The final débâcle of the intelligentsia and the impoverishment of spiritual culture threatened to destroy the foundations of Russian civilization, and it was precisely these foundations that Lenin and his comrades were striving, above all, to preserve and defend. Accordingly, Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin barred the way before their left-radical colleagues who tried to finish off the Russian intelligentsia so as to have a clear space on which to erect a ‘proletarian culture’. Lenin categorically opposed those efforts, saying:
we hear people dilating at too great length and too flippantly on ‘proletarian’ culture. For a start, we should be satisfied with real bourgeois culture; for a start, we should be glad to dispense with the cruder types of pre-bourgeois culture, i.e., bureaucratic culture or serf culture, etc.100
After all, Lenin observed, ‘At a time when we hold forth on proletarian culture and the relation in which it stands to bourgeois culture, facts and figures reveal that we are in a very bad way even as far as bourgeois culture is concerned.’101 Trotsky spoke out no less resolutely:
There can be no question of the creation of a new culture, that is, of construction on a large historic scale during the period of dictatorship. The cultural reconstruction which will begin when the need of the iron clutch of a dictatorship unparalleled in history will have disappeared will not have a class character. This seems to lead to the conclusion that there is no proletarian culture and that there never will be any, and in fact there is no reason to regret this. The proletariat acquired power for the purpose of doing away for ever with class culture and to make way for human culture.102
In another place this same Trotsky — who, not long before, was ready to love those who would have blown up Petrograd — said that ‘the development of art is the highest test of the viability and significance of every epoch.’103 Trotsky’s line was that writers who accepted the revolution should be allowed ‘complete freedom in the sphere of artistic self-determination’.104 Later on he was very proud of that phrase, uttered at a time when he was in power, evidently considering it important as a refutation of the view that he began to defend freedom only after he found himself in opposition.105 And in fact, despite his sometimes ‘appalling’ statements, Trotsky remained one of the defenders of maximum toleration in the sphere of literature and an opponent of vulgar-sociological methods in the theory of art. His views, however, were far from being fully shared by Bukharin, who supported the idea of ‘proletarian culture’. As for Zinoviev and Stalin, they thought in altogether different categories. Joel Carmichael writes: ‘In cultural life, too, Trotsky was without a faction! He was simply the spokesman, once again, for abstract ideas, in a situation where such ideas had found no embodiments.’106 This generalization, like most of Carmichael’s generalizations, is quite incorrect. The line advocated by Trotsky was supported by Lenin and for a certain period continued to be official Party policy in the cultural sphere, but within the Party opposing tendencies were already gathering strength.
The liberal Bukharin wrote: ‘We need to have the cadres of the intelligentsia trained ideologically in a definite way. Yes, we must turn out intellectuals mechanically, produce them just like in a factory.’107 According to him, what the Party needed was not an independent group of creators of cultural values but disciplined intellectual functionaries, transmitters of state policy, without any personal initiative. True, in those same years Bukharin spoke in defence of freedom of artistic creativity, but these contradictions merely show his inability to grasp the problem of individual freedom and spiritual independence as a whole.108 Some Bolsheviks came out with antiindividualist statements that were a great deal sharper. ‘For us the individual personality is merely that apparatus through which history acts,’ we read in the works of Pokrovsky. ‘Perhaps these apparatuses will one day be created artificially, just as we now make electric accumulators artificially.’109 This prospect reminds one forcibly of the gloomy picture given in Aldous Huxley’s anti-utopia Brave New World Familiarity with this sort of statement evidently inspired Zamyatin’s melancholy jests of a few years later:
I do not know how many decades it will take, but some day the first pages of all the newspapers will be filled with reports on the international Geneva conference on problems of state anthropoculture: just as now one argues about the calibre of instruments, so in the future one will argue about the calibre of mothers and fathers permitted to bring children into the world. Having organized the material basis of life, the state must inevitably concern itself with problems of eugenics, the perfection of the human race…110
However,
the trouble is that with the use of the machine one can very easily manufacture as many Oedipuses, as much raw material for tragedy, as he likes, but for the manufacture of rare, complex apparatuses, capable of processing this material and its would-be Shakespeares, the machine civilization does not suffice.111
The contradictions between the above-quoted statements by prominent Bolsheviks — Trotsky, Pokrovsky, Bukharin — are not accidental. They reflect the contradictoriness of the Bolsheviks’ actual attitude to culture (and also to democracy, individual freedom, and so on). On the one hand, culture (like democracy) was recognized as a very important, fundamental social value; while on the other the very logic of the class struggle made it permissible for the sake of future democracy, future culture, future freedom, to destroy the elements of culture or democracy that actually exist today. Regarding these contradictions in the ideas of Trotsky or Lenin one can, of course, moralize and engage in talk about ‘doublethink’ and so on. But that would be to contradict Russian history itself. We should not launch into reflections on whether the Bolsheviks were right or wrong, concretely, in this or that action, but observe that the choice before them was not easy. In any case the Russian Communists, who considered civilization and education to be very important preconditions for socialism, had need of an intelligentsia.
On the one hand attempts were made to start a dialogue with the old intelligentsia, while on the other they quickly began to create a new one. In 1925 there were more students in the USSR than in 1914 -167,000 as against 112,000.112 The revolution had opened wide access to cultural activity for the children of the workers and for members of the national minorities. The relative freedom of the press and a certain degree of trade-unions independence give grounds for Giuseppe Boffa’s description of the NEP period as a time when ‘germs of pluralism’ appeared.113 There was not only a revival of spiritual life in the country after the bloody nightmare of the civil war, but a new upsurge. The elements of civil society were taking shape in Russia, and the sphere in which the greatest individual and social freedom prevailed was that of culture.
In the 1920s there appeared among the intelligenty who were cooperating with the new rulers a special ideology of their own: ‘left-wing Smenovekhism’. The authors of the symposium Smena Vekh, published in Prague, criticized the pre-revolutionary publication Vekhi. One of them, Yu. Potekhin, declared that if members of the intelligentsia were guilty before Russia it was not for ‘their excessive revolutionariness’ but on the contrary for ‘their inability to accept the great Russian Revolution in the popular forms which were alone available to it.’114