The Erosion of Soviet Ideology

...The film is about Soviet youth, and is being widely discussed as a work that breaks new ground in the Soviet cinema...

...What brazenness enables them to refrain from answering to the people for having devastated the country...

...What is their fate now that another "merciless champion of progress" has spoken...

...The following day, Khrushchev returned to the question: "Did the leading Party cadres know about the arrests...

...No, this they did not know...

...It may have once been thought that under Communism individuals would be free to follow their own ways...

...According to the authors of the film, the youth can very well decide how to live without the advice or assistance of older people...

...Such an admission, however, is compromising to the present leadership...

...Once opened, the Pandora's box of Stalinism cannot be so easily closed...

...And jazz, abstract art and Beat poetry—all of which have attracted the young Soviet poets—are negative expressions from the Soviet point of view precisely because they involve a nihilistic rejection of the collective and represent a way of asserting individual identity...

...But there is a definite purpose, a very definite meaning behind all this...

...Only in this way can the dictatorship "legitimately" remain...

...Last week, too, Yevtushenko was sharply attacked by the Soviet youth organ Komsomalskaya Pravcla for his uncensored autobiographical articles in the French weekly L'Express, and his scheduled visit to the U.S...

...Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that in the future control of the writers will necessarily be weaker...

...One sees this occurring in Soviet physics, biology, physiology, and even economics...

...And if he shows pride and starts resisting, into irons with him...

...but he will have the secret satisfaction of knowing that sometime, somewhere they will doubtless appear after his death...

...And all this is camouflaged by empty words about the happiness of the people...

...The paintings of B. Zhutovsky ("who eats the bread of the people, and how does he repay the people...

...The father, in turn, asks: How old are you...

...A former managing editor of The New Leader and labor editor of Fortune magazine, he is now Professor of Sociology at Columbia University...

...Yes, they knew...

...The name has quickly passed into the Russian language as a term for the Philistine careerist...

...At the present time, this would itself provoke an open rebellion among Soviet intellectuals...

...Yet it is precisely the primacy of the Party, the demand for submission to Party directives, which the younger generation and large sections of the intelligentsia have called into question...

...Why single out for rebuke, by name, Ehrenburg, Konstantin Paustovsky, Viktor Nekrasov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky and Marien Khutsiev...

...They must be...

...Similarly, the sculptor Mikhail Naritza was arrested and transferred to a prison lunatic asylum after he gave two German tourists the manuscript of an autobiographical novel that was subsequently published by Russian emigres in Germany...

...If all writers were to start writing only on this type of subject, what sort of literature would that be...

...About this scene, Khrushchev scornfully comments: "Can anyone imagine a father refusing to answer his son, refusing to help him find the right road in life...

...THINKING ALOUD The Erosion of Soviet Ideology By Daniel Bell AT the beginning of the first volume of his long memoir, People and Life 1891-1921 (Knopf, 1962), Ilya Ehrenburg recalls Chekhov's story, "The Duel," which in its retelling becomes the epigraph to his own work...

...And who knows...

...The water has been polluted...

...Denouncing the power of this bureaucratic class, Paustovsky continued: "Dudintsev has described the particular case of an inventor who exposed the monstrous picture of the 'activity' of the Drozdovs...

...The speech was misleadingly reported in Lirertilurnya Gazeta...

...In the same ignoble manner, with the same complete disdain for the Russian tongue [they] employ a dead language, a language of red tape...

...The function of an ideology, after all, is not merely to provide a social map of a society...

...They dare to dispossess our country of its human and material wealth for their own personal interests—and to dispossess it with no small amount of brazenness...

...From his own point of view, his "place in history" depends upon his ability to transform the economy and restore the faith shattered by Stalinism without overt coercive force...

...Whatever these pressures may be, the underlying elements remain for any Soviet leadership to contend with...

...The last choice, with all its attendant risks, is one to which a number of Soviet writers have already resorted...

...The present conflict of generations in the USSR —the reality of which is attested to by the Premier's strictures—has many causes, but the central moral issue is the guilt of the Khrushchev leadership for the crimes of the Stalin era...

...The Drozdovs don't give a damn...

...The desire, not to "imitate" the West, but to become part of the general cultural community is as strong among Soviet artists and writers as it is among the country's scientists...

...We cannot imagine what an infinite number of talents, minds and remarkable men have disappeared...

...We learned about Stalin's abuse of power, and all the facts about the lawlessness of which he was guilty only after his death, when Beria, that sworn enemy of the Party and the people, that spy and vile provocateur, was exposed...

...Alexander Tvardovsky, the liberal editor of Novy Mir, which printed Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, has reportedly been relieved of his post...

...Khrushchev is reported to have said a number of times that if the Hungarian Communist Government had exercised greater control over its intellectuals, the 1956 Revolution might have been averted...

...In three established cases the regime, fearing the consequences, has already acted to put the authors in lunatic asylums...

...Otherwise anarchic self-will will disrupt and disorganize the life of society...

...Khrushchev also does not want to lose the support of the intellectuals...

...Yet admissions of this kind not only call to mind the question "How could you not know...

...Strictly speaking, there is no non-partisanship in society...

...As Khrushchev observes in his speech: "I understand that the magazines and publishing houses are being flooded with manuscripts about peoples' life in exile, in prisons, in camps...

...In the field of science a "private accommodation" has been effected...

...And in a remarkable speech at the Moscow Writers Union in October 1956*, the writer Paustovsky impassionately denounced these "acquistive carnivores" who "claim the right to speak in the name of the people—of a people whom they really despise and hate, though they continue to speak in its name...

...Without an organizing, directing principle, not only Socialist society but any society, any social system, even the smallest community of people, cannot exist...

...Within recent years, this theme has been persistently sounded by the young Soviet poets—especially Yevtushenko, Voznesensky and, the best of them all, Robert Rozhdestvensky—who have called for speaking out plainly against the lack of courage shown by their elders in the "difficult years...

...He intended to write to Khrushchev after their publication and ask for the right to publish openly in the Soviet Union, or for permission to leave Russia with his family—a path that was open to dissident intellectuals in the 1920s...

...A sense of proportion is needed here...

...It is against this that Khrushchev declares in his speech: "If everyone is going to thrust his own subjective views upon society as a rule for all and insist that they shall be followed contrary to the generally accepted norms of Socialist society, that will inevitably lead to disorganization of people's normal life and the functioning of society...

...Nikolai Arzak and Ivan Valeriy—are antic, phantasmagoric and grotesque in style, constituting a desperate protest against Socialist Realism...

...These three elements, together with the desire to be left alone to do one's work, add up to a wholesale demand on the part of liberal intellectuals that all remaining vestiges of Stalinism—including the right of the Party to impose a uniform artistic style—be eliminated...

...Thus Khrushchev's speech can be taken, in the language of Bolshevism, as the definitive formulation of Party policy in this "historic stage" of the building of Communism...

...I don't insist on capital punishment...

...Layevsky is denounced by von Koren, whom Chekhov calls "the merciless champion of progress and natural selection," in the following terms: "In the interests of mankind and in their own interests, such people should be subject to extermination...

...His father played a role in the 1905 revolution and his father-in-law was the Soviet Air Force General Alksnis, who was shot by Stalin...

...And if the proposition that a theory is to be tested by experiment rather than promulgated by dogma once becomes accepted in a single field, the demand for autonomy of thought in other fields begins to develop as well...

...In this area, then, Chekhov's reflection still applies, although the emphasis is different: It is one step backward and two steps forward—to freedom...

...Yet what of the entire generation of young Soviet poets, painters, writers, dramatists and film makers who had begun to show a resurgence of creative power...

...The sculptures of Ernst Neizvestny (who, ironically, has been hailed by John Berger, the English New Left art critic and a rancorous opponent of abstract art, as the leader of a new humanism) he called "revolting concoctions" and "deformities...

...But for von Koren, human beings are puppies, nonentities, too trivial to form the goal of his life...

...If it has been proved that this is harmful, then invent something else...

...4) published a hitherto unknown letter of Krupskaya's [Lenin's widow], in which she declares that Lenin's famous 1905 essay on Party Organization and Party Literature was not concerned with literature as fine art—a view 1 have long held...

...At a number of different points in his speech, Khrushchev also turns uneasily to the conflict between generations...

...We believed and we wrote...

...but a stenographic report smuggled out of Moscow was published in L'Express on March 29, Î957...

...Perhaps their boat will sail to the real truth.' " And musing further about the story, Ehrenburg concludes: "I have met some von Körens in my lifetime . . . and, like Layevsky, I have grieved for my own dim star, which I had cast out of the sky . . . and if within a lifetime a man changes his skin an infinite number of times—almost as often as his suits —still he does not change his heart: he has but one...

...This is a force which weighs heavily upon the country...

...the First Central Committee Secretaries of the Communist parties of the Union Republics and a number of regional and city Party committees, also Central Committee Secretaries of Communist parties of the Union Republics in charge of ideological work, the editors of central newspapers and magazines, representatives of the radio and television system...

...In painting, examples of "photographic realism" were selected for approval...

...this month was cancelled...

...He who advertises his non-partisanship does so in order to conceal his disagreement with the Party's views and ideas, in order to recruit supporters...

...Why attack abstract art...

...In discussing this question in the most recent installment of his memoir published in the literary monthly Novy Mir, Ehrcnburg remarked that under Stalin it had been necessary to "grit one's teeth" to keep quiet, implying that he had known the criminal nature of many of Stalin's acts all along...

...be] worthy continuers of the cause of your fathers...

...Finally, Khrushchev has staked his "place in history" as the man who ended Stalinism, and this itself puts a limit on his actions...

...Mindful of the way the cultural pressures in Poland and Hungary quickly translated themselves into political demands, Khrushchev has called a halt to cultural experiments...

...In effect, the young Soviet generation is saying to the generation before it: "You have told us of the gross violations of Socialist legality under Stalinism...

...so that lip service-to dialectical materialism is no longer required...

...Driven by increasingly open challenges from the intelligentsia on the implications of the Stalinist period, in his declaration of ideology he has been forced to the most extreme statement of the Party's role in shaping culture since the infamous Andrei Zhdanov's pronunciamentos about Socialist Realism...

...Stalin simply did not care and was contemptuous of them...

...The second is the culpability of the present Soviet leadership for the Stalin purges...

...The third is the "erosion of ideology" among the Soviet intelligentsia...

...In reading Khrushchev's speech, one is struck first by his brutal language and emotional vehemence in confronting specific works of modern art...

...With the cult of Stalin destroyed and Socialist legality promised to the masses, material incentives (which are few) or ideology remain the sole means of mobilizing people...

...Akhmatova writes about unhappiness, Zhdanov exclaimed...

...So it is in life...

...To put the question in the style of Bolshevik didacticism, what does all this mean...

...But this can only lead to a new sterility in the Soviet arts...

...What do you want to do—incite the youth against the older generation, set them at loggerheads, sow discord in the friendly Soviet family, which unites both young and old in the common effort to build Communism...

...In a similar fashion, Khrushchev berates the "minute descriptions of the gloom and despondency . . . aroused in certain individuals by the difficulties they had to contend with . . . such pictures of reality can be produced only by those who have no part in the people's constructive activity . . . Skepticism, lack of will, flabbiness, pessimism and a nihilistic attitude to reality, are wholly alien to Soviet people...

...These men dare to claim the right to represent the people—without the people's consent...

...Moreover, Khrushchev is quite sensitive, as Stalin was not, to public opinion outside the USSR...

...If you do not live up to that, your lot will be disgrace...

...Even the ideological arguments are becoming a rope of sand...

...The hero, Layevsky, is the "superfluous" man, given to musing about the vagaries of life and continually surrendering to despair...

...Certainly no "revolutionary" situation now exists in the Soviet Union...

...But Khrushchev has "reinterpreted" Marx in the most direct and vulgar fashion...

...a Vintage paperback edited by Hugh McLean and Walter N. Vickery...

...But haven't you gone too far...

...Insofar as Ehrenburg was the chief whipping boy of Nikita Khrushchev's recent, 15,000-word speech on ideology and the arts, his own premonition was remarkably prophetic* Of course, at the age of 72 Ehrenburg has little to fear personally...

...In effect, Khrushchev's recent speech means that the Drozdovs have come back to power in the literary and artistic milieus...

...The reason for all this is that Khrushchev is fighting to retain the last vestiges of ideology in order to control Soviet society without resort to terror...

...When he discovered that the "thaw" was not sufficiently extensive to allow publication of his stories—which criticize Soviet manners—he sent them abroad...

...If these Drozdovs had not existed, our country would still have such great men as [Vsevolod] Meyerhold, [Isaac] Babel, Arytom Vesyoly and many others...

...they are refractions of the present...

...And "music that has no melody," said Khrushchev, "inspires nothing but irritation...

...Were he to apear with his didactic words, the picture would be ruined...

...Tarsis is a senior member of the Soviet Writers Union...

...it must also offer a set of justifications for the existing boundaries and point to the direction of future change...

...Replying to the poet Rozhdestvensky, for example, the Premier states: "In Comrade Rozhdestvensky's speech one could detect the contention that only the group of young writers and poets express the sentiments of all our youth, that they are the mentors of our youth...

...Ordinary mortals who work for the common good, they have their neighbor in mind—you, me, in short the human being...

...In the Soviet Union, ideology must further provide an élan or a passion for action (as in the early years of the Revolution), for ideology in this case demands voluntary compliance with the orders of the Party...

...We are for music that inspires us to deeds of heroism on the battlefield and in labor...

...But they did not know that innocent people were being arrested...

...To sum up: Khrushchev's pressure for cultural orthodoxy will not go so far as Stalin's...

...The Soviet Premier's problem, as his own speech so amply demonstrates, is that it is precisely "a sense of proportion" that the regime cannot maintain...

...Force cannot work...

...And why at this time...

...The forestry protection belts have been laid waste...

...Tarsis had published a number of academic works on Western literature, but for 20 years his novels, short stories and poetry had to be written in secret...

...Don't we in our own milieu know some Drozdovs...

...In his 1905 essay on "Party Literature and Party Organization," Lenin insisted that anybody who wrote for the Party journals should express the general line of the Party...

...Not surprisingly, Khrushchev goes on to condemn these moods as "survivals of the past within the country...

...It was reprinted in The Year of Protesi—1956...

...It is clear that greater care will be exercised in the selection of Soviet writers for travel abroad, and that abstract sculptures and paintings will not be shown publicly in Soviet exhibits...

...For one thing, the present-day Soviet intelligentsia has a built-in defense: If the pressures become too extreme, the question can be publicly raised whether such measures do not smack of Stalinism, and this would put Khrushchev himself on the defensive...

...After quoting flattering words Ehrenburg had written about Stalin shortly after his death, Ilyichev sarcastically remarked: "At that time we all wrote and spoke in this way, without hypocrisy...

...But here, it may well be Khrushchev who is hoist on his own quotations...

...If it's impossible to exterminate Layevsky, then isolate him, obliterate his personality, conscript him for public works...

...but the more damaging "How could the system allow these monstrous frame-ups to happen...

...He works . . . not for the sake of love of his neighbor but in the name of such abstractions as the human race, future generations, an ideal breed of men...

...The second notable aspect of the speech is the insistently reiterated declaration of ideological war in the realm of art...

...Ironically, in Tarsis' story "The Bluebottle" the hero is told by a security chief that he is "very ill and in need of treatment," while his mistress tells him that he is in danger of being certified to a lunatic asylum "in accordance with a well-established Russian custom...

...In a key episode, the chief character meets the shade of his father, killed in the War, and asks him how he should live...

...Sufferings, mistakes and the tedium of life throw [men] back, but the desire for truth and a stubborn will drive them forwards...

...The heavy hand of Soviet bureaucracy has become a living disproof of the "heroic ideals" demanded by the Party...

...Of von Koren, Layevsky thinks: "Even his ideals are despotic...

...But you, it turns out, did not believe but still wrote...

...In 1934, at the first Congress of Soviet writers, Zhdanov resurrected this article as the authority for making partanosi the foundation of Socialist Realism...

...At worst, the final chapters of his memoir will not be published during his lifetime...

...They reflect the intense desire of the people, and the young people especially, for "private lives" in which they will no longer be subject to the constant demands of the Party to live up to the self-sacrificing, heroic ideal of the "new Soviet man...

...I will not attempt here the "Kremlinological" speculations which insist that the ideological tightening-up is a product of Stalinist pressure within the Party imposed on a reluctant Khrushchev...

...On the first day of the Kremlin meeting, Leonid Ilyichev, the Party's ideological spokesman, was quick to attack what he termed Ehrenburg's "theory of silence...

...Only in this way can it rationalize the abandonment of old doctrines that were thought to be hallowed (e.g., equality of wages) and adopt new doctrines that have little basis in previous Party dogmas...

...There is evidence, however, that Ehrenburg, not Khrushchev, was correct: In the preface to the English edition of his book, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, written in Budapest in May 1962, the Hungarian literary philosopher George Lukacs, defending his own actions, wrote: "Two years ago the Soviet magazine Drushba Narodov (1960, No...

...In concluding different sections, Khrushchev comes to such formulations as: • "Who is not with the workers and peasants is inevitably against them...

...Our people cannot accept this rubbish in their ideological arsenal...

...At the end of the story," Ehrenburg writes, "Layevsky, and Chekhov with him, think as they watch a stormy sea: 'The boat is hurled back, it makes two steps forward and one back...

...In sculpture he cited the "majestic" figures created by E. V. Vucetich in the Soviet war memorial in East Berlin, an extraordinary tableau of two large slabs of red marble, simulated as two dipped red flags, in front of a "heroic" Red Army soldier holding a child in one hand and a bayonet in the other...

...It is notable, too, that the stories and novels of Soviet writers which have been published abroad under pseudonyms—those of Abram Tertz...

...And, in passing, he noted that at the instigation of Lavrenti Beria and Lazar Kaganovitch "Stalin intended to wipe out a substantial part of the literary and art intelligentsia in postwar Soviet Ukraine . . . suspecting that nationalist tendencies were maturing...

...It is far more likely that the regime will try to hold the artists to the official line by flattery and coercion...

...They want to fulfill the plan, so down go whole forests...

...You know very well that it was Lenin who put forward the principle of partisanship and ideological value in literature and art...

...he described as "horrible rot and dirty daubs...

...Attending the March 7-8 Kremlin conference at which the speech was delivered, according to the Soviet New Times of March 20, were writers, composers, artists, sculptors, cinema and theater workers from Moscow, Leningrad and all the Union Republics...

...The same theme appears earlier in the speech when Khrushchev discusses at great length Khutsiev's unreleased film, Zastava Ilyicha—whose title refers to a district named in honor of Lenin, but means, too, the "frontiers of Lenin...

...They believed Stalin and could not imagine that honest men devoted to our cause could he subjected to repression...

...Now we are told in the writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others what we have long heard whispered—about the existence of concentration camps where millions of persons were arbitrarily imprisoned and cruelly treated...

...Especially now that the stick of terror is not being wielded, such tastes and attitudes undermine the Party's effort to mobilize the population to continual sacrifices for the "future...

...As the Italian Communist Senator Umberto Terracini wrote in the party newspaper, L'Unita, on November 12, 1961: "It was absurd to believe that the monstrous process of degeneration suddenly unveiled at the 20th Congress could have had one sole author and actor...

...Only by emphasizing this can the Party weather the successive changes of political line or the tactical defeats it occasionally suffers...

...Tarsis was locked up last August, three months before his book was published in England...

...It is hard for a normal person to understand what is meant by the word 'dodecaphony,' in all probability it stands for the same thing as cacophony...

...The importance of this statement is considerable, for this essay was the bible of sectarianism in the arts during the ideological dictatorship of Stalin and Zhdanov...

...The note was first sounded in the mid-1950s by Ehrenburg in The Thaw, a novel which indicated the common desire of the "grandfathers" and the "grandsons" to restore the purity of revolutionary ideals, and which repudiated the middle generation of "fathers"—men raised to power by Stalin in order to carry out his purges...

...It is curious, and interesting, that the publication of Krupskaya's letter should have received so little attention...

...But where were you while this was going on...

...Nor is this emphasis on the collective to disappear under Communism...

...To which the father responds, "And I am only 21," and disappears...

...But they cannot be held down indefinitely...

...There are, I think, three underlying problems which explain this singular statement of Khrushchev's.* One is the "conflict of generations" in Soviet society...

...Art enters into the sphere of ideology...

...Nor is there any chance of a reversion to Stalinist terror...

...One of the charges against Valentin Katayev, Nekrasov and other intellectuals who have traveled outside the USSR is that they were too "outspoken" and thus gave "ammunition to the enemy...

...Khrushchev's attack on the "cult of personality" had precisely to do with the fact that Stalin had pre-empted the role of the Party, and that the return to "Leninist norms" meant re-emphasizing the role of the Party—though it is never stated whether this refers to the "norms" before or after the 10th Party Congress of 1921, which abolished internal Party democracy...

...Abstract artists he dismissed as "perverted people who, as the phrase goes, have a screw loose, and [produce] shameful hackwork insulting to the feelings of human beings...

...In his speech, Khrushchev taxes Ehrenburg with saying that Lenin allowed for the possibility of the coexistence of various ideological trends in Soviet art, and retorts: "That is not right, Comrade Ehrenburg...

...The conflict of "fathers and sons," which haunted the generation of the 1840s and 1860s (as evidenced in the rival novels of Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai Chernyshevsky), has now begun to haunt the present generation of Soviet leaders as well...

...Hence the inevitable, even if unformulated, question whether other denunciations might not be forthcoming in the future, even going so far as to sweep away Comrade Khrushchev himself...

...Our Soviet youth has been reared by the Party, it follows the Party's lead, seeing in it its teacher and leader...

...The point is, however, that they are not survivals of the past...

...The question is, how Jong can these new controls work...

...Those who think that Socialist Realism and formalistic, abstract trends can live peacefully side by side in Soviet art inevitably sink to a position alien to us, the position of peaceful coexistence in the field of ideology...

...Today, the central feature of Soviet ideology is not any formal doctrine, but the idea of partlinost— the belief that the Party, in its collective wisdom, is always correct, and that Party pronouncements take priority in every field of thought and endeavor and should direct the work of individuals in all fields...

...In the same speech, though, Khrushchev also observed that "in the last years of his life Stalin was a very sick man—he suffered from a persecution complex and was a prey to suspicion...

...Where is there unhappiness when people are engaged in a great collective effort...

...Earlier, the philosopher-poet Alexander Yessenin-Volpin, son of the great Soviet poet Sergei Yessenin, was locked up for sending manuscripts abroad (several of which were published two years ago in Encounter...

...The latest victim, as reported by Edward Crankshaw in the London Observer, was the 60-year old Valeriy Tarsis, whose stories were published in England last year by the Harvil Press under the naked pseudonym of Ivan Valeriy...

...We take class positions in art and emphatically oppose the peaceful coexistence of Socialist and bourgeois ideology...

...They were destroyed to preserve the stinking well-being of these Drozdovs...

...Such a complete purge would have occurred, he intimated, "if the Ukranian Bolsheviks had fallen in with that," which suggests of course that he was one of the "Ukranian Bolsheviks...

...In his novel, Not By Bread Alone, Vladimir Dudinstev depicted a bureaucratic figure whom he called Drozdov...

...Shortly after World War II, Zhdanov accused the poets Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak of demoralizing Soviet youth by writing in a subjective and pessimistic manner...

...Under Communism, too," he asserts, "the will of the individual must be subordinated to the will of the community as a whole...

...But the Drozdovs are many...

...That is not so...

...In his recent travel notes "On Either Side of the Ocean," for example, Viktor Nekrasov, discussing the film Zastava Ilyicha, wrote: "I am endlessly grateful to Khutsiev for not having dragged onto the screen by his greying moustache the allunderstanding old worker who always knows all the answers...

...Well, we flatly reject this cacophony in music...

...For the Soviet intelligentsia there are three paths open: compliance, silence (with consequent economic penalties), or smuggling out work for publication abroad...

...The "approved" examples given by Khrushchev indicate what the regime wants...

...The son replies that he is 23...

...And in praising an East German film, The Russian Miracle, a purported documentary of the Civil War, Khrushchev returns again to the theme: "We would like to advise our young people: Learn from the history of the Revolution, from the history of the struggle in which your fathers and mothers shared, and revere the memory of those who are no longer with us...

...Sons are being told that their fathers cannot teach them how to live, and that there is no point seeking their advice...

...Why did you not speak out...

...Daniel Bell, a regular contributor to this department, is author of Work and its Discontents and The End of Ideology...