It was important, though, that the countries of Eastern Europe had practical experience of Communism reformism, which produced real successes. The theories of Pelikan, Šik, Lukács and Kardelj were for these peoples not just ‘fantasies’ but definite practices, even if they had not been carried to completion. The Soviet intelligentsia lacked such experience: instead we had suffered, along with the Hungarians, the intervention of 1956 and, along with the Czechs, the invasion of 1968. These were events in our history; they were our experience, which was, in the upshot, as negative as could be. The tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia of the seventies was that without having directly witnessed the victories of reformism, it was present at its collapse. The defeat suffered by the ideology of ‘the liberal decade’ in Russia was therefore complete and crushing. It was no accident that Solzhenitsyn, who after 1968 took up more frankly some extreme right-wing positions, wrote: ‘Those days, 21 and 22 August, were of crucial importance to me.’40 If until then the intelligentsia had retained some sympathy with socialism, in 1967-68 it disappeared. A frenzied quest began for new values to counterpose against the old. They wanted not only to burn what they had worshipped but also to worship what they had burned — although, in fact, what they worshipped and burned were often the same thing under different names.
Disappointment had already begun to take possession of the public consciousness after Khrushchev’s fall. In the Political Diary for October 1965, V. K-v wrote:
A substantial section of the youth cannot believe in the truths that we believed in, and this loss of faith in the spiritual values of the past allows the attitudes of despair and disenchantment, now fashionable in the West, to penetrate into the ranks of our young people by the most varied channels.41
The crisis of ideology in the sixties is very well illustrated in the evolution of Yevtushenko, the poet who was at one time seen as the spokesman for the new ideas. A civic position of the old type (as shown in Bratsk Power Generating Station and Babi Yar) was no longer possible after 1968 — not so much because of the censorship as because the very notion of renewing the system and getting back to ‘true Leninism’ and so on had been discredited. In the new state of affairs one’s civic position had to be ‘extrasystemic’, and so the poetry came out in samizdat. It also appeared in the form of the ‘guitar songs’ so despised by Solzhenitsyn,42 which were disseminated about the country in millions of tape-recordings. This democratic poetry proved really popular because its authors openly challenged the system (like A. Galich) or else (like V. Vysotsky) simply turned their back on it. The latter type of poetry corresponded to the feeling of the broadest masses of the working people in the seventies. But it called for thinking — not only political but, above all, poetic — of a kind quite different from Yevtushenko’s. Finally some, especially B. Okudzhava, turned to history and the experience of the war, seeing in this the last refuge for civic poetry.
Yevtushenko did not try to carry on in his old way, and this was sometimes sad and sometimes funny. He got lost. Tactics degenerated into politicking. Yevtushenko’s misfortune was not that he hoped simply to reform the system but that he could not make up his mind to break the official rules of the game, which no longer gave him scope to continue as a civic poet. After 1968 intrasystemic reformism assumed extrasystemic form, being obliged to proclaim its ideas in samizdat, to lead an underground existence or to function within the dissident movement. At the beginning of the 1980s Roy Medvedev still defended the reformist ideas of the Khrushchev epoch, but he was able to do so successfully only as a dissident.
On the other hand reformist ideas are better expressed, after all, in articles than in verses. In 1960 the reformists were the extreme left wing of the official Party, but in the 1970s they became the moderate wing of the opposition. And while moderation is good and helpful in politics (especially when there is no revolutionary situation), it is out of place in poetry. Poetry is not at all the domain of moderation. The poet who is a revolutionary is a combination encountered quite frequently, but a poet who is a reformist is absolutely unthinkable. Of course, among poets, there have always been people who held reformist views. But can one recall even one good poem in praise of moderate reformism? ‘It is impossible to be oneself if one is not constantly in quest of oneself,’ wrote Yevtushenko.43 His misfortune was that he lost himself in the sixties, and did not manage to find a new ‘self’ in the seventies. And that was not his fate alone.
The political turn was sharp, and many were taken by surprise. Many lost their heads. Many others tried to save what could still be saved. At that time Solzhenitsyn and the writers who supported him waged such a struggle. Reformist ideas did not yet go further than abolition of the censorship restrictions on art. Essentially, this was a campaign of self-defence for literature. Its programme was formulated before the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in Solzhenitsyn’s letter to the Fourth Congress of the Writers’ Union, in May 1967. A number of writers expressed support for the letter: P. Antopolsky, G. Vladimov, V. Sosnora, V. Konetsky. The last-mentioned wrote that the questions raised by Solzhenitsyn were ‘the fundamental questions for our literature’.44 The oppositionist writers rallied round Solzhenitsyn at that time, ‘in battle order’, but already not for offence, only for defence.
The last line held by open oppositionists within the limits of censored literature was the journal Novy Mir. In spring 1968 its editorial board suffered a blow. Zaks and Dement'ev were removed, but this only facilitated the editors’ movement to the left. Owing to bureaucratic slovenliness the authorities had got rid of the very members who were most moderate and timid. The journal became more militant. As often happens, bureaucratic decisions had the opposite effect to the one intended. At the same time the authorities could not make up their minds to suppress the journal. The conviction prevailed for a long time in Stalinist circles that Novy Mir ‘ought not to be suppressed’, that it was the journal for ‘a certain section of the Soviet intelligentsia which includes writers who, if there were no Novy Mir, would send their work abroad, like Sinyavsky.’45 This view, experience showed, was quite sensible. Nevertheless, the editors themselves knew that the destruction of Novy Mir was only a question of time. Not a single number came out without a struggle. It was not only the political censorship that had to be fought. Getting Bulgakov’s Teatral'nyi roman ‘through’ proved very difficult, although there was no politics in it. The bureaucratic leaders of culture considered that to cast doubt on the authority of K.S. Stanislavsky in theatrical matters, as Bulgakov did, was like criticizing Lenin in politics. There must be no encroachment on sacred ground. After 1963 the editors of Novy Mir were guided by the principle: ‘Treat every issue as though it were the last.’ They had to work in inconceivably difficult circumstances. For example, a special personal censorship was introduced for the articles of V. Lakshin, who was regarded as the chief ideologue of the tendency. However, the authority of Tvardovsky (and other factors too, perhaps) put off the dispersal of the editorial board for at least eighteen months, and that interval was well employed. The journal continued to publish very interesting works by Kolman, Kon and others. This was its ‘swan song’. Although Novy Mir was obviously doomed, it kept up its resistance.