Actually, the chief problem in this period was not the omnipotence of the censorship but, on the contrary, its lack of independence, the censors’ diffidence. An American observer wrote later:
the censors, be they editors in publishing houses or officials of the central censorship organ, tend to act less out of conviction than from fear — that ever-present element in Soviet society. Page after page is cut and passages sacrificed because ‘they’ (the Party authorities) would not want them to appear.123
It was impossible to negotiate as an individual with the Party bureaucracy. There had to be a writers’ society. The official Writers’ Union would not do. Novy Mir became, at the end of the fifties and in the sixties, the centre for studying Stalinism through literature. In this sense its role was unique. Under the leadership of Tvardovsky — and, to some extent, of Simonov — Novy Mir revived the tradition of the ‘thick journals’ of the nineteenth-century literary opposition — Sovremennik and Otechestvennye Zapiski. In a society where features of Stalinist totalitarianism were still present, the journal managed to defend its editorial independence. ‘Novy Mir’, writes Roy Medvedev, ‘never “fell on its knees”, but pursued its own line under extremely difficult conditions.’124 The first step on this plane, which was taken after the Twentieth Congress, was probably the publication in Novy Mir of V. Dudintsev’s novel Not By Bread Alone (even before the appearance of Simonov’s ‘Literary Notes’). In its day this novel enjoyed immense fame. The discussion of it held at Leningrad University resembled an anti-government meeting.125 The debate on the novel in the Writers’ Union also produced some highly instructive scenes. K. Paustovsky made a sharply anti-bureaucratic speech.126
In the same issue of Novy Mir in which the first part of Dudintsev’s novel appeared was also published D. Granin’s story ‘Private Opinion’, and in 1958 the journal carried G. Troepol'sky’s Kandidat nauk. All these works, though written very differently, were devoted to a single theme: the bureaucratization of science. But that was not all they had in common. They focused on ‘the new man’ engendered by the statocratic regime and its pseudo-communist ideology, studying and anatomizing him from every angle. The essence of these works was not the conflict between bureaucrats of science and scientists by vocation, as might seem at first glance, but the conflict between bureaucracy and science itself, their incompatibility.
M. Voslensky observes wittily about Dudintsev’s book:
From the Western point of view, the plot of the novel sounds like a farce: the nomenklaturist Drozdov, a factory manager, engages in vigorous intrigue to prevent the introduction of new machinery that will increase his output.127
In reality such a situation is very familiar to us and quite normal even now, a quarter of a century after Dudintsev’s novel. It was precisely the typicality of the conflict, the familiarity of the situation that enraged bureaucratic circles. Many people recognized themselves in Drozdov.
‘Bureaucratic man’ appears in a variety of avatars. Before us is a whole gallery of bureaucrats, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’, military and civil, but gradually the features they have in common become apparent: above all what Troepol'sky calls their ‘weather-vane quality’, when a change of purpose entails a change of principles. Troepol'sky’s hero first
cut his hair ‘like Mendel’, then combed it ‘like Lysenko’, and now he would very much like to have a hairdo ‘like Mal'tsev’, but… he was already balding, with only a few strands of hair left. Still, that wasn’t important. What mattered was inner conviction.128
The result is incompetence and putting the interests of one’s career or of ‘one’s own’ clique before the interests of the task in hand. A character in Dudintsev’s novel formulates, before Parkinson, the principle of incompetence, and adheres to it in his life:
A man’s job should always be a little beyond his powers… And as soon as one began to be equal to the job, as soon as one had been praised once or twice — the thing to do was to move up into a region of fresh difficulties….129
Bureaucratic man’s lack of principle does not mean in the least that he is tolerant of other people’s ideas — quite the reverse. People with staunch principles scandalously obstruct the working of the bureaucratic machine; they hinder its ‘mobility’. Hence the bureaucrats’ hatred for all dissidents, a hatred which is essentially antisocial and antipopular. ‘It is impossible’, wrote Dudintsev, ‘to destroy those who think differently — they are needed, just as a conscience is needed.’130 The bureaucracy is hostile to all thought, to every idea, to any conscience:
Their aim is to stay put in their easy chairs, and to go on getting richer. But a discoverer of new things is serving the people. A discoverer always thinks differently, in any sphere of knowledge. Because he has found a new and shorter way, he rejects the old habitual one.131
Dudintsev’s book aroused interest out of all proportion to its artistic merits. 'Not By Bread Alone', writes the American scholar Joshua Rubenstein, ‘is not an elegantly written novel. The characterizations are crude, and the story takes predictable and not wholly convincing turns.’132 As regards the alleged ‘unconvincingness’ of the story one may disagree: the misadventures of the inventor who tries to overcome the bureaucratic barrier are described in a lifelike way. For the rest, however, Rubenstein is right: the book is far from perfect. From the artistic standpoint, the novel was, as Shatz puts it, ‘a peculiar mixture of conventional socialist realism and relatively penetrating criticism’.133 Dudintsev’s success was a succès de scandale, a political success. The right-wingers cried panic, which only increased the interest taken by the youth and the intelligentsia in this novel.
In December 1958 Literaturnaya Gazeta quoted with approval some dramatic utterances by various neo-Stalinists, such as: ‘The danger of revisionism… has touched literature with its dark wing’, or ‘the nihilistic wind from the West has also enlivened our own nihilists… They are slandering our Soviet way of life, sometimes with subtlety and sometimes crudely.’134 The ‘revisionists’ included Dudintsev, A. Yashin and others. The journal Teatr was also attacked. In that same year Pasternak published (abroad) his novel Doctor Zhivago. This was the first case of its kind for many years. There was reason to sound the alarm. Khrushchev himself showed irritation (as he often did) and spoke out against Dudintsev. ‘His book Not By Bread Alone,’ he said, ‘which reactionary forces abroad are now trying to use against us, contains tendentiously selected negative facts interpreted with an approach that is biased and unfriendly.’ That almost amounted to subverting the system. ‘This approach to the presentation of reality in works of literature and art is nothing short of a craving to misrepresent reality, as it were through a distorting mirror.’135