The influence of Pomerantsev’s article on the ideological protest of the late fifties and early sixties was indeed very great. It gave expression to something very important for an entire cultural epoch. Its ideas retained their significance to the end of the Khrushchev era, as the distinctive minimum progamme of the radicals. The universal favourite of those years, Yevtushenko, answered a question about ‘the voice of the young writer’ by saying that ‘this voice must, above all, be sincere. It is not a matter of sounding sincere but of being sincere, being honest. The young poet and writer must write as he thinks, as he feels.’49 It was just that simple honesty that compelled Tvardovsky to support Sats in the Pomerantsev affair. Honesty became the initial principle of the democratic ideology. Sincerity, as we see, can be not only an artistic but also a political category. The article evoked many responses. Komsomolskaya Pravda published a letter from students, supporting the writer. (Later on, that put the paper in an awkward position.) The Stalinists, too, ‘responded’ to Pomerantsev’s article — with a torrent of abuse.
The characteristic feature of the first period of the history of the post-Stalin Novy Mir, as of the intelligentsia as a whole, was a fight on a broad front against literary stereotypes, against socialist-realist clichés and routine. The essence of this fight was the liberation of art forms from the fetters of dogma, a return to artistic quality. In itself this programme had nothing political about it; naturally, however, it met a hostile reception from the Stalinists. The ruling body of the Writers’ Union adopted a resolution ‘On the Mistakes of the Journal Novy Mir’. Pomerantsev was accused of all the mortal sins. Tvardovsky was charged with printing ‘incorrect and harmful articles’50 and removed from his post. It was declared that Pomerantsev had ‘called for a onesided portrayal and exaggeration of the negative phenomena of our reality.’51 At the same time sentence was passed on F. Abramov’s article ‘People of the Collective-Farm Countryside in Postwar Prose’ and Mikhail Lifshitz’s mocking review of the book The Diary of Marietta Shaginyan in which he said, in particular, that ‘the inflation of big words results in their losing all their value.’52 Later, as we know, Lifshitz reformed and began to engage in the exposure of ‘revisionism’. In those years, however, his article figured among the writings which censured the prevailing system of literary clichés and seemed incredibly bold.
Pomerantsev’s article provoked a storm of indignation from the conservatives, who at that time received — quite deservedly — the nickname of ‘right-wingers’. It was typical, though, that even A. Karaganov, while blaming Pomerantsev in the pages of Novy Mir on the grounds that his ‘sincerity is at odds with, or does not coincide with, Communist principles’, and his arguments about freedom were nothing but an expression of ‘petty-bourgeois subjectivism’,53 at the same time took up arms against ‘canons and clichés’. In the same article in which he said that ‘true freedom for the artist is born of the sense of organic union with the Party’54 — in other words, true freedom consists in voluntary slavery, in freedom from thought — the author called on his readers ‘to see the limits to all laws and not to carry them beyond bounds, through canonizing settled habits and influences or methods which are fashionable and therefore seem universally recognized.’55
The process of liberalization marched on. Under the leadership of K. Simonov, who temporarily replaced Tvardovsky, Novy Mir held to the same course. Truth made its way increasingly into the pages of the press. Literature began more and more often to speak of the reality of life in our country. V. Ovechkin’s sketches appeared, telling of the actual situation in the villages, of the causes of hardship, of the need for democracy. Today the sketches of Ovechkin, G. Troepol’sky and V. Tendryakov, which were published immediately after Stalin’s death, do not make the same impression as they did earlier — they can occasionally be reproached for insufficient profundity — but in their day they brought about a real revolution, for in them, in the words of M. Shcheglov, a well-known critic of the period, ‘the countryside of our time stood before the reader as it really was’,56 instead of the popular-print ‘pictures from an exhibition’ to which Stalin’s publicity machine had accustomed the public. These reflections might often seem muddled and imprecise, but they disturbed people’s ideas and compelled them to look for answers.
The critical tendency strengthened and was reinforced after the exposures carried out at the Twentieth Party Congress, the condemnation of the Stalinist practices which were delicately referred to as ‘the cult of personality’. In his secret report to the Congress Khrushchev talked about many of Stalin’s crimes, but he ascribed them exclusively to subjective causes. This version went into all subsequent textbooks, which repeated that the whole trouble was due to the fact that ‘Stalin believed in his own infallibility, began to abuse the Party’s trust, to violate the Leninist principles and norms of Party life, and to allow unlawful actions.’57 Consequently, the effect of the Congress exposures on the public — and especially on the intelligentsia — was twofold. On the one hand it was a gigantic step forward: ‘Whatever may have been N. Khrushchev’s aims when he made his report, that report will remain in the memory of descendants as his greatest service, and one that indisputably belongs to him alone,’ wrote Roy Medvedev in his Political Diary.58
On the other hand, however, Khrushchev’s report produced bewilderment and a demand for deeper analysis. Explanation in terms of ‘the cult of personality’, not relating the tragic events of the Stalin era to social processes in the country and its political institutions, sounded ‘like mockery of any Marxist analysis of history’.59 This was immediately remarked upon by many people, both in the USSR and also — especially — in the West. The very expression ‘cult of personality’ could not but cause bewilderment. ‘If all the unappealing aspects of Stalin’s rule had been limited to the cult of his “personality”,’ an American scholar observes, ‘there would have been no need for de-Stalinization.’60 The restoration of the truth about many Party leaders who had been executed by Stalin was not accompanied by the rehabilitation of such major leaders of Bolshevism as Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Kamenev and Zinoviev, which in itself signified, in Tucker’s words, a ‘re-falsification of Soviet history’.61 The state’s policy changed, but the structure of the state and the Party remained, on the whole, what it had been under Stalin. ‘To bring back old Bolsheviks and others from Siberian exile’, writes Tucker, ‘does not restore the Party as they once knew it.’62 But the people who returned from the camps and from exile brought the truth about the past with them, and thereby raised new questions in people’s minds.
The freeing of Stalin’s prisoners, writes Boffa,
had psychological and political repercussions throughout the country. By how many the population of the prisons and camps was reduced in 1956 and, in general, after Stalin’s death, is not known. But it is clear that the Twentieth Congress lightened the lot of many millions of people. Under Stalin it was impossible even to mention the concentration camps and exile; not only in the press but in private conversation, too, it was preferable to say nothing about them. Now the sufferers were returning en masse to civil life, and could talk freely about their past. Some were broken, physically and morally, but others, on the contrary, felt ready to engage in fresh activity, fearing nothing any more, and demanded justice.’63