The fight to preserve the historical aspect of our towns is closely associated with the movement to defend the environment generally. In 1986 the ecological lobby, which included the literary critic Academician Likhachev and the prominent writers Zalygin and Rasputin, secured the cancellation of the project to divert our northern rivers southward. This was a major event in social life, a proof of the power of the ecological movement. But the position was much worse where positive ideas and constructive proposals were concerned. The youth groups, unlike the eco-lobbyists of the older generation, were oriented towards a new conception of social development. Young architects set up a public laboratory, ‘The Town of the Future’, trying to combine ecologism with a new historical awareness in their practical work. When, in 1987, there was talk of the Government allowing free cooperatives to be established, the question also came up of alternative ways of organizing production and ‘clean’ technology. The Moscow Club and the Club for Social Initiatives (KSI), as well as some other clubs, which stepped up their activity after Gorbachev came to power, forged close links with the new social movements and informal youth groups, helping them to go over from protest to the elaboration of their own plan for society.
The changes are gradually ceasing to be the concern only of leading figures and veterans of the Khrushchev period. Thanks to Twelfth Floor, Parfenov has become known throughout the country. The talented publicist G. Pavlovsky has at last gained access to a wide readership. It was he who, at the end of the Brezhnev period, edited the samizdat periodical Poiski [Quests]. In those days the appearance of Poiski was an important event in the life of the opposition, its pages containing not only criticism of official practices but sober considerations on the defects and weaknesses of the dissident movement. Poiski showed how left-wing tendencies had grown stronger in the ranks of the opposition. One of the most determined spokespersons for these new moods was Pavlovsky himself. In 1982 he was arrested and sentenced for ‘slandering the Soviet power’. When he returned from imprisonment, after Gorbachev’s accession to power, he was given permission to live in the capital and later allowed to take up a job as a journalist — this time on the official periodical Vek XX i mir.
In Pavlovsky’s view the movement for change stands in acute need of a renewed socialist strategy — not one artificially constructed by theoreticians but one that has grown out of our history, out of the everyday experience of the masses (just as in the first Russian Revolution). Socialism, wrote Pavlovsky, is
a simple, industrious word, whose definition excites passions today. The workers in overalls and the artisans of the 1920s like my grandfather knew what it meant: after cleaning their machines they wiped their hands on a greasy cloth and went home, stopping by at a shop on the way for bread and kerosene. Yet hardly any of them would have passed an exam in scientific communism. So were they socialists?… They were simply the Russian people. And from this arose their need for socialism. What kind? Today we can only guess. At that time there emerged a workers’ definition of socialism, its basic features blending with popular speech and with the Revolution. We remember how it was distorted and lost and wish to believe that that is what surfaces in our memory, returns to the past, with a peculiar freedom, a peculiar love, a peculiar unwillingness to condemn.9
One must not suppose, of course, that it is only the progressive forces that are becoming active. Liberalization created new legal opportunities not only for left-wingers but also for the extreme right. For the latter the centre of attraction became the Pamyat' [Memory] and Rodina [Homeland] clubs which established branches in Novosibirsk, Moscow and Leningrad, together with VOOPIK as mentioned above. Their leaders do not hide their anti-semitic and antidemocratic views: they dream of a strong state and the revival of the true spirit of the old Empire. They have taken root in a number of the temperance clubs formed in the course of the campaign against drunkenness that was launched by the authorities in 1981-86. In the area around Moscow a semi-spontaneous movement has arisen called ‘the Lyubers’ (from the Lyubertsy suburb). Their programme is simple in the extreme: to beat up Muscovites, everybody who wears foreign clothes, to drive out the ‘metallists’ and to cut the hippies’ hair. The ‘Lyubers’ belong to the same age-group as the admirers of ‘heavy metal’, but they represent, so to speak, two different epochs. The psychological basis for the Lyubers’ activity is nostalgia for Stalinism. As the editor-in-chief of the youth magazine Smena, A. Likhanov, put it, they ‘want to model their “behaviour” on the most distressing period of our history.’10
At the end of 1986 the Public Prosecutor’s office began to investigate the doings of the Lyubers, since what was involved was a systematic and malevolent violation of public order. However, the investigation was not completed. After a demonstration in Moscow on 22 February 1987 by two thousand supporters of the youth movement, to demand that the activity of the Lyubers be stopped, some newspapers suddenly declared that Lyubers do not exist, any more than the Abominable Snowman. Literaturnaya Gazeta informed its readers of the demonstration, while stressing that there were no grounds for it since rumours about the Lyubers had been exaggerated by irresponsible journalists. The paradoxical feature was that this article was written by the well-known reporter Shchekochikhin, who had been the first to write about the Lyubers. Quite obviously, certain forces were not at all interested in mobilizing public opinion against this threat. Something else was obvious too — that the anonymous influential protectors of the Lyubers were one and the same with those opponents of Gorbachev’s liberalization who were keeping quiet for the time being.
The strategy of the new right is to use the expanded legal opportunities so as to combat liberalization itself (just as the ‘Black Hundreds’ did in the period of the 1905 Revolution). The inevitable difficulties and contradictions of the process of change, the unsuccessful economic experiments, the costs of reform — all can be exploited by the reactionary groups in the hope that the course of events will inexorably bring the country to a ‘critical point’, when the ‘restoration of order’ and ‘normalization’ will become the slogans of the day. The economic strategy of the reactionaries presupposes a sharp reduction in demand, to provide the means for renewing productive equipment, introducing new technology and so on. The well-known economists Selyunin and Khanin aptly described this plan as a ‘second edition’ of Stalin’s industrialization in the thirties.11 Their problem is to find an ideological and cultural-psychological justification for such a policy in present-duy conditions. Soviet society in the late twentieth century is different from what it was in the thirties, when Stalin carried through his ‘revolution from above’. The way of life has changed, and so too have the social structures. Nevertheless, there does exist a certain nostalgia for the past, for ‘totalitarian’ order, and not just among people of the older generation. Erich Fromm once wrote of the ‘flight from freedom’: certain social groups in Western society saw in the development of democracy a threat to their firm traditions, way of life and security, and these were not only the privileged strata but also a section of the lower orders. After the January 1987 Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, which proclaimed the need for more thoroughgoing liberalization, the editors of Soviet newspapers began to receive letters from readers who doubted the need for changes. Sometimes these letters also contained open threats to the journalists.12 The disposition to flight from freedom is evidently characteristic of a certain section of the population; although, we must suppose, the strength of such feelings is not as great as the reactionaries imagine. In any case, the Lyubers’ actions are not mere hooliganism, but constitute an alarming cultural-psychological symptom.