‘The campaign against “cosmopolitanism” embraced at the end of the 1940s not only dramatic criticism and literature’, Roy Medvedev wrote later, ‘but also all the social and natural sciences.’27 On 24 March 1949 I. Gladkov launched an attack in the Academic Council of the Institute of Economics against ‘cosmopolitan economists’, calling for a showdown: ‘This is not the time’, he said, ‘or the place to argue with the cosmopolitans… We have to talk with those people by other means and in another language.’28 The ‘cosmopolitans’ — Academician Varga, Trachtenberg, Eventov, Rubinshtein, Lif, Roitburd, Bokshitsky, Berdnikov — were, again somehow, mostly non-Russians. True, in each successive list the representatives of ‘these people’ — in plain words, Jews (‘the concepts “Jew” and “cosmopolitan”’, writes Boffa, ‘actually coincided’29) always had one or two Russians ‘mixed in’ with them, but that had no particular political significance since the anti-Semitic campaign was closely interwoven with a campaign against intellectuals in general. Not only ‘the Jewish question’ but the problem of culture as well was threatened with a ‘final solution’.
In 1949-53 the destruction of culture — or, more precisely, of what was left of it — was in full swing, and we cannot tell what the end would have been had Stalin lived two or three months longer. In any case, the incompatibility of culture with the bureaucracy had never been more obvious. The personalist Emmanuel Mounier wrote: ‘Il y a des gens qui sont “aveugles à la personne” comme d’autres sont aveugles à la peinture ou sourds à la musique.’30 If Mounier had had to deal not with the French bourgeoisie but with the Stalinist statocracy, he would have expressed himself more harshly. Those who destroyed millions of people in the concentration camps were fully capable of trying also to destroy culture as such. Of course it was necessary to retain some appearance of culture, and when even that appearance vanished the statocracy got worried. Hingley writes that the crisis in culture in 1949-53 was so striking that even Stalin and his clique ‘began to show mild signs of dissatisfaction with what they had wrought.’31 It was not accidental that Stalin had issued quite a liberal constitution. We were to have everything — a parliament, elections, guaranteed rights. But not real ones, just shams. In the same way we now had to have Soviet satire, Soviet lyric poetry, Soviet comedy and even Soviet tragedy. It was on the basis of the contradiction between the formally existing laws and what actually happened that there arose later among us the movement for civil rights, which claimed to uphold… the Stalin Constitution of 1936. Similarly, the official willingness to permit the writing of satirical verses or tragic plays created an ideological chink through which dissidents soon contrived to push themselves.
Paradoxically, through Stalin’s death in March 1953 the struggle against ‘cosmopolitanism’ had a final effect which differed from what had been intended. Without having destroyed the new intelligentsia it prepared them for a future clash with the rulers, aroused discontent, and engendered doubt in the minds of people who had grown up under Stalin and believed his dogma.
Stalin had not succeeded in carrying through his anti-intellectual campaign to the end. He died at the very moment when the anti-Semitic hysteria had reached its climax in connection with the case of the doctors who were supposed to have been going to kill him (‘a group of corrupt Jewish bourgeois-nationalists’, recruited ‘by a branch of American intelligence, the international Jewish bourgois-nationalist organization “Joint”’, who attempted to murder prominent political personalities,32 and so on). After Stalin’s death the case was immediately discontinued and the investigator shot. The difference between this frame-up and other Stalinist cases which were no less frame-ups was merely that this time the organizers suffered fiasco. But because it had exacerbated relations between the rulers and the intelligentsia, this campaign prepared and facilitated the rapid movement of the bulk of the intellectuals into definitely anti-Stalinist positions in 1955-56.
This turn did not, however, make itself felt immediately. After the dictator’s death Novy Mir, edited by Tvardovsky, published an article by A. Fadeyev with the expressive title ‘The Humanism of Stalin’. In this article it was said that, even against the background of Stalin’s splendid achievements in the political sphere, his contribution to the development of culture was incredibly important. ‘Comrade Stalin’s role was absolutely exceptional’, wrote Fadeyev,
in the development of Soviet art and literature. More than anyone else, Stalin defined the great humanistic significance of literature as a force for the education and re-education of man in the spirit of Communism, calling writers the engineers of the human soul. Stalin discovered and established theoretically the method of socialist realism in Soviet literature, and developed Lenin’s teaching on the partisan character of Soviet literature. Stalin inspired all the Party’s decisions on questions of literature. He directed the progress of Soviet literature, animating it with ever new ideas and slogans, and exposing its enemies, while carefully fostering cadres of writers, criticizing and inspiring them.33
This passage was by no means something put in for the censor’s benefit, or a product of hypocrisy. In this sense the eulogy of Stalin was categorically different from the subsequent, thoroughly hypocritical panegyrics to Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Fadeyev actually said what was thought by a considerable section of the intelligentsia and the overwhelming majority of the people. Stalin still seemed sinless: propaganda had done its work. It was not accidental that V. Bukovsky — the same Bukovsky who was later to devote his whole life to combating the system — wrote that in 1952 ‘for every single one of us, Stalin was greater than God.’34 But ‘cosmopolitanism’ had sowed doubt in the minds of the intellectuals. This doubt did not yet touch Stalin, but later events quickly clarified the picture. Even before the exposure of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress a large number of cultural figures, who were to play no small role in the next decade, had already taken up their position in relation to Stalinism. Strictly speaking, even before March 1953 many intellectuals felt no particular love for Stalin, but they respected him. The general grief which followed the news of his death involved even many critically thinking people. As early as 1953, however, a vague sense of change was in the air.35 The attitude to Stalin became cooler and cooler, and early anti-Stalinism began to take shape. As we shall see later, this position was not entirely consistent, but nevertheless one can say that a patent break in Russia’s spiritual history happened in the 1950s. ‘The death of Stalin,’ writes Tucker,
like the death of Nicholas I, was the end of an era and posed the problem of internal change and reform. In both instances the autocratic system revolved around the autocratic personality, and the situation towards the end of the reign assumed the aspect of a profound national crisis, a crisis of paralysis and compulsion.36
The first wave of liberalization, which began after the fall of Beria, created a paradoxical situation, when it seemed impossible to make out what was still forbidden and what was already permitted, what was punishable and what would merit encouragement by the authorities. The statocracy itself had not yet decided on its new line, and a struggle for power was going on at the top. At that moment there appeared in Novy Mir V. Pomerantsev’s brilliant article ‘On Sincerity in Literature’, which marked the beginning of a spiritual break with the past.