When everyone is hailing liberalization, it is hard to make out who is sincere and who is not. The sportsman and writer Yu. Vlasov maliciously remarked on television that there is nothing more repulsive than ‘collective recovery of sight’. In his view, what the country needs is not general talk about freedom, but Marxist analysis of the social causes of lack of freedom, a struggle to change social conditions and not just the political conjuncture. Vlasov’s address, which was shown twice on television, became one of the most important events in our spiritual and social life towards the end of 1986. The TV station received a tremendous flood of letters. Essentially it was a question of finding a radical cultural alternative, a fresh, more sober way of seeing society. However, a different mood prevailed among prominent members of the creative intelligentsia. While Rozov stood on the extreme right flank of the renewal movement and Vlasov demonstrated the vitality and necessity of the ideas of its left wing, the majority of the ‘renewal’ intellectuals preferred to remain somewhere in the middle, more or less faithful to the traditions of the Khrushchev period. This enabled them to preserve an appearance of unity. Rozov’s statement evoked no serious protest, apart from an article in Moskovskie Novosti, which had become, under its new editor-in-chief Yakovlev, the mouthpiece of the radicals. As a rule, people wished to enjoy the new freedoms without effort, instead of thinking about far-reaching reforms. But the actual course of events was placing such reforms on the order of the day.
As Gorbachev himself has acknowledged, the economic reforms came up against vigorous and successful resistance from the bureaucracy, who were defending their privileges and power. The traditional measures for influencing the apparatus did not yield results. Orders were not carried out: on the one hand, many decisions taken in the localities were concealed from higher instances, while on the other hand resolutions adopted under the influence of Gorbachev and his supporters were hedged round with so many instructions and explanatory documents that their original significance was obliterated. Without some freedom of criticism it was proving impossible not just to smash but even to expose such ‘bureaucratic sabotage’. Hence the logic of the economic reforms insistently called for intensified liberalization. The new leadership showed interest in, and began to encourage, certain manifestations of freedom of thought. In this situation what was needed was not only a relaxation of the censorship but also more serious transformations.
The film people were the first to appreciate this fact. At the Fifth Congress of their union, in May 1986, they threw out their old leaders and elected a new set who, in most cases, had been put forward as candidates without prior ‘agreement’ with the Party organs. Many participants in the congress spoke of what happened as a ‘revolution’, and in fact nothing like it had been seen before in the entire history of the cultural unions in the USSR. In Khrushchev’s time speeches no less radical had sometimes been made, but it had never been possible to oust the bureaucracy from the leadership of an organization. The new ruling body of the union, headed by Elem Klimov, undertook to prepare a fundamental structural reform of the whole system of film production. Klimov set new tasks before the union: not just to defend film-makers against the censorship, but to fight for decentralization of the industry’s administration.
The debates at the writers’ congress, in June 1986, were even fiercer. Liberal and left-wing authors criticized the censorship, corruption in the union leadership, and incompetent interference by state officials in cultural matters. However, thanks to the votes of provincial delegates, the conservatives managed to hang on to the key union posts. To ensure that provincial writers voted ‘the right way’, Party functionaries had been brought up to Moscow from certain towns to keep an eye on ‘their’ delegates, and although the presence of these outsiders was noticed at the congress nothing could be done about it. The progressive tendency later got its own back at the Russian theatrical union’s congress in December, when the old bureaucracy and persons connected with the Ministry were excluded from the key posts in the union that was formed at the congress itself to replace the All-Russia Theatrical Society.
Thus, the left and liberal intelligentsia not only became politically active but won control of two of the three leading cultural unions. This achievement soon had its effect on the general course of events. Tarkovsky and Lyubimov were invited to return to the USSR. The invitation, to be sure, came too late: Tarkovsky died in Paris while pondering whether to go back; and Lyubimov, who had established himself rather well in the West, said that he had already signed contracts for several years ahead and, in any case, would not be able to work in Moscow in the immediate future. (It is quite possible that what lay behind his reply was also a wish to wait and see how the situation developed in the USSR.) At the same time there was a marked change in film-hire policy. Tarkovsky’s films again appeared on our screens, and works by outstanding Western masters which had been considered ‘too complicated’ for the Soviet cinemagoer (such as Fellini’s 8 ½) were shown to a wide audience.
In these changes a very great role was played by the secretary of the Central Committee, Aleksandr Yakovlev, whom Brezhnev had appointed to take charge of culture and propaganda. Yakovlev had subsequently fallen into disgrace when he spoke out against Russian nationalism and upheld the traditions of the Khrushchev period — actions which led to his removal from the Central Committee apparatus and a posting as ambassador to Canada. But Yakovlev returned to Moscow under Andropov and emerged as one of the most energetic and consistent leaders of the reform movement. Such successes as progressive groups in the intelligentsia achieved were due in no small part to the fact that Yakovlev gave most resolute support to their demands.
In February 1987 the Central Committee of the CPSU and the USSR Council of Ministers adopted a joint resolution enlarging the rights of the cultural unions. This document was drawn up by the Party and Government apparatus together with the leaders of the relevant unions and on the basis of their expressed wishes. Some questions, however, were not dealt with at all — for example, the organization of a publishing house for the film-makers’ union. It was regrettable, too, that intervention by higher authority was requested to secure an increase in the number of pages in the newspaper Sovetskaya Kultura. Such matters can and should be decided by the editorial board itself. Structural reform of the cultural organizations was not obtained, because their leaders, with the exception of Klimov, had no clear-cut programme for change. Most members of the governing body of the Writers’ Union simply feared change, and activists in the theatre union concentrated most of their efforts on getting jobs for themselves in the Ministry of Culture. Thus, despite the exceptionally favourable circumstances, supporters of the liberal tendencies among the intelligentsia achieved relatively little.
Meanwhile, the ‘new dissidents’ were not wasting any time. As early as autumn 1986 a number of conservative activists began openly to criticize the changes that had been made. Chakovsky, editor-in-chief of Literaturnaya Gazeta, speaking at a session of the secretariat of the Writers’ Union, accused the supporters of change of ‘surrendering ideological positions’. Before Abuladze’s film Repentance was shown, several attempts were made to have it banned or cut. Rybakov’s novel Children of the Arbat was the focus of acute political conflict over a long period. One moment they decided to publish it, the next they demanded that it be rewritten. ‘How do things stand with Rybakov’s novel?’ became almost a ritual question in intellectual circles, a barometer of the political weather.