In the nineteenth century people spoke of the two Russias. That dualism returned under Stalin. ‘Russia had again become a dual entity,’ writes Tucker.
Despite the spread of literacy and education in the Soviet period, the country experienced a revival of the cleavage of cultures. The culture of official Russia, with its apotheosized autocrat in the Kremlin, its aristocracy of rank, its all-powerful bureaucracy, its pervasive atmosphere of police terror, its regimentation of all activities, its rituals of prevarication, its grandiose ‘construction projects of Communism’, its great new foreign empire, its official friendships and enmities, its cold and hot wars — this was one thing. There was also a suppressed and little-known unofficial Russia with a life of its own.52
The traditions of Gogol and Shchedrin could not fail to come back to life under such conditions. Even in Stalin’s time a small flame of spiritual opposition flickered among the intelligentsia:
For the artist, thinker and writer it often meant an underground creative life over which the state had no control, an escape from the dreary official culture to real self-expression in secret. Among some youthful elements there was a revival of evangelical religion, carried on underground, and the old Populist tradition came alive again when university students at Moscow, Leningrad and elsewhere formed secret circles to discuss among themselves oppositional political ideas with an anarchist tinge.53
Later this flickering flame of protest was to blaze up, startling people who were unfamiliar with Russian tradition. ‘The rebirth of dissent in Russia astonished many observers,’ writes Shatz.54 In the 1950s Western scholars noted that between the old intelligentsia and the new,
a residual element of continuity was much greater than they expected, for the situation of the Soviet intelligentsia was, objectively, in many respects similar to that of the intelligenty in pre-revolutionary Russia.55
The new conditions merely revived an old tradition:
Once again, an embattled little minority of intellectuals is determinedly resisting the power of a mighty state; the hallowed tradition of literature as an instrument of dissent has been resurrected; lives are being shattered by prison, exile and emigration. Even such specific government responses as the detention of dissidents in lunatic asylums have their historical precedents, for this approach to nonconformist thought was foreshadowed as far back as the 1830s by Nicholas I’s treatment of Peter Chaadaev. With justification, many parallels have been drawn between dissent in Tsarist times and in the post-Stalin period.56
Old debates were renewed and old problems came up again.
It has to be said that the old tradition of Russian culture — its humanistic, critical and anti-authoritarian (and so anti-governmental) political tendency — contributed to no small extent to the acuteness of this conflict. It is well known that tradition in general matters more to the intelligentsia than to any other social stratum. The question to be asked, though, is a different one: How had Russia’s intellectual tradition been preserved after the intelligentsia had suffered, first the severe consequences of the civil war, and then the ferocious repression under Stalin? Between 1917 and 1937 the old Russian intelligentsia had been literally destroyed.
The strictly Stalinist attack on the intelligentsia was waged systematically, beginning at the end of the twenties. One can even distinguish several stages in it, each with clearly defined tasks. The first mass-scale blow (‘partial’ repressions, not aimed against a particular stratum in its entirety, went on all the time, almost without interruption) was struck at the old engineers, the technical intelligentsia, those whom Bukharin had once suspected of dangerously propagating ‘the old culture’ within the new society. They were now openly accused of being ‘wreckers’. Roy Medvedev writes:
The serious mistakes made during collectivization and industrialization lowered the workers’ standard of living, disrupted the supply of food and manufactured goods, and weakened the alliance between the city and the country. Strict rationing had to be reintroduced in the cities. Discontent grew. It was hard to ascribe all these shortcomings only to kulaks and ‘subkulaks’. Another scapegoat had to be found for Stalin’s faults. And such a scapegoat was found: the specialists, the intelligentsia, who had been tainted before the Revolution.57
There began a real witch-hunt of the old specialists. The official organs wrote that ‘between 90 and 95 per cent of the old engineers must unquestionably be regarded as having a counter-revolutionary attitude.’58 But not only the engineers were involved. The second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia asserted plainly that wrecking ‘is possible not only in the economic sphere but also in the spheres of science, literature and art.’59 A group of Ukrainian intellectuals were even charged with ‘wrecking on the front of the development of the Ukrainian language, its terminology, spelling and alphabet’.60 The matter did not stop at accusations. Sentences duly followed…
The Communist historian Boffa, who has carefully studied the material on the trials of the ‘wreckers’ which appeared in the Soviet press, came to the conclusion that not one of the charges brought was justified:
Today it is quite clear… that the cases were faked. As in the later… trials, no documentary evidence against the accused was produced apart from their own confessions. Much subsequent testimony has since exposed these methods of physical torture and moral coercion by means of which they were forced to slander themselves.61
And yet, to this day, none of the big ‘wrecking’ trials has been revised. Even after the ‘exposure of the cult of personality’ in 1956 and condemnation of the unlawful repressions carried out in the Stalin era, the Soviet government continues to maintain that the policy of the 1920s in relation to the intellectuals was correct and the arrests justified.62 On the other hand, the thesis of the universal ‘counterrevolutionariness’ of the old intelligentsia has been quietly abandoned. The official textbook on the history of the CPSU acknowledges that ‘the overwhelming mass of the old specialists worked honestly.’63 Dr S. Fedukhin states that the intelligentsia did not approve of the Bolshevik revolution; ‘but’, he goes on judiciously, ‘these intellectuals who did not agree with the new government, and denounced it, did what the republic mainly required of them — they worked.’64