The best description of the situation is the biblical phrase about ‘the blind leading the blind’. ‘The worst enemy’, wrote Karyakin,
cannot do as much harm to the ideas of Communism as is done by those who transform these ideas into a variety of religious dogma (nourishing thereby the arguments of many anti-Communists). What can be more contrary to nature than a blindly believing Communist and a Marxist who bows down before an idol?205
The anti-Stalinists sought, above all, to draw support from Lenin’s criticisms of bureaucracy and dogmatism. ‘As a writer,’ wrote Lakshin,
Lenin was hostile to the evasiveness of platitudes, cautious reservations and the abstract treatment of subjects… Lenin’s articles, by their method of analysis and their freedom from clichés, wage war in their very form against what they attack in substance — against narrow-minded dogmatism, against thought which had gone to sleep, against sectarian deification of formulas.206
Lenin said that our country’s destiny depends on ‘the really enlightened elements for whom we can vouch that they will not take the word for the deed, and will not utter a single word that goes against their conscience.’207 It was to that appeal of Lenin’s that the anti-Stalinist intellectuals sought to respond. They felt a new sense of responsibility. Karyakin considered, however, that it was necessary to go further:
Too high a price has been paid for us to restrict ourselves, in the end, merely to the safeguarding of those convictions with which the Communists began the hard task of building a new world. That is necessary but insufficient. And if such a price has been paid, we must extract everything we can from the experience we have undergone.208
Although Karyakin called for deeper analysis, in his own writings there is nothing but criticism of ideology. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn had raised questions which could be answered only on the social plane. What was at issue here?
When Karyakin sees Stalinism as merely an obstacle on the road to socialism, he is right, in the last analysis. But it is not difficult to suggest that this obstacle was, in its own way, logical and inevitable — that Stalinism did not come from nowhere, without any roots, and that it played a certain role in our country’s modernization. All of which needs to be looked into. And then, when we have understood the roots of Stalinism — its essential nature — we must investigate how to overcome it. Characteristic of the first post-Stalin decade was a striving to tell the truth, to expose, to reveal the reality of society. Now a new need was arising — to go into the inner mechanism of things and analyse it.
The change in the problem to be tackled and the change in the nature of the left-wing intelligentsia’s thinking brought on a crisis. The Twentieth Congress had given hope, but it had also proved a source of illusions. It had prevented us from perceiving the main thing — the class nature of the regime. The liberals of the sixties believed that society as a whole, the system as a whole, was moving towards the elimination of Stalinism, yet what happened was merely its updating. They saw in the Twentieth and then in the Twenty-Second Congresses the beginning of a new course but in fact that was, in both cases, the end of it. They did not realize that everything that had happened was closely connected with the class struggle. Oddly, people who were Marxists when they analysed the West seemed to forget class analysis when they turned to their own country. In 1965 M. Gefter, Ya. Drabkin and V. Mal'kov published in Novy Mir an article entitled ‘The World During Twenty Years’ which was a real manifesto of Soviet liberalism; in it they called for ‘the creation of political, ideological and moral guarantees to make impossible any revival of the cult of personality’.209 Note that they spoke of moral problems, yet said nothing about social problems — this was due not to censorship but to the writers’ way of thinking. One can distinguish two weak aspects of the ideology of the Lefts in Khrushchev’s ‘great decade’. On the one hand there was their naive belief in ‘true Communism’; on the other their moralism. They tried to think about political questions exclusively in cultural categories and, though sincere supporters of Marxism, they had not mastered the Marxist method of social criticism. ‘Of course,’ writes Rakovski,
the critique of theoretical ‘dogmatism’ went hand in hand with the denunciation of political and sometimes institutional ‘distortions’. But the unofficial Marxists of this period never used the argument that in Soviet-type societies it is only the vocabulary of the official ideology that is socialist.210
Stalin’s crimes were not ‘mistakes’ and ‘deviations’ from ‘the correct line’; they were themselves ‘the correct line’ of the statocracy at a certain stage of its struggle against the working classes and against socialism. Legal Marxism was censored, and in this case it is clear that such an idea could be voiced only in samizdat: but up to that time it had not been heard in samizdat publications.211 This resulted from the willingness of the ‘true Communists’ to remain within the limits set by official dogmatics. It is important to remember that even in the best period of Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, the left-wing intelligentsia was unable to break away from the ‘Procrustes’ bed’ of the Stalinist schemas, and thought in terms of the old categories. Subsequently a long (and still uncompleted) struggle took place against the schematism of ‘Communist’ dogma and for dialectical thinking. Getting rid of schemas and starting to think about the world freely and critically proved, as we shall see later, extremely difficult. In the sixties ‘critical’ thinking still confined itself to correcting dogma in accordance with a commonly accepted schema, finding internal contradictions in the dogma and studying them, squeezing into the ‘ideological fissures’ of Stalinism.
Such ‘fissures’ existed in the sixties and were constantly being widened owing to the political conflicts within the statocracy itself. Certain groups in it were disposed to support the Lefts, and so we had the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. After Khrushchev’s fall the statocracy closed its ranks. Attempts by oppositionists to squeeze into the ‘political fissures’ between its different groups proved less and less successful, and the ‘fissures’ themselves became narrower. Under Brezhnev the statocracy achieved an ideal equilibrium such as it had not possessed either under Stalin or under Khrushchev. True, this did not rule out the appearance of new groupings and new ‘fissures’ after Brezhnev, but that is another question. What matters is that in the seventies the ideology of ‘true Communism’ ceased to be ‘operative’.
Moralism had a rather different significance. We must remember that the movement of the sixties was necessarily, at first, not a political but a literary and cultural movement, subject to the laws of literature’s development and Russia’s cultural traditions. Given the existence of censorship, literature had to bear an additional political workload, but politics itself became ‘literary’. Russian literature is in no danger of being ‘over-politicized’, for in order to continue as art it rethinks politics in philosophical and — especially — in moral categories (one has only to remember Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn’s best works). It exercises moral judgement over politicians. But here a danger of a different order arises. Shatz writes: