The crisis of traditional concepts and of the old liberal-intelligentsia culture has found expression in prose literature no less than in drama. The fashionable books published in 1986 (Rasputin’s Fire, Astaf'ev’s The Doleful Detective, Aitmatov’s The Executioner's Block) bear witness not only to the disappearance of many censorship restrictions but also to the decline of analytic thought. None of these writers is sparing with dark colours in their description of numerous outrages and injustices, acts of cruelty and social defects of all kinds. When we come to the question of who is guilty, the answers are most unexpected. Rasputin blames everything on European civilization and urbanization; Astaf ev sees the root of evil in the Jews; and Aitmatov seeks to show the devil’s hand behind it all. Each of these writers is convinced that men are bad because they have lost God. But where, then, is he to be found?
The anti-semitic pronouncements of Astaf'ev in The Doleful Detective could not have failed to provoke protests from many cultural figures. Eidelman, a historian fashionable among the Moscow intelligentsia, sent a letter to Astaf'ev in which he exhorted him to renounce his views. But the author of The Doleful Detective wrote back that we need to put an end to the activity of the Jews in Russian culture, to ‘the seething pus of Jewish super-intellectual arrogance’, and so on. The Jews must pay for having killed ‘our last Tsar’. A position at which The Doleful Detective only hinted was thus given its ultimate development. Lamentations over the woes of the Russian people turned into a call for pogroms. Eidelman began to justify himself: it was not we who killed the Tsar, ‘most of those who did it were Ekaterinburg workers.’ Astafev’s letter, which had been sent as a private communication and not intended for publication, was duplicated by the historian and circulated by hand. Although, of course, one cannot put the two participants on the same level, it is plain that Eidelman did not come off the better. A critique which repeated general truths to the effect that it is bad to be a racist and an anti-Semite could hardly change Astafev’s position, while the unprejudiced reader would simply find nothing new in it. The misfortune of the liberal intelligentsia of the eighties lies in their lack of fresh, original ideas and their unwillingness to proceed from mere declarations to more profound analysis of the historical situation that has come about. Persons who claim the role of spiritually leading the renewal — Aitmatov, Eidelman, Shatrov — offer each their own recipe, but all their ideas are alike in being directed towards the past. Some talk of a return to Christian values (Aitmatov), others of the traditions of nineteenth-century liberalism (Eidelman), yet others of a rebirth of true Leninism and the heritage of the Twentieth Party Congress (Shatrov and the group around the paper Moskovskie Novosti); and sometimes these ideas are quaintly interwoven. The future turns out to be the hostage of the past.
Yet the young generation’s frame of mind is, as a rule, much more radical. In the last days of 1986 the television showed an encounter between Leningrad youngsters and some singers known as ‘the bards’. In the sixties the ‘bard’, the man with the guitar, was the symbol of spiritual independence, freethinking opposition to the Establishment. The leader of the ‘bard’ movement, Vladimir Vysotsky, actually became a national hero. Vysotsky died, however, and the movement has evidently lost its original radicalism. Those present at the meeting reproached the ‘bards’ for having stopped singing about social problems, about freedom, about how the masses live today. What we need now, they argued, are ‘songs of protest’, ‘songs that lift people above themselves’. The popularity of some rock groups is to be explained precisely by the fact that, in one way or another, they have managed to strike a note that accords with this mood.
The ‘Aquarium’ group, led by B. Grebenshchikov, has had enormous success in seeking to assert new positive values. Towards the end of the Brezhnev era Grebenshchikov was expelled from the Komsomol and sacked from his job on account of his songs. Only in 1986 did it become possible for ‘Aquarium’ to appear on television, and its first record went on sale still later. Nevertheless, Grebenshchikov conquered his audience: they learnt his songs by heart and put them on cassette. To the surprise, it may be, of his enemies and of Grebenshchikov himself, he became one of the leaders of the new youth culture which slowly took shape underground in the late seventies and early eighties, and then burst vigorously on to the surface of social life.
Crowds queued to buy tickets for the Latvian film Is It Easy To Be Young? It is very unusual for a documentary to enjoy such sensational success in our country. The explanation, in this case, is to be found mainly in the subject of the film — young people talking openly about their problems, admitting that they need a lot of money, questioning the values of society, protesting against official requirements or simply asserting their right to be unlike other people. Among those who appeared on the screen were punks and adherents of the Hare Krishna sect, as well as men who had fought in Afghanistan. The film is very beautifully made, and even the scene where a morgue orderly is cutting up corpses is shown in a highly refined way: the cameraman obviously spent a long time selecting the best angles and compositions. One cannot help thinking that the makers of this fashionable film would have photographed a murder no less professionally.
In themselves, the interviews with young people are rather monotonous, and there is no attempt at analysis. Twelfth Floor offers a much fuller presentation of the views of the new generation. But it is the beautiful, professional images of the Latvian film that stay in one’s memory. Its picture of the youth culture comes over in an indistinct way that fails to excite the spectator. The interview with Afghanistan veterans is used to show that war in general, regardless of its purpose, is a dirty business — but one in which somebody has to engage all the same. Somebody has to do ‘the dirty work’ — cut up corpses, shoot Afghan rebels. (It is interesting that people who fought against the Germans for the liberation of our country during the Second World War reasoned quite differently.) The film’s objectivity is based on cynical indifference. With such an approach one inevitably ends by putting on the same level truth and lies, criminals and their victims. And yet the culture of youthful radicalism is a protest against just such a view of the world. There are, of course, cynical and indifferent people in every generation, but they are not the ones who create cultures.
In the opinion of youth movement activists, rock groups are persecuted first and foremost not for their music but for their ‘striving to get away from ordinary forms of life, their fear of sinking into philistinism’, their ‘rebellious tendency’, their protest against social injustice.4 A movement of ‘metallists’ has been formed around the ‘heavy metal’ rock groups, with its own symbols, structure and leaders. At first the official organizations reacted with bans, and a list was compiled of 73 Western and 37 Soviet groups whose records were not to be played at discotheques or any other institutions for young people under Komsomol control. But after Gorbachev came in, this list, whilst not cancelled, simply ceased to be operative. It was just ignored. The ‘banned’ groups ‘Mosaic’ and ‘Aquarium’ were allowed to appear on television, and songs of the ‘Kino’ group began to be quoted in newspapers. It had been admitted by official personages that the movement of the ‘metallists’ and other informal youth groups constitutes ‘a challenge to the Komsomol’.5 To suppress them or drive them underground is simply not considered possible in the new conditions, even though many Komsomol officials would prefer just such a course. The changed relation of forces at the top and the new social situation have forced the legalization of informal youth groups. In 1987 in the Sevastopol district of Moscow a club of ‘metallists’ was registered for the first time. The rebels were permitted to speak openly about their feelings and their views.