In a period of stagnation reason’s chief weapon is irony. Kon calls for a distinction to be made between the ‘wilful irony’ of the middle strata ‘who want, while doing nothing, to enjoy all the world’s blessings and to feel that they are superior to everything around them — what Heinrich Boll aptly called “a drug for the privileged”’ — and the tragic irony of the real intelligentsia. The nearer the crisis approaches, the quicker this demarcation becomes manifest. The irony of the left-wing intellectuals is constructive; it is ideological, akin to Hegel’s negation, for it underlies every spiritual creation. The wilful irony of the middle strata expresses soullessness and ideological futility. The crisis of ideas is not a justification for lack of ideals. On the contrary, it obliges us to seek new positive values. Kon wrote:
Today, the intelligentsia has become an organic component of society which penetrates into all parts of the social mechanism. And this means that its responsibility has immensely increased. Not seclusion in an ivory tower but active struggle for the realization of advanced ideas is the path to be taken by the best representative of today’s intelligentsia. Freedom as merging with the progressive forces of society does not mean renouncing critical contemplation and self-analysis. The power of a philosopher, as such, does not consist in his knowing how to shoot. But when eighty-year-old Bertrand Russell joined in a sit-down demonstration, that was not only a political act but proof of the seriousness and sincerity of his beliefs. If intellectuals do not merely trade in ideas but live lives inspired by them, they cannot turn away from the struggle to realize these ideas.62
Kon’s appeal was more than timely. The practical conditions of the creative work of the Soviet intelligentsia had become markedly more complex. In 1970 Tvardovsky was removed from the editorship of Novy Mir. Under Kosolapov the journal soon began to lose its individual character, even though there was at first some attempt to retain it. After 1971 it could be said that Novy Mir had become a journal ‘like the rest’. It kept a large number of its writers — Abramov, Aitmatov, Tendryakov, Trifonov and others belonged, as before, to ‘the Novy Mir circle’ — but on the whole it was no longer the tribune of the liberal intelligentsia. Moscow wits said that the title page ought to bear the words: ‘Let us renounce Novy Mir [that is, the new world]!’
The era of Brezhnev’s ‘historic compromise’ began — a sociopolitical lull. A. Lim called the rulers’ formula for this period ‘the new social contract’.63 The rulers guarantee the masses a certain degree of social stability while the masses, in return, are obliged to give up the struggle for their rights. The rulers guarantee that there will be no return to Stalinism, but do not carry out any further liberalization. The slogan of the era is ‘neither reaction nor reform’. Its ideal is stability, understood as meaning immobility. Its policy is conservatism in the most precise sense of that word. Class and political struggles are temporarily frozen. True, in the economy mighty hidden processes of disintegration and breakdown are under way which cannot be halted without introducing reforms, and it becomes ever more difficult to keep to the terms of the new social contract. In the long run the prospective results of this course cannot fail to be catastrophic for the statocracy itself which has imposed this ‘contract’ on society. But at first it can feel satisfied with the situation.
On the whole the rulers maintained a passive role in the new conditions. Having, in the course of the ‘preventive counterrevolution’,64 succeeded in crushing open opposition — in the legal press, at any rate — the statocracy went over to the defensive. ‘The requirements of ideology’, writes Rakovski, ‘were now entirely negative: not to challenge the supremacy of the official ideology, or rather to celebrate ritually (on rare occasions only) a willingness to submit to that ideology.’65 A Soviet culturologist called this ‘ritual selfdefilement’. But critical thinking — and consequently its bearer, the intellectual who disturbs calm and alarms the public conscience — had no place in Brezhnev’s ‘new order’. Lim writes:
From the village teacher to the philosopher, the writer, the artist, all have been broken and torn to pieces, until nothing but the name remains. The instinct of self-preservation compels the intellectual to defend himself.
Conscience does not let him cease to be himself, and so society’s observance of the contract presumes continual assaults on the intellectual, either literal or figurative, and he is forced to resist, to speak out, to reject, to refuse consent.66
The seventies brought into being new forms of cultural-political movement. Whereas in the sixties one could speak of a united anti-bureaucratic cultural front, a single stream in which the literary movement clearly played the leading role, in the seventies that unity no longer existed. This was not only because the common ideology of the ‘children of ’56’ had already passed away. Culture itself had become more diverse, had split up into many different streams, running in different directions, clashing with each other. In the last analysis it was only in the seventies that one would say that a real cultural pluralism had come to birth. The crisis of the cultural movement of the sixties, its break-up, was in itself, perhaps, a step back in the political sense, but it also opened up new historical prospects before the Soviet intelligentsia.
The pressure from above — what Kon calls the intellectual terror — caused a blossoming of illegal literature. Besides samizdat, many Russian publications appeared abroad. Those who remained loyal to the hopes of 1956 and unwilling to adapt themselves to the new period were pushed aside, but at the same time they broke with the system. This was a tremendous step forward on the spiritual plane. Henceforth there began to take shape, alongside the opposition within the system which had predominated in the sixties, a new opposition to the system. The dissident movement emerged.
‘Since the late sixties’, write Bence and Kis (they also write under the pseudonym Rakovski),
official culture has ceased to retain its monopoly in Eastern Europe. In some of these countries the non-official forms of communication have become customary, and in others, efforts have been made towards the same end. Works banned by the censor and works that had never been submitted to the state-controlled publishers began to circulate. This literature in some countries creates a whole system of non-official communication, a parallel culture; bulky volumes and periodicals appear, disputes flare up, different ideological tendencies become crystallized. Political ideologies, practical programmes and tactical conceptions are formulated and sometimes even political movements — though embryonic — are born.67
All this influences legal culture as well, for it cannot be separated from the illegal variety, if only because the same readers have access to both legal and illegal literature, and sometimes the same authors write for samizdat and for the official publications. It has been said that ‘there is no going back’ from samizdat to legal literature, but some writers (Iskander, Lakshin, Yevtushenko and others) have managed to demonstrate the unsoundness of this formulation. The degree of oppositionism among samizdat writers is no less variegated than the degree of loyalty among writers for the censored publications. In any case, there is no gulf between legal and illegal culture. The principal service rendered by samizdat is that it ‘breaks the monopoly of the ruling ideology’s patterns of thought, and introduces new concepts and alternative ideas into the social consciousness. Even the most ancient and reactionary myths’, continues Rakovski, ‘have a clearly positive role from this point of view, since they in fact multiply the number of patterns of thought which can be confronted with each other.’68 Within the framework of samizdat the fundamental tendencies that exist in our thinking can formulate their principles more precisely, and this is very important.