But of course, it is not only protest against alienation and proletarianization that motivates intellectuals. Their actual exploitation grows steadily more severe. The statocratic state is in the position of a monopolist who can dictate conditions to the wage-workers. As a result the material position of most scientists, writers, actors and intellectuals in the USSR has become worse — as a whole, that is, of course — than that of their colleagues in the West. An exception must be made, however, for those bureaucrats of culture or science who perform official propaganda functions, completely accepting the rules of the game and refraining from independent creative work. Although these people contribute nothing of practical benefit to society, their books, which nobody reads, are printed in many thousands of copies. For the sake of propaganda the state accepts losses. Such pseudo-intellectuals are for practical purposes integrated into the lowest level of the ruling statocracy, with all the consequences this entails. But it must be realized that in this field there are always fewer vacancies than applicants. The result is that many of these people get thrown overboard, even though they have accepted the rules of the game. Unfortunately, talentless people and mediocrities are more numerous in our country than the bureaucratic posts for them to fill.
At first, until the mid 1930s, although the intelligentsia were in the position of wage-workers they retained some economic privileges. It was typical that when the onslaught on the old specialists began, as Roy Medvedev writes, ‘their material position was, for the most part, better at the time of their arrest than before the Revolution.’99 The intelligentsia was not yet very numerous; the rulers had need of it and shared with it a part of the statocratic surplus product. But the increase in the number of people with higher education meant also that the position of remaining members of the traditional intelligentsia was undermined. It was no accident that the wave of Stalinist repression broke over them at the end of the thirties. By that time the ruling nomenklatura had a sufficient number of new specialists to replace those who were now ousted.
And so we see in the USSR, as in the West, a social degradation of the intelligentsia, but we must consider also the fact that this is happening against a background in which new middle strata are being formed. While the bulk of the intellectuals are being turned into simple proletarians, certain groups of them, directly connected with the statocratic upper stratum, are on the contrary strengthening their position and obtaining fresh privileges. On the one hand these new middle strata confront the intelligentsia, but on the other they form part of it. In relation to the mass of the intelligentsia they can be seen as a sort of aristocracy of labour. In the ideological struggle they perform an important function in defence of the existing order, but their relation to the ruling circles is also heterogeneous. These middle strata consist not only of the upper circle of the ideological and repressive apparatus but also of technocrats, business managers, some scientists and also the auxiliary personnel of the nomenklatura and the ‘commercial aristocracy’ — people who enrich themselves by battening on our economic difficulties. This entire motley mass is certainly linked very closely with the Party bureaucracy but it also possesses its own interests — professional ones included — which it sometimes has to defend against its own protectors.
Furthermore, these middle strata retain fairly close links with ‘the lower orders’, who frequently influence them. Where the intelligentsia working in the humanities are concerned, the rulers constantly strive to integrate their leading representatives into the middle strata. At the same time the reverse tendency operates, with a section of the middle strata constantly drifting down to the level of ‘the lower orders’, sinking to their position. The political ideal of the middle strata is a very moderate reformism, but a political ideal does not determine all one’s thinking, even one’s thinking about politics. Consequently the middle strata, as the intermediate link between the statocracy and the intelligentsia, form that field in society where a bitter struggle is constantly being waged, ‘for the souls of men’, between the government ideologists and the dissidents.
These, broadly speaking, are the social conditions in which the cultural-political process is advancing in the USSR. Before immediately proceeding to expound ideas and events, we must say something about the role of another factor which has had an important influence on the character of social thought: censorship.
It would really be more correct to speak not of censorship but of the censors. Formally the censor’s function is performed by ‘Glavlit’, but it is also carried out by editorial boards themselves. In addition, a variety of higher organizations constantly intervene in the work of those subordinate to them, granting ‘approval’, making observations and, in short, playing the part of censors. What matters, however, in the last analysis is not so much the structure of the censorship apparatus as the influence it exercises on the country’s spiritual life.
The well-known historian A. Nekrich wrote: ‘Censorship, which was introduced by Lenin as a “temporary measure”, has become one of the pillars supporting the edifice of the Soviet regime.’100 What we are concerned with, though, is not only the bans and administrative controls but the combined effect of many different phenomena connected with the censorship — its influence on culture as a whole. The most important feature of the Soviet censorship (one mentioned by A. Sinyavsky) is, perhaps, that it ‘forbids silence. It not only prescribes what you should write and how, it also insists that you do write. Pasternak, for instance, fell silent; Babel was silent; and this was a crime [emphasis added].’101 It is this which ultimately renders the censorship all-powerful in its way, for it leads to the practice of selfcensorship.
In connection with Solzhenitsyn’s letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union, in which he demanded that belles-lettres be at last allowed creative autonomy, V. Sosnora wrote: ‘The censor-in-chief, like Jesus Christ, has his twelve apostles, who watchfully protect and stoutly defend this responsible personage. We do not have just one guilty censor. We have twelve.’102 These are the author himself, the editors at different stages, the reviewers, and so on. It often happens that by the time a work reaches Glavlit there is nothing in it to be censored. Selfcensorship flourished especially in the Stalin era when, essentially, no ordinary censorship was needed. People were on the one hand so frightened, and on the other so indoctrinated by systematic propaganda, that they not only wrote but thought as the government wanted. It was typical of the time that the ‘thick’ literary journals such as Novy Mir were, generally speaking, not censored under Stalin. A piece of fiction or poetry which had been approved for printing by the editor-in-chief could not be deleted by Glavlit. This arrangement explains how V. Ovechkin’s sketches on the Soviet countryside could appear in print, and later, after Stalin’s death, the articles by V. Pomerantsev, F. Abramov and M. Lifshits which aroused the fury of conservative-bureaucratic circles. On the contrary, however, under Khrushchev it was necessary for Tvardovsky, as editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, to wage a running fight with the censorship, which was openly unwilling to recognize his authority. The curious ‘liberalism’ of the Stalin era was possible only given the conditions of a totalitarian regime when all free thought was stifled and there was nothing left to stifle.