What do the new radicals want? Up to now they have not formulated their ideas quite clearly. What is predominant is just moods, and they obviously lack a clear-cut platform. However, their moods are eloquent enough in themselves. For example, many people criticize Grebenshchikov because his lyrics are too abstract and his work too replete with mythological and even heraldic imagery. All the same, the singer’s main idea reaches his audience all right: it is a call to emancipate human feelings, to unite with nature, to protest against alienation and cynicism. The name of the ‘Aquarium’ group harks back to the Beatles’ famous song about people looking out from inside a glass onion, and Grebenshchikov is constantly stressing the link between his group and the traditions of the Liverpool quartet.6 The lyrics, the music and the style of performance of ‘Aquarium’ remind many of Latin-American song culture, and even more of the best examples of Western youth counter-culture in the sixties, with its close connections to the ‘New Left’. Paradoxically, despite the similarities in fashion and their interest in American music and the latest Western films, young Soviet people today are more reminiscent of the Western generation of the sixties than of their contemporaries in Italy or the United States.
This is quite natural. The well-known sociologists Nazimova and Gordon have pointed to the structural similarity, in a number of parameters, between social development in the West in the sixties and in the USSR in the eighties. Such a coincidence explains a great deal and opens some ground for optimism. The country which Gorbachev has inherited is already not the same as the one that came into Khrushchev’s hands. It is an urbanized society with a large number of hereditary townspeople and skilled workers. A whole number of ‘intellectual’ processes have acquired a mass character and have simultaneously become devalued. Young people have no memory of the poverty of the forties, but react acutely to any threat to lower their present standard of living. Problems of personal freedom and responsibility have come to the fore. People are tired of Brezhnevite ‘stability’. Protest against corruption and alienation of the personality calls forth a keen demand for new, democratic forms of collectivism.
So sing the ‘Kino’ group, and such songs are encouraged under the conditions of Gorbachev’s perestroika. But the crux of the matter is that many young rock groups, including some in the provinces, had begun to sing about the need for freedom and renewal even before Gorbachev came to power. Their initiative was not a response to any appeal from above. Independently of the will of the leadership, a new cultural milieu began to be formed already in the first half of the eighties. A group of young admirers of Marx gathered around a rock ensemble — that would have been hard to imagine ten years ago. This actual case illustrates very well the processes which have taken place. As in the West in the sixties, interest has increased sharply in both Marxism and utopian socialism. Some are interested in Kropotkin, others in Narodnik ideas about the free commune, others still in the theory of alienation.
The cultural mosaic of the ‘new protest’ is a great deal richer than anything the ageing ‘children of the Twentieth Congress’ can offer. It is clear that without Khrushchev there would have been no Gorbachev, and without the intellectual movement of the sixties the current changes would not have been possible. But every epoch has to find its own means of self-expression. Renewal of the ‘high culture’ of the professional intelligentsia will depend on its ability to comprehend the impulses coming from the spontaneously formed counter-culture of those down below. Historical continuity is inconceivable without the reinterpretation of accumulated experience.
Interest in the past is no less characteristic of the eighties generation than it was of those who participated in Khrushchev’s thaw. ‘In order to stand I must stick to my roots’, sings Grebenshchikov. The point, however, is that the new historical awareness that has spread so quickly among our young people has little in common with the ordinary ideas of cultural liberalism. The editor-in-chief of Moskovskie Novosti, Yegor Yakovlev, considers that the most important task of the day is criticism of Stalinism and, possibly, the rehabilitation of Bukharin. Yet an ever larger number of people are inclining to think that, instead of exposures and rehabilitations, what we need is a full, many-sided and objective interpretation of our historical past in all its contradictoriness. Society must find its memory again: not a selective but a complete memory.
In a programmatic article entitled ‘Freedom to Remember’ the left journalist Gleb Pavlovsky sharply criticized the liberal idea of selective rehabilitation: ‘Today people are talking so much about the truth. But strange as it may seem, there is more selectiveness as well. Old names are being pulled out like rabbits from a hat. I suspect that under the banner of “the restoration of truth” publicists are preparing for a mass exhumation, but it will be selective like their own memories. In this gigantic literary morgue the remains will be laid out in rows, and the publicist-generals, orders in hand, will start marching along them. Yes, now is the time to get ready, so as not to miss the opportunity to engage in that traditional Russian “business” — turning repentance into gain…. And when the truth becomes a form of career, then again, as a classic writer predicted, “the boot will come down on the face of humanity”.’7 In Pavlovsky’s view, any selectiveness with historical facts is impermissible. By eliminating references to Stalin from historical publications, Khrushchev was paving the way for his own defeat. He himself was forgotten ‘on command’ in just the same way that Stalin had been forgotten on Khrushchev’s orders. And today the question arises: is the partial rehabilitation of Bukharin enough in order to understand the deepest roots of Stalinism? In truth, turning ‘evil renegades’ into ‘true Leninists’ with a stroke of the pen will hardly allow us to grasp the real tragedy of those people, their services and their responsibility before the nation, as well as the inseparable link between the two. Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat has appeared. Gumilev is being published in the mass-circulation magazine Ogonyok. The appearance of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is due. But not a word has been said about Vasili Grossman’s great novel Life and Fate, which came out in the West after the author’s death and is to this day unknown to the Soviet public.8
There is a close link between freedom and memory that is well understood by representatives of the youth movement. In 1986, when it was decided in Moscow to demolish the seventeenth-century Shcherbakov Palaces, a group of students and schoolchildren, led by Kirill Parfenov, occupied the building and held it for two months. As a result, not only were the Shcherbakov Palaces saved but they remained in the hands of the ‘invaders'. Parfenov himself appeared on the TV programme Twelfth Floor and spoke of the need to carry on the struggle to preserve the capital’s historical aspect. The official society for the protection of historical and cultural monuments (VOOPIK) itself came under critical fire. The point was that, at the end of the Brezhnev era, right-wing Russian nationalists and anti-Semites secured complete control of this society, and the defenders of the monuments had shown that the leaders of VOOPIK were more interested in combating Jews and freemasons than in preserving and restoring the heritage. The spontaneous movement for the defence of monuments which arose in the eighties found that it had to confront not only the bureaucratic and technocratic groups responsible for destroying the city’s environment but also, to a significant extent, VOOPIK as well. Despite the difficulties (perhaps even because of them), the activists of the spontaneous movement chalked up some real successes, in Moscow at least, and have become a real alternative to the official body.