher to the intelligentsia. He is simply endeavouring ‘not to be left behind by progress’. The position is a great deal more complicated in the case of persons who do claim to be leaders, or at least patriarchs, of the forward movement of society.
The well-known actor Mikhail Ul'yanov, who in 1986 became a leading figure in the Russian theatrical union even before the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress, appeared before Western journalists to attack Yuri Lyubimov and Andrei Tarkovsky, who had left the USSR. He said repeatedly that none of the productions put on by Lyubimov had ever been banned. Yet Ul'yanov himself knew very well indeed what had really happened. The reason why Lyubimov departed for the West was that, over a period of several years, the Ministry had refused to authorize a single one of his productions. Not only is Ul'yanov not ashamed of his lie, he is calling for a moral clean-up and talking of ‘a harsh and unconcealed struggle’ against conservative forces. True, he does at the same time stress that ‘the crisis phenomena have not been created by the system itself’, that particular individuals are responsible for them.2 In the last analysis such calls for struggle turn into efforts to redistribute power ‘upstairs’ between different organizations and individuals.
Someone who compromised himself even more gravely was the playwright V. Rozov, who openly declared against democratizing the theatre. In his time Rozov had brought about a revolution in Soviet drama, by refusing to write plays in accordance with formulas left over from Stalin’s time. Rozov’s works in the sixties were models of truthfulness: he took as his subject not the grandeur of the state but the experiences of the individual. In the eighties, however, Rozov proved to be one of yesterday’s men.
The opportunity for his declaration was provided by the death of the director A. Efros and the conflict in the Moscow Art Theatre. Efros had come to the theatre on the Taganka after the Ministry of Culture forced Lyubimov to quit the USSR. Efros’s company did not accept him, and the productions he put on at the Taganka were pretentious and feeble. An outstanding director, Efros was stricken, so to speak, by creative impotence as the price for his moral surrender. But when Efros died suddenly in early 1987, the tragedy was used by Rozov as an illustration of how fatal it is for actors not to submit to their director. It was all clear to him. Efros was a victim: the company, which had been unwilling to accept the man assigned by the Ministry, was the villain. The conflict between the majority of the Moscow Art Theatre company and chief director Efremov produced the result that when, for the first time in our history, an elected council was formed to lead the collective. Efremov failed to get elected. Rozov understood: the time had come to put a stop to ‘the saturnalia of the contemporary mob’.3 His position was quite simple. There is ‘good’ democracy, which consists in unrestricted freedom, not bound by the will of the majority, for the creative personality to impose their correct decisions upon the ‘mob’. And there is ‘bad’ democracy, when everyone is free to say what they think and decisions are taken on the basis of the views of the majority. In the latter case, democracy is carried to its ‘most repugnant extremes’ and the Ministry of Culture has to intervene so that ‘a catastrophe does not occur’. It is typical that, despite such absolutely anti-democratic opinions, Rozov and his like still regard themselves as patriarchs of the spiritual renewal and — what is most lamentable — to some extent do play that role.