Khrushchev and the Intellectuals
HINGLEY, RONALD
THE ORDER TO RETREAT Khrushchev and the Intellectuals By Ronald Hingley For some months foreign observers have been wondering what has become of official Soviet policy toward the arts. At...
...Though he spoke with approval of some recent episodes of deStalinization, notably of Solzhenitsyn's novel, Khrushchev was still concerned that the process might get out of hand...
...Alexander T. Tvardovsky...
...No, they did not...
...In Soviet terms, this amounts to a direct order not to print any more material like Solzhenitsyn's concentration camp novel, at least for the time being...
...On the one hand we have had amazing concessions to "liberalism," such as the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, of two remarkable short stories by the same author, and of lesser-known "revelations" such as F. Abramov's article, "Round and About," in the January number of the journal Neva...
...now they may have to...
...Soviet citizens, Khrushchev told us, are always asking whether anything could have been done at the time to check Stalin's misdeeds...
...What is much more depressing is Khrushchev's constant emphasis on the need for writers and artists to take a more positive role in building the new society, which, again stripped of code, means that the neutral literature which has enjoyed a modest boom during the last four years is now officially discouraged...
...Stripped of verbosity and coded allusions, what it added up to was this: Writers were to suspend overtly hostile political criticism, in return for which they were permitted to portray private situations and predicaments...
...This bodes ill for "cultural contacts" in the near future...
...That speech was a charter of relative tolerance in literary matters...
...Now, though, the Party has evidently come down on the side of the die-hards...
...Before dealing with the arts in detail, the Soviet Premier made a thoroughgoing reappraisal of Stalinism, by no means the first to have occurred in the complicated history of de-Stalinization...
...IT is too early yet to be sure, but it is possible, at least on a pessimistic interpretation, that the March 8 speech will turn out to be Khrushchev's most authoritative instruction to the writers since he addressed them at the Third Conference of Soviet Writers in early 1959...
...That this was in fact an order to retreat (from the point of view of the Soviet "liberal" and the disinterested foreign observer) is clear from every line of the speech...
...In its recent issues, Novy Mir has been serializing Ehrenburg's controversial memoirs...
...They could not be hostile, but they could be neutral, and many writers—in prose, verse and drama—availed themselves of the concession...
...This is evident from the whole tone of Khrushchev's remarks, which seems to echo the tone of die-hard speeches by Kochetov, Gribachev and others at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961...
...Curiously enough, Khrushchev fell into Stalin's own question-and-answer technique in dealing with this point: "Did the leading Party cadres know about the arrests at the time...
...But this abuse could be, and was, safely ignored since the Party as such did not come down on either side...
...The speech included a great deal of routine raillery against modernism, "abstractionism," formalism and the like in the arts...
...This last work does for the Soviet collective farm of the '60s what Solzhenitsyn did for the concentration camp of the early '50s...
...Then nobody took much notice...
...That method surely does not lend itself to application on a wide scale, however, and the question arises whether the Party may decide to experiment in other forms of repression...
...Among the other depressing features of the speech were the attacks on various writers—Viktor Nekrasov, Konstantin Paustovsky, Andrei Voznesensky and even, to some extent, Yevgeny Yevtushenko—for adopting the wrong postures during recent visits abroad...
...Antony's College, Oxford...
...On the other hand, all this has been accompanied by threatening rumblings from Premier Khrushchev, Party ideological spokesman Leonid F. Ilyichcv and other functionaries...
...Anyway, Khrushchev said, quite a lot was being done, on the side, to help the persecuted...
...every kind of "bourgeois vermin" abroad is liable to fasten on it like huge fat flies on a piece of carrion...
...After the Premier's speech, no one can be under any illusions on that point any more...
...Anyone, either liberal or diehard, who really overstepped the mark was liable to be called to order...
...The new editor is said to be Vladimir V. Yermilov, well known as a conservative writer and as one of Ilya Ehrenburg's strongest critics...
...Theodore Shabad, The New York Times...
...They believed in Stalin and could not conceive that repressive measures were being applied to honest persons devoted to our cause...
...These were enough to create alarm and despondency, but somehow fell short of an authoritative statement of policy...
...Yes, they knew...
...Words, after all, hurt nobody, and they are by now so debased a form of currency in the Soviet Union that one wonders whether disaffected writers and artists are likely to heed any mere harangue, even from the archharanguer...
...Writing has always been the senior art form in Russia, but in recent months it had seemed to many Russians, as to foreign observers, that perhaps for some reason literature was to be treated more gently (though the heat was certainly on in music and painting...
...But such material, he said, is very dangerous...
...These writers were under constant fire from the Soviet Union's literary die-hards...
...TVARDOVSKY FIRED Moscow March 22—According to informed sources here...
...New "liberal" tendencies have also appeared in music, films and the visual arts...
...Now at least everyone knows in which direction he ought to be advancing —or perhaps, to be more precise, one should say retreating...
...And the information that Khrushchev wept ("sincere tears") over Stalin's death is an easily decipherable instruction, in traditional Soviet code, to put the reins on "liberalism" in all walks of life...
...Tvardovsky's removal, which has been rumored in recent weeks, could not be officially confirmed...
...A change in management in Novy Mir would silence one of the few remaining outlets for non-orthodox writers...
...But did they know that completely innocent people were being arrested...
...In dealing with the arts in his speech, Khrushchev gave pride of place to literature...
...The newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta, long identified with liberal currents in Soviet literature, has been toeing the official line since the recent appointment of Aleksander B. Chakovsky as editor...
...Ronald Hingley, author of Under Soviet Skins, is a Research Fellow at St...
...At times one has even been inclined to ask whether there still is an official policy, in the old sense...
...He supported this with a new story about how the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov intervened (unsuccessfully) with Stalin personally on behalf of Don peasants persecuted by Soviet officialdom shortly after collectivization...
...Publication of Ehrenburg's book is expected to resume in subsequent issues, however, after the author has made changes demanded by the Party's new ideological strictures...
...In addition to Ehrenberg's memoirs, Novy Mir has recently published a muchcriticized account of a trip to the U.S...
...The youth magazine Yunost, edited by Boris N. Polevoi, has also been attacked for giving too free a forum to young writers who depart from strict adherence to Party principles...
...That this statement is the purest nonsense Khrushchev himself conceded at a later stage of his speech, when he said that Soviet editorial offices have recently been inundated with manuscripts—which they have not printed—about life in exile, in prisons and camps...
...Still, the Party seemed to be behaving as a dispassionate and easy-going referee who winked at minor infringements, blowing its whistle only occasionally to award a foul...
...Now that position has changed as the result of a long speech made by Khrushchev, on March 8, to representatives of literature and the arts...
...A sympathetic reference to Gribachev is perhaps the most sinister single feature of the whole speech...
...The Party, according to him, has now told the "full truth" about the "cult of personality...
...The answer, he said, is that none of the other Soviet leaders knew they were misdeeds...
...and the familiar abusive remark that some paintings recently exhibited might have been executed by a donkey's tail has been resurrected...
...They were accused of turning their eyes away from the present day, ignoring Soviet "achievements," grubbing around among petty personal issues and portraying man as a dismal, grey, weak, incompetent creature...
...Much of this is designed, as on similar occasions in the past, to keep Khrushchev's own record clean...
...This, however, seems to have little interest except as a pathological symptom...
...The forthcoming (March) issue of the magazine, informants report, will not contain the regular installment of the memoirs...
...And it is not merely in the sphere of the arts that the retreat has been sounded...
...For those wearing die-hard colors, such as Vsevolod Kochetov, Nikolai Gribachev and Aleksey Surkov, the Party seemed to show no particular sympathy—rather the reverse, if anything...
...by Viktor P. Nekrasov and a story of a rural wedding by Alexander Yashin that emphasized the poverty and backwardness of the Soviet countryside...
...the editor of the liberal literary monthly Novy Mir, has been dismissed from his post...
...So far Khrushchev's speech appears to be little more than a verbal bombardment, although it is true that some writers have been more seriously persecuted by being declared insane and forcibly detained in asylums (Alexander YesseninVolpin, Michael Naritza, Valeriy Tarsis...
...But it seemed a natural consequence of the accusations directed against the 52-year-old poet for showing too little political discrimination in choosing material for his journal...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 7
