Moscow Summer 1964-III
MIHAJLOV, MIHAJLO
MOSCOW SUMMER 1964 MIHAJLO MIHAJLOV, A TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK. PART III. At our first meeting Andrei Voznesensky astonished me. Apparently he had heard about me a year ago. In the spring of 1963, I...
...I consider that Spengler was right in a way, regarding the great future of Russia and its ideology...
...As Georgy Klomov wrote in his book The Kremlin in Berlin, translated in Yugoslavia about 10 years ago, several tens of thousands of Jews lost their lives because of that situation in 1941, when the German tanks arrived at Moscow and the evacuation of the city started...
...Astonishing the impersonality of this mind of the "man from the masses," as the great philosopher Ortega y Gasset put it...
...Let us recall Dostoevsky's words: "Build a palace...
...Poor girls, they probably had some fanatic "godfighter" atheist for an instructor or for a home-room teacher...
...Homo sovieticus lacks awareness of the historical past...
...He has been raised with the "paternal and maternal" fear that the child will be misled, the compulsion to read not what he wants but that which "educates," an instinctive horror of liberalism, a disbelief in man (and all mistrust of others reflects a lack of confidence in oneself), and the conviction that, without paternal care and leadership, he will fail...
...And it is a bloody battle...
...This is happening...
...Fortunately, as Berdyaev says: "Truth makes man free, but man must freely accept the Truth, he cannot be forced to accept it...
...The psychology of homo sovieticus is strongly plebeian...
...You doubt it...
...It is a psychology of men who identify themselves with the entire history of the Soviet Union, with all the ideas which set in motion (and sometimes hinder) life in the Soviet Union...
...For one thing membership in the Soviet Communist Party —an organization deprived of any democratic base, which unquestioningly carries out orders from the "top" (verkhushka)—requires a more or less constabulary character...
...In a healthy society, allowing every open and public criticism and opposition, a secret police would be an absurdity...
...When one sees all these stupidities, one feels like running away to a monastery for spite...
...The government constantly, and for the most part unsuccessfully, battles for increased work output...
...So Russian Jews found themselves between two fires...
...The young generation will have to wage a fierce struggle to clear away these spiritually strangling weeds...
...However, no one really feels this threat as yet...
...On the contrary, it seems as if many basic conflicting points between the individual and the social order are very simple—so simple, in fact, that everyone should be expected to understand them...
...The real paradox lies in the fact that although man longs to come out of his loneliness, any forceful joining together only prevents this...
...I recalled another of Ehrenburg's sarcastic remarks: "Andryusha is developing in the shadow of Pasternak...
...and when in a conversation with an historian you find out that he has never read Oswald Spengler...
...As Berdyaev says: "Power is possible only over an object, not over a subject.' Alienation is not solved until all kinds of authority are eliminated...
...To go on a tour of Europe is an unattainable dream in the Soviet Union...
...that young people are accepted into the Writers' 2. This statement was supposedly made by Voznesensky at a rather stormy Writers' Union meeting held in the Kremlin on March 1. 1963...
...it represents something respectable only for the "cult people," who pass by it many times a day...
...Education damages, it does not improve people...
...No matter what the topic of conversation, whether it be the imperfections of the Moscow city maps (only about a week after my arrival the maps appeared in the kiosks), or the space flights, or the construction of apartment buildings, homo sovieticus will always say: "We did not print enough city maps, we have flown into space, we have built...
...A prominent Muscovite in the field of education told me that, although he graduated from high school in 1952 with high honors and received a gold medal, he was not allowed to register at Moscow University because of his Jewish ancestry and had to study in the provinces...
...Yet it is a fact, no matter how paradoxical, that the common Russian people do not consider material poverty the greatest misfortune, even though their living standard is still very low (about 40 per cent lower than in Yugoslavia...
...The club in the House of Writers was closed that night for some unknown reason, so we went to the Actors' Club...
...He was butchering bastards...
...But only when I passed him the second time did I realize that his remark was directed at me...
...and the reevaluation of Russian literature and Russian philosophy...
...Once, I had occasion to see a very interesting event in Red Square...
...In the same vein, there are numerous jokes about everything and anything...
...Everybody knows about Berdyaev and Dmitri Merezhkovsky only because the polemics against them still go on...
...The best-known are Destiny of Man...
...It was Khrushchev himself, together with Ezhov, who purged the Ukraine...
...Little is known about the attitudes of the Stalin bureaucracy toward Jews during World War II...
...Solovyov, in his famous book Three Conversations About War, Progress and the End of the World's History, and also in his famous Story About Antichrist, cites in great detail the causes of unavoidable conflict in the future between the two great nations...
...I surprised him with the statement that in Zagreb, philosophy students study Nikolai Lossky...
...He gave me a collection of his poems on which he wrote : "A . Voznesensky, Moscow, 20th century...
...One can find no place to sit down to write a postcard or to rest, however, because in accordance with the town's custom, there are no restaurants or cafeterias of any kind—people here do not "waste time...
...one of its basic themes is a battle against an "evil" and for a "good" technology...
...Union, thanks to the intercession of an average poet but remarkable man—Stephan Shchipachyov...
...6 Also, I was reminded of my conversation with Viktor Shklovsky in which we spoke of Russian philosophy being almost unknown...
...On another occasion, I saw a similar incident in Maxim Gorky Park...
...Not only is this terribly stupid, it is full of poisonous hate...
...the effort was successful only with the poet Vladimir Khotov, an author of stereotyped Socialist- Realist jingles...
...Undoubtedly, the numerous measures being enacted in the Soviet Union to decentralize agriculture and other sectors of the economy will succeed in attaining that sooner or later...
...Almost all Russian philosophers are still on the index (the "black sheet")—from Konstantin Leont'ev, Nikolai Fyodorov, Vladimir Solvyov, ApolJon Grigorev (a "Bergsonian...
...In theory, only exceptionally talented children are to be admitted to these schools...
...The first characteristic of homo sovieticus is that he approves and accepts everything that is decided at the top with complete sincerity...
...The Soviet Union and the rest of the world find themselves at a significant crossroads...
...Thus, a student at Moscow University, speaking about lack of respect for the individual in the Soviet Union, angrily cited this as an example: In broadcasting light music a Soviet disc jockey announces the titles of selections only after a few bars have been played, so it is impossible to tape the whole composition without taping the speaker's voice too...
...and much else...
...Everyone should believe in his own spirit, and all will be united...
...In this respect Party ideologist Leonid Ilichyov surpassed Stalin...
...All possible articles from abroad 14.In 1963 the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences published (in a tiny edition of only 5,000) a book entitled Contemporary Psychology in the Capitalist Countries, co-authored by seven Soviet psychologists...
...Obviously this is simply a case of a broadcasting cliche, yet it is symptomatic that the young man in question considers it interference with the rights of an individual...
...but that it is a travesty on religion, and that it is really an attempt (fortunately unsuccessful) to destroy the last remains of free will in man is proved by the methods of the straggle against religion...
...The poem is the lyric diary of a physicist, a confession of his love (found in a hotel...
...The State Museum of Atheism is located in several of the buildings at the very center of the complex...
...Voznesensky likes Dostoevsky and does not like Gorky...
...Perhaps you will not want to leave it ever...
...With all due respect for Martynov's poem, however, it is difficult to accept the judgment which Mihajlov makes of it when one considers the poetry written by Akhmatova, Pasternak, Zabolotsky — to name but three — in the period he cites...
...The "negative Catholicism" of the "Holy Mother Moscow Marxist Church'' is self-evident...
...Man alone wants to come out of his loneliness, but any kind of force prevents him from doing this...
...Nazis, conquering the world, dying on the fronts of Europe and Africa, were also there not because of the economic gains they expected after the war, but because of the idea of the "One-Thousand-Year Reich...
...Is There a God...
...An individual feels that he is helplessly caught in the jumbled multitude of facts, and with a pathetic patience, he waits for the experts to discover what he should do, and where he should go...
...From 1956 on, changes occurred in many respects in the power structure, and that these changes are still going on is evident from the anti- Stalinist clean-up (chistka) which is taking place right now, according to what is being written everywhere in the European press...
...The 20th Party Congress brought much that was positive...
...A completely apolitical, typically middle-class intelligentsia, or, more correctly, semi-intelligentsia is also emerging—an army of technicians interested only in material gain...
...they are dissatisfied with the slow tempo of liberalization...
...Any action not planned from the top, no matter how useful it may be, is still criticized: There is no greater Soviet sin than an unplanned action...
...The heretofore connective tissue (if not for the entire Soviet nation, then at least for the fanatics of the hierarchy) has disintegrated...
...forced to waste much time translating languages of numerous national groups in the Soviet Union, and his translations are often better than the originals...
...A friend of Voznesensky's, a journalist in the German Democratic Republic , had translated my article for him over the phone...
...One student said to me with a sarcastic smile: "Oh, you too want to see Lenin's holy relics.' Another one showed me a thick book, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and said: "As you can see, I am preparing for an examination on Lenin's religion...
...This was in vain, however, because petty fanatics like Erkel can in no way understand what it means to serve an idea, except to relate it to the man who, they believe, embodies it...
...The problem of how best to collectivize the spirit (beginning with the Pioneer Youth organization) has been frequently discussed in recent times in the Soviet press, amid glorification of conformity with the mass of "the people.' (This is the greatest He—the masses are not people...
...One 20-year-old Moscow girl told me: "Stalm was right to butcher them...
...This means that only the destruction of all power will open the door to spiritual unity for mankind...
...More recent reports from the Soviet Union indicate that a quota system limiting the number of Jewish students in Soviet institutions of higher learning still exists...
...The indoctrination continues all the way to the kolkhozes and factories...
...most of its better features were preened out subsequently, making How the Steel Was Tempered a model of Socialist Realism...
...It is your happiness./' You broke it yourself,/ That deepest of silences,/' In which you were held captive...
...Once they were accused of "attempting l0.Of.NL,March 16, 1964,which reproduced anti-Semitic cartoons from Judaism Without Embellishment...
...Finally, it was announced that a committee of the Mossoviet would consider the matter...
...AND what about those people who cannot be characterized as homo sovieticus...
...Never have greater evils been performed than some of those done out of love...
...After the War, anti-religious pressure became more severe than it had been between the two wars...
...Believe me, Misha, I would give my life for this poem without hesitation...
...Stalinism represented a materialization of the psychological needs of millions of Erkels to whom the liberty to make decisions in every instant of their lives is threatening and impossible, and who, thanks to their plebeian spirit, cannot exist without a "master...
...But the existence of serious problems, about which there is silence, is revealed by the numerous anonymous letters received by the editors of Soviet newspapers (not too long ago, Komsomolskaya Pravda attacked the authors of these letters...
...The Soviet newspapers are full of anti-religious articles, pamphlets, and proclamations...
...lust as the abolition of individual economic power (over goods and production) did not abolish power, so the abolition of political power will not abolish the intellectual power of technocracy...
...We talked about Kafka, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Simone Weil, Teilhard de Chardin, and about many things which are terra incognita for the other Soviet writers . Voznesensky was the one who informed me that The Trial was already in print, and that the translation is excellent...
...I do not know what the decision was, but the very fact that the issue required grave discussions on the front pages speaks for itself...
...judging from this, all Moscow's "golden youth" knows him...
...Goethe once noted that there was no worse government than paternalism...
...These will facilitate control of such labor shifts...
...It is as if the world began only yesterday...
...Of course, they vanished from the Institute and from the city...
...All the discussions in Soviet magazines and newspapers are more or less skillfully arranged...
...In fact, however, it is the children of the privileged classes who attend them...
...It is harder to be a subject than an object, to be a personality rather than part of a collective...
...that Evtushenko and Rozhdestvensky went on a cruise of the North Sea for a month...
...Anti-Semitism IN the Soviet Union, unquestionably, anti-Semitic forces do exert strong pressure...
...The process of de-Stalinization has advanced quite far...
...Only because of the death of the "Wise Leader" did 20 Moscow doctors—Jews—remain with their heads on their shoulders...
...Doctor Zhivago...
...Yugoslavia could play an important cultural role if, say, a collection of Russian philosophy were added as a 13th volume to our excellent Collected Philosophy...
...In fact, today there is no more conservative society than the Soviet society...
...A very appealing Moscow youth who works for Intourist, Jury Zuev, told me of a dishonest act by a foreign student...
...that Pasternak's collected works are in the process of preparation for the press...
...Every tyranny, even the most horrible one, lasts because of the support of its honest fanatics...
...Some—the older type of homo sovieticus—think that Khrushchev is hurting "the cause of Communism...
...it provokes not merely revulsion but the desire to cross oneself publicly in front of it, even if for the first time in one's life...
...Sensitive, tender and good Erkel—yet perhaps he was the most insensitive of all the murderers preparing to attack Shatov, without any personal hatred...
...Only individuals seek truths, and they break away from anyone who does not like truth enough," wrote Boris Pasternak in his famous novel...
...De-Stalinization seemingly creates the possibility for the renewed embourgeoisement of the Soviet Union, but only seemingly, because this is only one essential stage toward a new kind of unity, this time without coercion...
...Otherwise they would live to see that their work did not move forward one step, that their ideals remained ideals, and that it is not enough to smash the Bastille into pebbles in order to make out of confused prisoners free men...
...It is possible that at a given moment the Soviet government will remember Solovyov, Berdyaev, and other 7. Many of the writers cited here would be considered more properly theologians, cultural historians, critics, etc., than "philosophers" in the usual sense of that term...
...A double standard and a degree of insincerity are part of the everyday life of the Soviet man, generally speaking...
...Khrushchev was appealing precisely to them when he spoke of raising the standard of living to a higher level...
...With money received for precious religious objects sold in the United States, tanks were bought for two divisions, and until 1944, when Stalin was finally sure of victory and thought it no longer necessary to cater to the religious feelings of members of the Red Army, there were tank battalions with white crosses signifying the two Soviet divisions "Saint Aleksandr Nevsky" and "Saint Dimitry Donskoy...
...It is a little town of picturesque, lush greenery...
...He adopts poses, but with such sincere naivete that it does not matter...
...Not enough that you already crushed me.' Confused, Oleg tried to calm him, but the man waved his hand and went away...
...Nikolai Danilevsky (with his famous work Russia and Europe, a predecessor of Oswald Spengler) to Vasily Rozanov, Nikolai Lossky, Ivan H'in, Vladimir Ern, Simon Frank, Georges Florovsky, Vasily Zenkovsky, Gustav Shpet, Sergei Bulgakov, Pyotr Strove, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Lev Shestov...
...For nearly half a century, Soviet ideology, or the so-called superstructure, has been the decisive factor in Soviet social and economic relations...
...The middle-aged man, slightly drunk, remarked: "See, a Jew is taking a walk...
...when you learn all of this, you fall into despair...
...A girl talked to me with envy of her boss' traveling occasionally "to Europe...
...We also agreed in our attitudes toward Russian classicism...
...Voznesensky agreed with me that Leonid Martynov is indeed one of the most significant living Russian poets...
...This past year Komsomolskaya Pravda described how nine high school girls from one of Moscow's high schools "fled" to a monastery...
...In the United States, the millionaires who govern are spreading throughout the whole world the story of American 'freedom of thought,' but at the same time they persecute and starve those lecturers who teach the truth about the origin of the earth, of life and man...
...in his own homeland no one knows anything about this philosopher...
...The most prominent were Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Karl Radek and Yakov Sverdlov, Fascist propaganda has always lumped together "Bolsheviks" and "Jews...
...This intellectual "innocence" at first entertains, but later unbearably exhausts...
...The most essential quality of the psyche of homo sovieticus is its inner justification for tyrannies and lies: Force is used and lies are told for love, in the same manner that parents act out of love for their children...
...Why look for black bread when you have white...
...As I was passing through the dining car, a passenger sitting at a table said something loudly...
...Mihajlov quotes from the translation of Escape From Freedom...
...At the same time the famous Jewish theater in Moscow was closed, and Jewish printing and publishing concerns were destroyed...
...it turns into evil...
...In 1933, Nikolai Berdyaev in his famous work The Sources and Meaning of Russian Communism wrote: "This new Soviet bureaucracy is stronger than the Tsarist bureaucracy, it is a new privileged class, which can ferociously exploit the masses...
...that Bergson and Freud1 4 are convinced reactionaries and enemies of the enlightenment (no one knows about Kierkegaard...
...It is unimaginable to homo sovieticus that someone in power could acknowledge the right of another to make a free decision...
...The Party and State bureaucracy are little by little being squeezed out by this new class, this technocratic intelligentsia...
...The Soviet Union at this moment is making an exit from Asia, attaching itself to Europe, and moving toward democracy...
...But this dissatisfaction goes to the other extreme of absurdity...
...The young Ehrenburg said it very nicely in Julio Jurenito in 1921: "A stick will always stay a stick, regardless of whose hand holds it...
...When you leam that the person with whom you are talking is deeply convinced that Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius are the last great achievements of "bourgeois" philosophy...
...Fortunately, I did not do this...
...the first sentence in the chapter on Freudianisin, for example, reads: "Freudianism is one of the most widespread and reactionary movements in contemporary bourgeois psychology...
...There remains now only one goal —attaining a high standard of living...
...It is the attitude of a servant in love with his master, and it is evident in all aspects of life: a complete absence of confidence in one's own opinion, a need for leadership and advice from experts...
...The destiny not only of mankind but of all life on earth depends greatly on what is going on today in the Soviet Union...
...In answer to my question why all the restaurants close at 10:30 P.M., one boy said to me ironically: "The government is taking care of our health...
...THE persuasion that democracy has never existed in any form and never will (for without authoritarian control the world would be destroyed) is so deep that it leads to unbelievable nonsense...
...Out of this grows spiritual confusion...
...The teaching in these schools is very advanced, and is carried on three different languages at the same time...
...He said: "Our greatest tragedy is that we consider ourselves Russians.' A rejection on such grounds couldn't happen today...
...Unhappily, centuries of imperial autocracy and decades of Stalinism have left the Soviets a terrifying inheritance—limitless paternalism...
...No doubt, it is a nice shadow, but still a shadow...
...I was perplexed by the decline in spiritual and intellectual powers during the last hundred years...
...All that went on before 1917 is not only utterly unimportant, but uninteresting as well...
...It is like Hitlerism (from which it got its rightful label, "cult...
...On the other hand, no matter how paradoxical it seems, the very same people bow before the West like servants...
...However, just at that point the essential problems will arise—and then what...
...but of anti-theism...
...In spite of his general immaturity (Ehrenburg remarked about him to me : "Andryusha is still a boy...
...It would be very hard for it to become a mandolin or a Japanese fan...
...In my opinion his symbolic poem, "The River Silence," is the best Russian poem of the period from 1929 to 1956.3 Concerning the younger poets, Voznesensky stressed the importance of Novella Matveeva, as had Dudintsev and Vinokurov...
...are highly priced, and you are approached on the streets and asked to sell pieces of your clothing...
...The Soviet press constantly writes about this, appealing to the consciousness of the "builders of Communism...
...Paul Korchagin16 was fighting for a "Paradise on earth,' not for a "high 16...
...Use marble, pictures, gold, birds of paradise, hanging gardens, everything that exists...
...A common man from the countryside is disturbed mostly by the following things: 1. Retention of the kolkhozniks on the collective farms: No one can leave the kolkhoz without a passport, and the passports are kept by the kolkhoz administrators...
...And since, besides Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, and Anatoly Lunacharsky, Russia had no other great Marxist philosophers (they are the only ones recognized), one gets the impression that the greatest Slavic nation has no philosophy.1 Yet original Russian philosophy, which is full of mysticism and anti-materialism, and in many respects is apolitical—in the persons of Shestov, Berdyaev and Rozanov—today influences much contemporary Western European philosophical thought...
...Martynov was born in 1905...
...Russian Philosophy LISTENING to the magnificent choirs in the monastery I remembered that it was in this place that Konstantin Leont'ev, one of the most significant, daring and original Russian minds of all times, spent the last days of his life...
...And we, children of one of the Slavic countries, hear about the existence of Russian philosophy—from the West.s (I recall how badly I felt when I discovered that in the library in Novi Sad, the numerous works of Nikolai Berdyaev, published in Paris, still had uncut pages...
...To allow these questions to appear so complicated that only one 'expert' can understand them, and even he only in a limited context, means, in fact, often intentionally, to long toward thwarting man's leaning on his own ability to think about those problems, which are indeed important...
...He also told me that T. S. Eliot will not be translated for a long time...
...The results are the eternal posters celebrating the "Brigades of Communist work," and "the brigades which compete for the title—Brigade of Communist Work.'' Massive fluctuations in employment have made it necessary to issue passports (they are being issued right now) on which every transfer from one job to another will be noted...
...When at the border station they attached the coach of the Belgrade train to the Soviet train, I went through the whole train several times examining the passengers and coaches...
...To my question-"A re you a member of the Party...
...Vladimir Solovyov, Danilevsky and many other Russian philosophers, for example, long ago foresaw the conflict between Russia and China in the 20th century...
...In this great turn of events in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia can again play an important role, just as it did in 1948...
...Naturally, he failed...
...But Tolstoy wrote in vain...
...This mentality is partly medieval, partly Renaissance, partly the product of a philosophy of its own: Enthusiasm for technology, a naive belief that only modern science can bring happiness to mankind, and that it will unquestionably solve all the problems of the human struggle (as soon as it discovers all the natural laws), a deep conviction that all non-Marxist thinkers are either capitalistic hirelings or immoral idiots—all this is accepted by the quite immature mind of homo sovieticus...
...The very existence of the Soviet Union has refuted all the theories which teach that a society's economic base and development of productive forces can condition its ideology...
...Therefore, Stalinism is not only a political, but above all an existential, a religious problem...
...Suddenly a very shabbily dressed man in his 50s, bent over, with suffering eyes, said in an angry trembling voice to my guide, who had a camera in his hands: "You are taking my picture, too, you swine...
...The others in the line, although smiling, turned their heads away from the young workers...
...Pushkin is people, not the impersonal masses...
...These include revision of the myth of the October Revolution (here The Russian Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg will play an important role, because it was, in fact, Lenin who opened the path for Stalin, as Ivan Karamazov dragged the action of Smerdyakov after him...
...Two or three years before Stalin's death, anti-Semitism was in full swing...
...There are four of them in Moscow, they say, and others in large cities...
...Baptists are gaining ground every day, energized by intimidation, and new nests of the sect are being discovered, especially among workers...
...But the punishment is inescapable: "Any jamming into a herd is the result of a lack of talent, regardless of whether it means being faithful to Solovyov or Kant or Marx...
...And precisely because of this lack of "spiritual sustenance" the various religious sects flourish...
...0 Although foreigners may not go farther than 30 kilometers [approximately 19 miles] from Moscow without permission, my official guide allowed me to go to Zagorsk alone because he was busy that afternoon...
...Permission (putyovka) is only given to the select...
...The poet wanted to read me a passage from his latest poem, "Oza,"4 which he regards highly...
...The scoundrels are rare, and never bring as many evils as the fanatics...
...2. Great variances in salaries: While an unskilled worker can buy two pairs of men's shoes on his month's pay of about 60 rubles, technical experts and administrative officials, who earn 500-600 rubles per month, can buy two television sets...
...And authority is the very cause of alienation, preventing true contact between people...
...Later, back in Yugoslavia, while listening one evening to the Soviet radio program "Youth," I happened to hear Voznesensky reading passages from this poem...
...The more revolutionary among the younger generation will carry them out, because, as Georg Lukacs says in his History and Class Consciousness: "The spirit of revolution is not determined by the radicalism of its aims, nor by the type of means which are employed in the struggle...
...Today a completely new social class is being formed...
...And classical Russian philosophy (Solovyov, Shestov, Berdyaev) will play a very important role in all this...
...I was so astonished by this that I nearly approached him to explain that I was not a Jew, but a Kavkazian through my grandfather, and the son...
...the questioning of God simply does not enter the sphere of the atheistic spirit...
...But just as Stalinism was not only Stalin's fault, so the 20th Congress was not able to destroy all those numerous Erkels who could hardly wait to bow in front of some new deity...
...9. There was a 1915 English translation of this work which is now, however, out of print...
...It broke the thread to which a system had clung psychologically for 30 years...
...Paul Korchagin is the hero of Nikolai Ostrovsky's 1932 proletarian novel How the Steel Was Tempered...
...There can be no doubt that a new revolution is coming, one which Mayakovsky predicted: a revolution in spiritual spheres...
...The old dominant idea which motivated men, the idea of an "earthly paradise," does not work any more...
...Not just years will pass, but epochs and centuries before the world grasps that it is not a question of who happens to be holding the stick now, but rather a question of the stick itself...
...Stalin, like Hitler, annihilated Jews, although he never did this openly...
...At one point in his life he spent several years in one of the northern concentration camps, and he would introduce himself with the words: "Leonid Martynov, Enemy of the People...
...Knowledge is becoming power...
...We must search in the writings of religious thinkers on the loss of God, and in the Marxist texts on human estrangement, which is to say, alienation— no less pronounced in a totalitarian society where mankind is made into a collective by force than it is in the capitalist world...
...So very much has to be rehabilitated—the value of free thought, the value of authentic democracy, the lasting value of certain basic truths in all domains of human life, the abolition of all secrecy, and more...
...This is not because it is unrealizable...
...It often happens that scientific works are publicly burned...
...Dimitry Donskoy and St...
...Understandably, the effect of it is the opposite of that which is desired...
...There is plenty of everything...
...he answered that I obviously did not know the history of contemporary Russian literature very well, since I was not familiar with his statement : "Like Mayakovsky, I am not a member of the Communist Party "2 Altogether Voznesensky left the most pleasant impression on me...
...Dostoevski', Dream and Reality, and The Meaning of the Creative...
...Zagorsk FORTY-FIVE miles from Moscow lies the little town of Zagorsk, home of the Troitse-Sergeeva Monastery, a 14th-century complex of churches and monasteries...
...Apropos of this, I compared some Russian magazines from the second half of the 19th century with some contemporary Russian magazines...
...I had occasion on the first day of my visit to experience Soviet anti-Semitism myself...
...Let us examine who and what...
...The students assembled in front of the former Winter Palace—now the Hermitage —and shouted "Hands off Hungary...
...cf., Literatumaya Gazeta (March 30...
...it lacks spiritual (as opposed to biological or sociological) aristocratic feeling...
...Here is one passage from E. Kol'man's book Is There a God?:12 "In the capitalistic states even today scientists who do not believe in God are persecuted...
...Skinner, and numerous others) gives it a certain significance, and it may be seen as a first halting step back into 20-century psychology...
...The spirit of revolution is a totality, a wholeness brought to bear on every act of living...
...But all that has happened in the Soviet Union shows that the solution to man's crisis is not to be found in the political, social or economic spheres...
...Nonetheless, the very scope of the book (discussing, often for the first time in Soviet print, such figures as Adler, Jung, Horney...
...But of course his work was suppressed and he became known publicly only in 1956, together with the generation of young poets—Evtushenko, Akhmadulina, Voznesensky, Zhirmunskaya, etc...
...We" and "they...
...Thus the psychological torture is intensified...
...Among those executed in that purge was the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukraine, Stanislav Kosior, whom Khrushchev rehabilitated so wholeheartedly...
...The less a child is spoiled, the less it will be necessary to educate him, and the more freedom he will need...
...Many changes await the Soviet Union, a land culturally two decades behind Western Europe...
...The common people will say: "They have not printed enough maps, they have made a flight into space, they have built some more apartments...
...It is less known that Leont'ev was also a talented story teller...
...The "Tsar, Little Father" guides the common man, the child...
...Actually, his novel as it first appeared was not without literary interest...
...But suddenly, let's suppose, someone builds a fence around your palace and tells you: Everything is yours, enjoy yourself, but you will not be allowed to leave...
...My guide, Oleg Merkurov, and I were standing on the street in front of St...
...However , Voznesensky is well known in Moscow and the doorkeeper let us in...
...Homo sovieticus is immature...
...of a White Russian emigre...
...Thus, last year the Soviet newspapers often printed front page articles about the necessity for flower shops in Moscow, arguing that flowers are not "bourgeois" property but are appropriate to the "proletarian relationship" among people...
...December 1961...
...It is a modern and exclusive night club, the only one in Moscow open till 2 A.M., but it is not accessible to all...
...For, as Andre Gide has remarked (and Berdyaev, too), there never was any atheism in the Soviet Union: Atheism is a complete indifference toward religious phenomena...
...Do not be afraid...
...One goes like this: "Of course there will be no war, but we will fight for peace, fight so well that there will not be a stone left standing...
...And more than that, all this luxury, all this wealth will merely increase your suffering...
...Robert Rozhdestvensky's verses, Rodina ("Native Land") in Pravda of December 16, 1962, have become very popular among the youth: We do not want to say any more: Somebody thinks for us...
...that in the 20th century, with the exceptions of Henri Barbusse and Louis Aragon, there were no significant French writers...
...Substitution of intellectual power for political power, however, does not change or solve anything at all...
...As one Russian proverb says: "One is not driven into Heaven with a club...
...The second characteristic is a naive and unthinking Jesuitism of the type described by Dostoevsky in the person of Erkel, one of the minor characters of The Possessed—honest, sensitive, and pleasant in his personal life, but prepared for the greatest servilities in the name of a "higher Idea...
...Let everyone believe in himself, and...
...The year 1956 was only the first wave...
...Of course, the jarring presence of the museum in no way encourages unenlightened believers to become atheists...
...This was an invention of recent years...
...Basil's Church intending to take photographs...
...it concludes: "There is no river silence/ The silence has been broken./ It is your fault...
...Naturally, he himself did not realize this, and identified revolution with force...
...But I must admit that I have never met such a person among the students, although an Italian student in Moscow told me there are many...
...Oza" is an anagram of the name Zoya...
...On the other, there is the rigidly ordered society in which individuals must withdraw into themselves even more-—Kafka's world: A machine in motion has no more life in it than a motionless object...
...These ideas subconsciously provide the psychological base for homo sovieticus...
...As a high school student he used to visit him often, he said...
...He said: "A European should not act that way...
...The Soviet press is rapidly improving, but until there are independent media, there will be no free press, and thus no public opinion...
...Hence the Soviet fear of public opinion...
...now they live normal lives in Moscow...
...It is hard to understand who are the more fanatical in the Soviet Union, members of the religious sects, or atheists who are fighting them...
...authentic Russian thinkers in order to mobilize national feelings, just as in World War II Stalin openly invoked St...
...There are outright Stalinists, still in great number, even among the younger generation between the age of 2015...
...Thus American McCarthyism and "witch hunts" are cited to strengthen and help maintain the paternalist- Stalinistic powers of the Soviet land...
...You may be sure that at that same instant you will want to leave your paradise and go beyond the fence...
...This starts with the nursery songs taught at the schools as part of the compulsory indoctrination in "collective spirit" (that is, the destruction of any individual personality in a child...
...Voznesensky triumphantly told me about the well-known Soviet mathematician and designer of electronic computers, Andrei Kolmogorov, who for several years analyzed texts and sent his assistant to poetry-readings with the intention of finding the "linguistic key" to versification and constructing a computer which would "replace" various poets...
...But every new achievement of the progressive forces is paid for with heavy sacrifices and exhausting struggle...
...The Museum of Atheism, by its position amid the cluster of churches, symbolizes the relationship of the state and religion...
...All the future conflicts within the Soviet Union, with the onset of this "third revolution," will be directed not so much against the bureaucracy as against the technocracy...
...Power without a jail is a debased and uneasy notion, something like a cat with its claws cut...
...This year the Central Committee has already held two plenary sessions dedicated to the struggle against religion...
...The last two processes have already begun...
...This attitude of the State toward religion, that is, denying people the right to determine of their own free will what is true and what is false, simply fortifies and stimulates religious sects...
...The evacuation of the territories conquered by Germans was planned in a way that made it impossible for Jews to get permission to retreat with the Red Army into the interior...
...3. The "limited attendance" schools: After the school reform of 1959, when it was decided that all students would be obliged to work two years in industry or agriculture following graduation from high school, so-called "limited attendance" schools were established...
...Until late at night we sat in the Actors' Club...
...Until recently, for example, every single leader in the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was eventually found to be a "capitalistic hireling," a "traitor," a member of one of the numerous "anti-party" groups, etc...
...these days poets begin their careers at the age at which Pushkin, Lermontov, Esenin and Mayakovsky ended theirs" ) , he surprised me with his wide intellectual horizon and his excellent knowledge of contemporary Western European literature...
...4. Voznesensky's "Oza," which has since been published in the Soviet Union, has just appeared in an English translation in the current number of the Northwestern Tri-Quarterly...
...During World War II, Stalin was forced to allow a certain amount of religious freedom...
...Voznesensky is more intellectual than emotional, with a technical manner of poetic expression (not thinking...
...In the spring of 1963, I had published an article on contemporary Russian poetry in Viesnik' in which I had called him the most promising young poet in the Soviet Union, and had named the much older Leonid Martynov as the greatest contemporary Russian poet...
...Within the monastery it is an arrogant symbol of authority...
...He began to write poetry relatively late, at the age of 35...
...It is impossible to make believe that one is happy about something that brings unhappiness...
...4. Long compulsory Army training of three to four years: Are people afraid of war...
...I must admit that I was quite surprised by the complete indifference toward war and toward the conflict with China among those whom I have met...
...It really is a small world...
...On the one hand, there are a multitude of disconnected individuals with no internal spiritual stays...
...However, the trend of events in the Soviet Union today does not lead one to think that the poem will be suppressed...
...Therefore the appearance of an anti-Semitic book in the greatest Socialist country was confusing to unsophisticated people...
...I talked to a large number of Soviet students, as I mentioned before, who had never heard the name Vladimir Solovyov...
...Give yourself freely to your emotions, do away with all the conclusions of reason—and the feeling will not trick you...
...Have trust in its nature...
...He possesses a naive ability to believe his own lies, deliberately closing his eyes to everything that negates those lies...
...The government is trying to direct the minds of young people toward the development of Siberia and the conquest of space, but without much success...
...The struggle against authority automatically brings in its wake the struggle against "Reason" (ratio), i.e., against science and discovery as the goals of man's earthly life...
...who died in 1936, was blind and partially paralyzed during most of his mature years, and he is one of the more sympathetic and honorable practitioners of that dubious Soviet genre...
...For man will never be satisfied with the idea that he is born in this cosmos and "that's all," that his only aim in life is to live well...
...Reka Tishina was written in 1929...
...The slightest change, even a new kind of tie, song or trouser leg width, provokes great resistance...
...Ideologically, he is an anti- Socialist Realist...
...Never was and never will anything be created in a man by force...
...The Psychology of Homo Sovieticus How good it is that all the enthusiasts are dead...
...It was at that point that the previously devoted leading French Marxist R. Garaudy, in the name of the French Communist party, abandoned Moscow and took a stand against Ilichyov...
...Homo sovieticus differs from other people in his attitudes toward reality, and, as I have said, it is very easy to recognize him after a few words...
...The young generation, especially the students, painfully and deeply feel all these absurdities of centralized statism...
...His novel The Egyptian Dove, once widely read, deserves a place in any anthology of world literature...
...De-Stalinization, or more precisely, the smashing of the machine, opens the way to an organic society—that is, to the free unification of people...
...Fortunately, the draconic laws dating from before World War II, according to which a worker could have been sent to a camp because of a few absences from work without a valid reason, are not in effect any more...
...Of course, he is 1.A daily newspaper published in Zagreb...
...At one point a man—probably the one in charge— came out of the hall and, addressing the people at the end of the line, told them there was no sense in waiting in line when only about 100 meters away there was another hall which was never crowded, where an excellent orchestra under the "Kremlin bandmaster's" direction was playing...
...It is difficult to bear responsibilities and easy to proclaim that man is determined by social history and "laws" of nature...
...the destruction of the myth of the usefulness of every type of labor (for work and creativity stand in the same relation as prostitution and love...
...Men never were moved to go to war by a desire for economic welfare, but only by a longing for "spiritual sustenance...
...in a special issue devoted to creativity in the Soviet Union...
...Following orders was a necessity for this simple little man who constantly, eagerly, subordinated himself to somebody else's will for the sake of the "universal" and "great" goal...
...Our nervous system is not a mere phrase...
...DESPITE the declaration of Evtushenko, who said "It is a miracle that after all that went on in our country for decades, our people did not become cynics,' I must admit that I was often surprised in my contacts with people at the extent of their cynicism...
...When in early 1964 the European press announced with fanfare the appearance of Trofim Kichko's "Judaism Without Embellishment," a typical anti-Semitic book,1 0 many people in the Soviet Union were surprised...
...Th e poet has a very young, almost child-like appearance, despite the fact that he is 30 years old...
...In general, while the popularity of Evtushenko is slowly declining, Voznesensky is being read more and more, and I don't doubt that in the near future he will become the most popular poet of the young intellectual generation...
...Surely Marxism will remain permanently as a science about society, but new spiritual movements will concern themselves with the human soul...
...It is impossible (fortunately) to force man to be good...
...As Lev Shestov says: "Even if the truth could be written in capital letters on every corner, one who was not told to read it wouldn't notice it.'' It is completely unimaginable to homo sovieticus, it is absurd and incredible that someone somewhere in the world could print his own opinions in the newspapers, opinions which do not coincide with those of the "official program" of the community he lives in...
...In the spring of 1964, the Plenum of the Central Committee accepted Ilichyov's proposal to introduce atheism as a compulsory subject in the curriculum of all high schools and universities...
...Forced goodness is no longer good...
...The threat from the Asiatic nations, indeed, hastens the formation of the new ideology...
...In fact these are the two sides of a coin, and within the next two or three decades we shall probably witness a repetition of what occurred in the last century, a conflict between the new "Slavophiles" and "Westerners...
...All are alike, and from the expressions on their faces you can see with whom you are dealing...
...During the prewar purges, a large number of Jews were killed in the Siberian concentration camps, supposedly because of their "Zionism...
...From that point of view, we could say that Pasternak is more revolutionary than many of those who have attacked him...
...Precisely this luxury will hurt you...
...LEO TOLSTOY, Resurrection I was inclined towards revolution, but now I believe that nothing can be achieved by force...
...Voznesensky is an architect by profession, but concerns himself only with literature...
...is not actually a book, but a 33-page pamphlet issued by the Molodoya Guardiya publishing outlet in 1958...
...But the continuous, fanatical anti-religious battle in the Soviet Union demonstrates something else—that with the Soviets it is not at all a question of atheism, 5 . The Troitse-Sergeeva Monastery was founded about 1335...
...The changes will be great and far-reaching...
...Therefore, everything that is happening in this important country attracts the attention of the world...
...For there is one thing missing: 'Freedom.' " The young people especially do not see any great misfortune in the low standard of living because they are striving to climb Calvary for the sake of a great idea which does not exist any longer...
...Osfrovsky...
...Pasternak would read him parts of Doctor Zhivago, then still in manuscript form...
...I myself trusted other people and wandered as if in a wilderness...
...Incidentally, when the clamor against Pasternak was raised Andryusha was bravely silent and did not take a stand in the defense of his teacher...
...To live is so boring," one young girl from Leningrad said to me...
...We know how that ends...
...In general, one meets such men in the various Soviet delegations, in Intourist, etc., but not every one of the 10 million members of the Soviet Communist Party is a homo sovieticus, though there is no doubt that the percentage of them is greater among Party members...
...a critical approach to the "myth of science...
...Some young people in the line, apparently workers, started to laugh, and one said, "Well, since it is under the direction of the Kremlin, it isn't worth anything...
...It is a known fact that a large number of Jews took part in the October Revolution...
...But because it was already very late, he sketched for me only its outline...
...HOWEVER, there is so much preventing the abolition of the old structure...
...Perhaps only the threat of China will mobilize the spiritual forces of the Russian people...
...all will be one...
...3. Martynov's Reka Tisliina is an outstanding poem by an important poet...
...Everything that accelerates this movement plays a positive role...
...The lawfully ordered welfare society makes sense only if it serves as a means to something and not as an end in itself...
...BORIS PASTERNAK,Doctor Zhivago THE SOVIET UNION finds itself on the verge of great changes...
...Maybe, indeed, you won't come out...
...Ivask characterizes Leont'ev's novels as being basically narcissistic and exemplifying an admixture of "black Christianity" and "bright paganism...
...ment that problems are too complicated for the average individual to understand them...
...Probably these technical and technocratic groups will play a more and more important role in the life of the Soviet Union in the near future...
...The Soviet press writes about this characteristic trend of the younger generation with a condescending laudatory smile, behind which one feels them thinking, "They're young, foolish.' Unconsciously I recall Pasternak: "It is impossible to keep quiet from day to day about what one is thinking and feeling without serious consequences to one's health...
...For although the contours of the economically and socially just society can already be perceived in many ways, it is being realized that this alone does not give spiritual sustenance...
...ALEKSANDR HERZEN THE SOVIETS have a psychology of their own, typically Soviet...
...Many Jewish Communists who escaped from Germany to the Soviet Union were turned over to the Gestapo after the signing of the Nazi- Soviet non-aggression pact...
...There is no denying that every time a man transfers the responsibility to someone else for his own behavior, he lightens his own existence...
...Our conversation was interrupted only by numerous greetings directed to Voznesensky...
...Yet not even Stalin thought of introducing "individual enlightenment" for religious believers...
...Serf laws...
...orders must be executed and all personal initiative suppressed...
...On a little hill encircled with an ancient wall stands the elevated lavra with about 10 church cupolas...
...Conclusions and Perspectives Various religions exist because people believe in others and not in themselves...
...And this is true not merely of the early Christians but of the Russian revolutionaries as well—they died for "justice over the entire earth," rather than for a high standard of living...
...it is not imaginary...
...Here is the weakness of Khrushchev's ideology...
...including, naturally, Stalin himself, who was guilty of "hostility toward the people...
...Everyone who tried to escape from the Germans without permission to evacuate was instantly shot...
...This is the psychology of the average homo sovieticus...
...And more: "The main misfortune, the root of all evil was the loss of faith in the value of one's own thinking...
...The process of trying to do away with planned agriculture is underway right now, but it is only a small beginning...
...that is stylistically close to the early Mayakovsky and Pasternak...
...Anti-Semitism has always been strong in Russia, and though efforts are being made to subdue it, this has in no way cured the disease...
...When Moscow Summer 1964 was written, of course, Khrushchev was still in power...
...It provides the psychological justification for the secret police...
...to poison" Soviet leaders...
...8. Twelve volumes of Berdyaev's philosophical and critical works are available in American paperback translations...
...TRUE, conditions are better now than they were in 1956-57, and they are still improving...
...His voice sounded impressive when he repeated about 10 times the words "Ave Oza,' with which a number of lines begin...
...lies which are psychological and theoretical justifications of the greatest servilities to a "higher goal...
...On the contrary, the museum irritates...
...In Moscow and in Leningrad I was also told about an incident involving a group of students from the Leningrad Technological Institute during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution...
...To such a person a mentor (or two) is assigned whose duty it is to enlighten his protege constantly—at work, in the club, even at home...
...Fromm's books have been published in Yugoslavia...
...Still, "Jewish jokes" circulate in which, as a rule, "a Communist and a Jew" carry on a conversation and clash with each other: an illogical confrontation on some illogical question...
...several decades before Bergson), 6. Leont'ev's novels have never been translated into English, but there is a good short survey-article on Leont'ev's fiction by George lvask (Slavic- Review...
...The Soviet kiosks are crowded with the most vulgar "atheistic" literature: Amusing Gospel, Entertaining Bible...
...The 20th Congress fired a significant blow at homo sovieticus...
...not of making it change hands, but of beginning to break it...
...Even at the large establishments which are shown to foreign delegations and at the prominent kolkhozes, work is of poor quality and the output is minimal...
...It seems Tolstoy foresaw something similar to this when he wrote, in his essay "On Education": "Education, if planned to form people according to definite ideals, is unlawful and untenable...
...It lies much deeper, in the existential, universal crisis of the personality, in the metaphysical depths of human beings...
...In my opinion, this does not hold true today to the same degree...
...Many foreigners also go there on pilgrimage...
...As is well known, the last years of Stalin's life were the hardest years in the history of the Soviet Union...
...quite the contrary...
...a student said of them to me...
...he is a poet excited more by synthetic fabrics than the hoary Russian birch tree...
...I think that the poem has great poetic power, and the influence of surrealism can be sensed in it (Mayakovsky's suicide bullet returns from the poet's chest into his gun...
...The means is not contract but contact...
...In front of the ticket office of a dance hall stood a long line of about 200 people...
...As an answer to the naivete of the lies, which only the average sovieticus can accept, the young respond with fanatical hatred to even a very small lie in their social or private lives...
...Its symbolism may be taken both personally and historically...
...Aleksandr Nevsky although in the first years after the Revolution they had been anathematized as symbols of the Russian Orthodox autocracy...
...The very existence of a Voznesensky today bears out the prophecy of the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who in the '20s wrote of the time when science and technology would dominate the minds of the masses, and the most talented men of the intelligentsia would turn in the other direction—toward a new mysticism...
...This notion leads to unbelievable absurdities...
...It would be naive to believe that any tyranny existed merely because of scoundrels...
...It is most interesting that the rehabilitation of Russian philosophy is prevented not by lack of interest at the bottom, but by pressure from the top because of the present political situation...
...Even the basic double standards, like those of Stalin and Stalinism, are criticized, but the majority of the ideas which still govern the life and thought of the country were created by Stalin, from Socialist Realism to the kolkhoz...
...A few years ago, indeed, a Jesuitical method of combat was introduced, the so-called "individual enlightening" of persons who are discovered to be religious...
...Since the standard of life on the kolkhoz is still on a much lower level than the standard of living of the least paid factory workers, the kolkhozes would become uninhabited without strict administrative measures...
...There are also weak people who believe all the absurdities of the top...
...Naturally, Voznesensky's "spiritual father'' is Pasternak, whom the young poet knew personally for a long time...
...And it is obvious that the Soviet Union will have to de-Stalinize itself in much greater measure than it is doing now, or else the wheel of history will come around again to Stalinism, and the whole period from 1956 will be proclaimed the work of "traitors.1 More energetic de-Stalinization is hardly likely, however, despite the fact that Khrushchev1 5 himself enjoys great popularity among the people...
...And now enter it...
...This disposition can be seen in his book of poems 40 Lyric Digressions from the Poem "The Triangular Pear," and his approach is exactly what most attracts the young educated generation these days...
...At root, indeed, it is a blind trust in a science which knows better than we do how to sleep with our own wives, how to be friends with our friends, even what we really want in life...
...As the very title of the book suggests, it is marked by an outlook ranging from the hostile to the contemptuous...
...Everywhere, discipline is instilled...
...The wellknown American Marxist Erich Fromm1 3 writes: "One type of curtain of darkness is in an agree 12...
...People come from distances of hundreds of kilometers to see the lavra, and the churches in it are always overcrowded...
...However, the sharpness of this decline can be a good thing: Every renaissance begins that way...
...Nothing human is damaging to man...
...Unfortunately, the Soviet social system itself still favors the development of Erkels...
...Voznesensky intended to print the poem in the magazine Znamya, although he was not sure that it would be accepted...
...Of course, until the time when the entire economic system is adjusted to deemphasize state control, all those posters, which have been used for 47 years to raise the "working elan of the masses,' will be absurdities...
...Some still consider him too much of a Stalinist and recall his activities during Stalin's era...
...In my opinion, it will be some sort of assertive individualism (whether "socialistic" or "Christian" is irrelevant...
...standard of living...
...The magazine Science and Religion carries stupid mockeries on the possibility of free religious consciousness in man, in articles titled "Is There a God?," "This Liar—Jesus Christ," "Behind the Walls of the Spiritual Academy," etc...
Vol. 48 • June 1965 • No. 12
