These limits were also seen in the matter of Stalin’s role in the history of the USSR. A Western scholar has written that Khrushchev was a ‘reforming despot’ of the sort encountered only in Russia.97 Perhaps he was even a liberator-despot. His entire activity, together with his contradictions, can be expressed in that contradictory definition. His policy imposed new rules of the game upon the intelligentsia: ‘Thus it was the state which not only initiated dissent but established the framework within which, at least at the beginning, that dissent was to find expression.’98 Moreover, Shatz continues,
by and large, unofficial criticism of Stalin accepted the limits Khrushchev had imposed on the subject. For the next ten years, until the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial of 1966, the voices of dissent evoked by Khrushchev’s speech confined themselves largely to the moral plane, calling for a change in the character and attitudes of the people running the Soviet system while exempting the system itself from direct criticism or serious analysis.99
On the other hand, in the beginning, the inner logic of the development of dissent itself dictated this approach. The whole history of social thought confirms that people moralize before they start analysing. It is said that Khrushchev was inconsistent. That is undoubtedly true; but it would be wrong to see his waverings as mere concessions to external pressure from right-wing dogmatists. His policy fully corresponded to his own notion of what de-Stalinization ought to mean. From the outset he understood very well that its scope must be limited, and he defined the limits clearly enough. He drew near to those limits or else withdrew from them, depending on circumstances, but he could not and did not want to step over them. It was impossible to cast doubt on the basic institutions and principles of the state which had been inherited from Stalin — all that ensured the dominant position of the statocracy in society. Even after the Twentieth Congress he spoke out against ‘a sweeping denial of Stalin’s positive role’,100 and even after the Twenty-Second Congress he continued to say that ‘the Party pays credit to Stalin’s services’101 while periodically he reminded people that Stalin ‘did much that was beneficial for our country.’102 Although condemning the terrorist methods of the ‘leader and teacher’, he did not choose to condemn his actual policy.
The longer the period of reform went on, the clearer it became that what was being undertaken was no radical transformation but a ‘controlled modernization, reflected also in ideology’.103 At the beginning, however, the limits to liberalization were not yet obvious to the Lefts, if only because their attention was centred not so much on political as on artistic questions. It was necessary to ‘clear up the mess in our own home’, getting rid of the Stalinist stereotypes of pseudo-artistic thinking. Until he had shaken them off a writer would be simply unable to tell the truth, even if he wanted to. As Solzhenitsyn said, the socialist-realist dogma bound writers like a collective ‘solemn pledge to abstain from truth’.104 Consequently, a struggle was waged in the sphere of art for a new form, for a break in practice with the dogmas of ‘socialist realism’. But a new form implied also a new world-view. The place of dogmatic pseudo-realism had to be taken by truly realistic art. The principles of the new artistic creativity must be sincerity, actuality, return to the sources. The first two principles had already surfaced in Pomerantsev’s article, while the third began to play a special role after the Twentieth Congress.
The rehabilitation campaign that then began forced people to look at the past in a new light — to rethink it. It was in this period that the foundations of present-day Soviet literary criticism were laid. One of the first literary critics to proclaim the new principles guiding attitudes to art and reality, as early as the fifties, was Mark Shcheglov. Although he died young, he succeeded in seriously influencing many of his own generation (for example V. Lakshin, who later did much to ensure that Shcheglov was not unjustly forgotten). Shcheglov cast doubt upon authorities and principles which had until then been unshakeable. He subjected to critical examination the novel The Russian Forest, a ‘classic’ of ‘socialist realism’, by L. Leonov and revealed the mass of defects, the artificiality, the striving for effect and the lack of warmth in this work. Shcheglov wrote also about the ‘conflictlessness’ of the literary sketch in the Stalin period:
From writings like these, especially sketches (which allegedly ‘photograph’ real life) the ordinary reader could become accustomed only to reading one thing while seeing something different in reality.105
He noted the spiritual degeneration suffered under Stalinism by the reader and by the writer, whose mind gradually ‘got used to seeing in life only comforting phenomena’,106 which enabled him quite sincerely to write lying sketches about nonexistent successes and dubious achievements, to describe the hungry countryside like a ‘happy Arcadia’, where, ‘under the influence of sky-blue fences, rose-coloured cottages and the heartfelt words of good leaders, the countryside is undergoing moral rebirth and even the eradication of alcoholism.’107 Arguing against Lunacharsky’s idea of the ‘higher’ truth of the future, which had hitherto been the foundation of ‘socialist realism’, Shcheglov wrote: ‘Ignoring the everyday “arithmetic” of facts in the name of some “higher algebra” can lead to no good.’108 He was able to quote in support more than enough examples which had accumulated in the Stalin era. One had only to look back over the Soviet theatre in the previous twelve years to be convinced. Shcheglov observed that the theatres preferred to put on classics because the Soviet repertory contained no real ‘plays from life’:
In our plays the power of art receives so little generalization, there are so few symbols and types and so many particular cases, there is so little high theatricality, so little spectacle, and, on the contrary, in everything we see an element of barren dramatization, of naturalism; hence also our extreme poverty of genres and fear of rising to the heights of tragedy and revolutionary romanticism.109
Liberalization facilitated access to foreign culture, and many people encountered Western literature for the first time. (A journal entitled lnostrannaya Literatura — ‘Foreign Literature’ — even began to appear, something without precedent in Stalin’s last years.) ‘The vigorous curiosity’ of educated Russians who contrived — heaven knows how — to become aware of the latest plays in the London theatres and the latest books in the bookshops of Paris, it was admitted by many Western observers, ‘cannot fail to surprise and astonish the visitor from abroad.’110 The rehabilitation of writers put to death under Stalin confronted the history of literature with complex problems. It was necessary, as an American journalist said, ‘to see beyond the wreckage of the thirties and forties back to the cultural world of the twenties.’111 Novy Mir printed articles in which the authors sought to take a fresh look at literary history. S. Shtut wrote:
Our debts are heavy, and to pay them it is not sufficient to ‘insert’ some previously unmentioned names in a chart long since delineated. We need to change the chart itself in many ways. We must say frankly that Soviet literature was, in reality, worse than it appeared in our idealized notions.112