Is there a solution to this tragic collision? And does not history, in the end, ensure the triumph of Pushkin over Bulgarin? Granin does not put this question to us, but nobody is left with any doubt as to whose side he is on. Reaction, though, does not come from nowhere. It is based upon certain classes, on state institutions, on the bureaucracy. Consequently progress, too, can base itself not only on the abstract power of reason but also on quite real social forces. The victory of reason, said Brecht, is possible only as the victory of the rational — as the victory of the advanced classes and parties which can smash reaction.
This revolutionary force is the working masses, including the intelligentsia — masses which have acquired political (class) self-awareness. But is the intelligentsia a real force? Igor Kon, in ‘Reflections on the American Intelligentsia’, came to this conclusion, from the sociological standpoint. Kon’s article, which belongs in the context of the general theories of the Frankfurt School (he refers directly, for example, to ‘the remarkable book by Robert Wolff, Barrington Moore and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance’52), is undoubtedly related to the most interesting researches of the New Left movement. According to the German political scientist Mehnert, ‘Kon’s work is also of interest to the Western reader.’53 Such profound penetration into the heart of the problem was possible because, to a certain extent, Soviet oppositionists at the end of the 1960s were able to identify completely with the movement of the new intellectuals in the West.
Kon examines the making of a mass intelligentsia, its transformation into a ‘new working class’, and so into a mighty economic and political force:
The intelligentsia has ceased to be a superior elite standing somewhere on the periphery of society and, as a result, relatively autonomous in relation to it and engaged in seeking to look at society ‘from without’, so to speak. It has become a very important component of society, inside the basic social classes and along with them.54
Following Gnedin and, like him, drawing upon the young Marx, Kon criticizes the bureaucratic hierarchy and shows how it stands in opposition to the intelligentsia and to intellect in general. The bureaucracy sees the work of the intelligentsia as merely a means to the attainment of its own aims. Consequently it tries to subordinate to itself other people’s minds, other people’s knowledge, imposing extraneous tasks upon them. The intelligentsia’s reply to the bureaucrats’ policy takes the form of outbreaks of student rioting and the growth of the New Left (France and Poland both provide examples). Protest against alienation leads to revolutionary action.
Of course, the revolt of the New Left in the West took place in quite different conditions from those in the USSR. The Western intellectuals rebelled against ‘repressive tolerance’, whereas the Russians suffered from a much more repressive intolerance. ‘Paradoxically, these differing conditions tend to have a similar effect on the political attitudes of the intellectuals of the two countries,’ write Brzezinski and Huntington, comparing the intelligentsias of the USSR and the USA. ‘In both cases they stimulate the sense of political frustration or even alienation.’55 However, the American scholars also mentioned what seemed to them another paradox. The American intellectual protests against the alienation, the counterposing of people to one another in bourgeois industrial society, whereas the Soviet intellectual is revolted by official collectivism: ‘The alienated American attempts to escape into just exactly what the alienated Soviet citizen attempts to escape from.’56 But this contradiction is only apparent. Soviet official collectivism does not really unite people: on the contrary, it alienates them to an even greater degree than ‘the American way of life’ or capitalist competition. It unites people with false, formal, obligatory bonds which are substituted for the natural ones and thereby prevents genuine informal human unity. It is no accident that horizontal bonds within all Soviet organizations (trade union, ‘Party’, and so on), between individual members or particular groups, are not only not provided for but are actually condemned. Under totalitarian collectivism every member of society is subject to ‘the leadership’ and counterposed to the other members. And nowhere is a person so lonely and isolated as in a collective where only despite official policy can informal bonds be established between individuals, as against those which are imposed upon them.57 It was natural, therefore, that the Soviet intelligentsia’s protest against alienation was in many ways similar to the protest of the Western New Left — not in form, but in content.
The experience of the New Left movement at the end of the sixties attracted much attention from Kon and Gnedin and other theoreticians of the Novy Mir circle (for example, L. Kopelev and R. Orlova). But in the West and in Poland in spring 1968 there was a political crisis. What was to be done, though, in a period of reaction, when the power of the ruling group was being consolidated and stabilized? What was to be done in a period of social stagnation? And that was what had arrived in the USSR, after the period of reform.
Political crisis activates the masses, but in a period of social stagnation, when there is no hope of political changes, the masses withdraw from politics:
The atmosphere of intellectual terror and the absence of a new ideology led to the impoverishment of political life and the increase of civic apathy. Many, especially young people, ceased to interest themselves in politics and went off into the world of private interests and experiences.58
However, this de-ideologizing of the masses also meant a crisis of the official ideology. A period of apathy and stagnation is historically necessary: it precedes a fresh, authentic revolutionary upsurge:
The propaganda machine continues and even intensifies its activity, people go on, from inertia, using the familiar ideological clichés… without appreciating (for the time being) their intellectual bankruptcy, but these clichés have already lost their emotional appeal — they leave people indifferent, or even irritate them.
Disappointment with the ruling ideology, the inflation of ideological values, is chiefly felt in a negative way, as a sense of devastation, lack of ideals, absence of prospects, ideological disorder. People who cannot think historically see nothing positive in this process of disintegration and look with yearning to the past. But this disintegration is a necessary precondition for the birth of new symbols of faith and action. Disappointment [the Russian word means, literally, ‘taking away the cup’] is always agonizing, but it alone enables one to see the world as it really is, without any mythological bandages over our eyes.59
This process can last a long time, but this duration has its advantages. Gnedin wrote about that in his article with the symbolic title ‘Lost Illusions and Discovered Hopes’.60 The longer the calm and submissiveness of the working masses continues, the mightier and more deafening will be the eventual explosion. Where the philistine sees inactivity on the part of the people and omnipotence on that of the regime, in fact the revolutionary forces are accumulating. The situation is comparable to the compression of steam in a closed cylinder. Where there are no safety valves it is not apparent that pressure is increasing inside the cylinder. Outwardly all is calm, but the tension grows until the steam bursts the cylinder. A revolutionary crisis arrives. As they sense this, the rulers may intensify repression. In the new conditions, however, that has the opposite result to the one they expect: ‘In relatively calm periods this can be advantageous to a reactionary government, but, at a time of political crisis, to intensify repression merely strengthens the forces of resistance.’61 Thus a crisis of ideas and a period of stagnation should not be regarded as a catastrophe. On the contrary, society’s spiritual crisis foreshadows renewal. The intelligentsia had to stand firm spiritually and be ready for the coming battles.