soviet CONTRADICTIONS as revealed in soviet literature

...His visit begins as a retracing of his own chilhood days and turns into a journey of discovery of the conditions of life of the rural population: "Varygin looked at the towels, gray for a long time, and again, not for the first time, the idea painfully struck him that his mother had suffered from want...

...Four—Another contradiction shown by Soviet fiction is that produced by the premium placed on a successful managerial record which conflicts with the welfare of the workers as well as with the demands of the whole economy...

...They will give you advice, a recommendation, but it is no advice, it is an order...

...they have answered both questions, at least by implication...

...Five—A related contradiction is that between the demands of one's own career and those of integrity of character...

...The great number of such characters in recent Soviet writing suggests that in this area the Party may even be encouraging frank criticism in the hope of frightening and perhaps reforming or removing such "imperialists" from their positions, or at least of alerting the population to the problem...

...They are indifferent to the welfare of others and either too ignorant to notice the injustices being done to inventors and innovators whose brilliant ideas are being suppressed, or they know full well what is going on, but suppress the ideas for the sake of personal interests and friendships...

...consciously or unconsciously, often perhaps without realizing the implications of what he was saying, he has pointed his finger at the root, not merely the excrescence, of the evil...

...The conflict is clearest in Varygin's conversation with a local engineer, who tells him, "In our region more than half of the nineteen collective farms are doing poorly...

...In his manner of pre senting the conflict, Dudintsev seems almost to have returned to something akin to the critical Russian Nineteenth Century viewpoint...

...The novel reveals a conflict between the collective and the private individual...

...We'll see a lot of trouble yet...

...In a recent story by Nikolay Zhdanov, "Return Home," published in the second volume of the controversial anthology, Literary Moscow, a successful bureaucrat receives word of the death in the country of his aged mother, whom he had failed to visit for six years...

...They must make excessive compulsory deliveries of produce...

...Paradoxically the writers are applying the sociological method of class analysis, almost Marxist in its exploiter-versus-worker groupings, against a state which purports to be an embodiment of Marxist ideas...

...When a being like you is sick, it is a pleasure to look at her...

...Our leaders in the District have forgotten how to talk to the people...

...The offenses of the elite are not the result of any innate sinfulness of the individuals or to their being "survivals of capitalism," but rather Soviet fiction shows them to be explainable by mechanisms embedded in the Soviet system itself...

...later, when he had more power, he would speak honestly in defense of whatever he believed was the right cause...

...He feels that his hard work entitled her to special privileges...

...On another occasion he says: "We have a good many difficulties and contradictions in our country...

...He is tempted to rejoin the group, but he knows he could only do so at the cost of giving up his superior machine...

...In addition, he disregards the best interests of the country in ways similar to those already illustrated from Granin and Kaverin...

...The complacency of a ruler collides with the discouraging harshness of the actual life of the underlings...

...They must not only teach us, but also listen to us...

...Good...

...The "contradictions" are built in...

...Milovan Djilas had the courage to write of the rise of a new ruling class and communist bureaucracy in Yugoslavia, and of the conflict between them and the people...

...He disagrees with their methods and will not yield...

...The system is presented as corrupt...

...They yearn for warm, personal treatment...

...he kept quiet...

...The inventor lives a lonely life, sees very few people, and is supported by a small handful of friends...

...The author even suggests that the system is rigged to reward caution by promotions and to punish boldness by treatment appropriate to a troublemaker...

...He thinks the Party would lose authority if he talked to people simply, like a human being...

...The denials of Russian spokesmen will not stand up against the evidence of their own current literature, as I propose to show by examining part of the recent Soviet literary output: One—The most common contradiction is between the well-to-do, city-dwelling, privileged member of the ruling class who repeats the official, optimistic slogans, and between the masses of workers or farm laborers from whom he has become alienated...

...Six—The sharp line dividing the ruling class from the mass of the population has another by-product— the personal, emotional isolation of the elite from the people...

...the collective is backing a far inferior, wasteful machine...

...So now they ought to trust this peasant...

...He too has some sense...

...They are fundamental, multiform, pervasive, and serious in their consequences...

...To celebrate a wedding anniversary, he gives a party to which his wife, who works as a schoolteacher, wants to invite some of her fellow teachers...

...They do not attempt to pay lip-service to the official view that in the "socialistic" stage of development, no classes like those of the capitalistic world exist, only social groupings of friendly workers, peasants, and intellectuals...

...The contradiction depicted by Kaverin in gruesome detail is that between an evil, unscrupulous man and his clique in high positions in scientific and medical institutions, who abuse their power, and the honest, productive, hard working scientists, who are hampered and persecuted by their conspiratorial superiors...

...He takes a train to the village where she lived and is to be buried...

...In the works of Soviet novelists and playwrights, we find data pointing in the same direction...

...Drozdov explains to her that this would not do...

...My duties do not allow it...

...The collective farm has transformed the peasant...

...It is necessary to overcome difficulties, not hush them up...

...He tells her, "These are favors which are distributed at any given stage in proportion to the quantity and quality of work...

...He is not presented, as he would have been in the thirties or forties, as an anti-social freak and counter-revolutionary...

...On the other hand, the protagonists also succeed —they develop a Soviet variant of penicillin...

...The problem is to come to know them, to study them, as soon, as deeply, and as exactly as possible...

...he hopes to be able to write dozens of articles about it, showing himself to best advantage, justifying the many financial advances he paid out to various supporters...

...In Ilya Ehrenburg's novel, The Thaw, the title of which could serve as a description of the entire post-Stalin period of Soviet literature, the head of a factory postpones the construction of long overdue apartments for the workers, even though the funds have been allocated and the building order issued...

...and he intends to satisfy his vanity without risk...

...True, it has transformed him...

...A storm destroys the hovels in which the workers had been left to live...

...The upshot is a compromise...

...Here the heroes are individuals scattered thinly throughout Russia...

...They are "bold intriguers who think one thing and say something altogether different...

...He deliberately preserved silence about two serious questions arising out of his indictment of Stalin: how it was possible for Stalinism to arise in Soviet society (is there anything in the society which permitted, perhaps even encouraged, the emergence of Stalinism...

...His wife is revolted by her husband's frank acceptance of the stratification of Soviet society...

...Several facts emerge from an examination of the "contradictions" laid bare in Soviet fiction: Many Soviet authors tacitly or overtly take for granted that social stratification exists in the U.S.S.R...

...It is impossible to fight Kramov...

...Sofronov calls them "troubadours of negative orientation" and says that if Dudintsev, Yashin, and their like were correct, Russia would be on the technological level of the samovar, when actually she is a leading pioneer in the sciences...

...Whether they are intellectuals or muzhiks, strength is in them...

...they have to send off so much grain that none is left for themselves after springtime...

...He frequently refers to his former academic work and comments on contradictions in the life around him...

...Zhdanov's story ends with the official's return to town, pleased to escape the unpleasant realities he had witnessed...

...They have established themselves on the editorial boards of medical journals, in research institutes, in medical schools, and in ministries...

...But his followers and others like him continue entrenched in powerful positions...

...Soviet writers have gone beyond Khrushchev...

...The story reveals the contradiction between the uninformed optimism GEORGE GIBIAN is a professor in the Russian and English departments at Smith College...

...That is exactly what happens towards the end of the novel—Kramov dies...

...The district head had called the local members his "levers...

...The story shows him preparing to speak out at last against a group of powerful men in defense of a youngster who is quite justified in his criticism of a badly designed motor and who reminds Minaev of his own younger self years before...

...In Daniel Granin's fine story, "Personal Convictions," a situation otherwise similar to that of Kaverin's novel is analyzed from the individual's moral point of view...

...They write about us: a new human being has made his appearance...

...they resent being ordered about and considered mere tools, "levers...

...I for example never go to a hospital...

...The men complain about him: "He doesn't listen to people...

...Yashin's story shows that the simple people feel a clear line of demarcation separates them from the next higher echelon of Party workers...

...Others take the opportunity to overwhelm him with their complaints...

...A group of workers on a collective farm, all Party members on the grass-roots level, criticize their district Party officials...

...most venial, resorting to cliches instead of facing a problem, refusing to produce a new machine or permit a new drug to be developed...

...He is removed, but after a short period of time pops up again in a good position in another part of the country...

...He is portrayed, of course, as an egotistic, unpleasant individual...

...The chief character, Minaev, started as a bold, independent, idealistic young man who dared to criticize whatever he held deserved to be attacked...

...In Venyamin Kaverin's novel, Searches and Hopes, the contradiction between the interests of science and the power interests of a highly placed individual is shown in several characters, Skrypachenko, Kramov, and a deputy minister, who obstruct the efforts of a woman scientist to develop penicillin...

...He is more interested in over-fulfilling his production quota, which means that a mark will be chalked up in his favor at the ministry, whereas housing for workers does not figure on the record of industrial production...

...Forces embodied in the social system squelch initiative and idealism...

...At one point the records of his invention are ordered burned...

...He then recognizes the errors of his way...

...You are my special one, a rare flower...

...Some assure him that his mother had been well off— she even received sugar a few times a year...

...and whether it did not have consequences beyond itself (did it not taint other areas of Soviet life...

...The city man "felt neither willingness nor strength to examine all that the engineer told him and that he had seen in the course of the day...

...The "contradictions," as they present them, constitute a longer, more detailed, more repellent list than Mao Tse-tung's categories...

...He has not restricted himself to exposing a few isolated bureaucrats...

...He, too, gives preference to what will look better on his record rather than to what the national economy (and the consumer) requires...

...The exigencies of his position and of the research institute he is now directing make it impolitic for him to speak up—and he is beginning to realize that the time when he will be powerful enough to act courageously and honestly may never come at all...

...When Ganicheva [the wife of another leading man] is sick, the woman will make them [other patients] get out again...

...the furnishings of their house, their whole way of life would provoke the envy of her colleagues...

...more serious, neglect of workers' living conditions...

...Their books show mechanisms in Soviet society which favor lesser men of Stalin's kind...

...Drozdov even has both halves of a house to himself...

...it was not an isolated phenomenon which could neatly be excised all by itself...

...Drozdov is socially, materially, and in power differentiated and cut off from the people...

...He insists on working independently, following his own ideas...

...He was soon taught to be more circumspect...

...He tried to fight on, but after two friends who sided with him were fired, he gave in...

...soviet CONTRADICTIONS as revealed in soviet literature by GEORGE GIBIAN While Mao Tse-tung has startled the Communist world by admitting that "contradictions" (in our terminology, conflicts, tensions, or hostilities) exist in China, classifying them in categories, and explaining their origin and future course, Soviet theoreticians have denied the existence of such contradictions in the Soviet Union...

...A contradiction is obvious between the requirements of the country and the direction in which self-interest of the managers is steering them through the incentive system of rewards used to guide the economy...

...Two—The contradictions between the Party leadership on the district level and Party membership among the people are exemplified in Alexander Yashin's short story, "The Levers," in the same volume of Literary Moscow...

...of the bureaucratic elite and the wretched life of farm laborers squeezed by demands from above...

...In his American television interview Khrushchev said they did not exist in Russia...

...Still, he told himself that he was making only a temporary tactical retreat...

...True, he has...

...Eventually the group, moving ahead in its cooperative enterprise, finds the solution, while he is still embroiled in his lonely experimentation...

...The peasant is no longer the same...

...In his own eyes, he looks on himself as a member of a ruling class...

...At the end there is no resolution, no recantation or reform...

...Socialism has its own kinds of contradiction which are removed peacefully, by knowledge...

...One idealist here, and another there, they crop up at every step," Dudintsev has one of his characters say as the most optimistic conclusion circumstances permit—not very different from what Chekhov wrote, "I see salvation in separate individuals scattered over the whole of Russia, here and there...

...In Russian literature of the twenties and thirties, in a conflict of the group with an individual, the group was right and the individual wrong...

...He even explicitly compares the effects of the capitalist system— which tends to drive the inefficient operator out of business and rewards the up-to-date economic worker or type of tractor—with the Soviet economy, in which he urges that a set of non-capitalistic stimuli must be provided which will have the same healthy economic effect as the capitalist methods...

...the yes-man is elevated above the innovator and rebel...

...neither side has dislodged the other or won a decisive victory...

...But every time he reached a higher rung on the ladder of professional success in industry, he realized that he still did not have enough power—it would have to be the next higher job—and then the next above that—and the next...

...The Soviet success with satellites has given fresh ammunition to those critics who, like Anatoly Sofronov in the Literary Gazette in December, 1957, attack Russian writers who have been drawing attention to "contradictions" and other negative phenomena of Soviet life...

...In Not By Bread Alone, the situation is the reverse...

...this he considers the inevitable, proper price to pay for his success...

...It is a hallmark of isolated, successful individuals in Soviet fiction that in the process of adapting themselves to the demands of their position in the hierarchy, they have become so inhuman that their wives cannot stand being married to them...

...Seven—In Not By Bread Alone, another conflict is prominent—that between the group and the individual —but, surprisingly for Soviet literature, the individual is the hero, the collective is misguided...

...The group magnanimously allows him to rejoin, and he is reformed into a good, conforming member of the collective, and even allowed to share the glory of their invention...

...As one character says about Kramov and his henchmen, "These people are capable of committing crimes...

...This exploitation of Russian scientific advances has currently become the standard official line in urging writers to look more at the positive side of Soviet life...

...One reason why Vladimir Dudint-sev's novel, Not By Bread Alone, has stirred up unusual controversies in Russia is its courageous portrayal of this contradiction, which is a reversal of the pious Soviet doctrine that Soviet leaders are close to the masses: that they are the people...

...She asks for them to be brought in again...

...You are now our levers in the village...

...Galina Nikolaeva's long novel presents numerous examples of various types of contradictions, which sometimes are contradictions in the senses in which they have been exemplified in this article and at other times are more like "built-in incentives to inefficiency...

...Through his rise in Soviet society, he has become isolated from other people...

...Drozdov learns of her attitude and is disgruntled...

...You must be placed in special circumstances...

...The higher he would rise, moreover, the more isolated he would become...

...The elite hold a rosy view of Soviet life, but when they are brought into contact with concrete facts, they become confused and flee back to the security of their office shelter...

...Some members of the elite commit transgressions of varying degrees of seriousness...

...Life on the farm is much more old-fashioned and wretched than it had seemed from his office, where he was looked after by an efficient secretary, attended meetings, and learned about life from official reports only...

...Granin demonstrates the incompatibility between the demands of forthrightness and courage, and the conditions of success in Soviet industry...

...He wishes to be able to say that he has done a great service to the state in acquiring a drug which will return to combat many wounded soldiers...

...On the other hand, an independent research project would be fraught with doubts and uncertainties...

...Equalitarianism is a harmful thing...

...a few private persons mitigate and counteract it...

...Yet he is framed by his opponents and sent to a forced labor camp...

...The industrial boss Drozdov is Dudintsev's exemplar of the isolated leaders...

...The papers and the inventor himself are saved, partly through luck and partly through the spontaneous help of a few individuals...

...the director's dereliction becomes apparent to all...

...The elite all live together, in the same neighborhood, in superior duplex houses...

...In Sofronov's play, The Moscow Character, the director of a textile machine factory similarly refuses to put into development and production a superior new model, for his planned output quota had not envisaged the introduction of a new model and hence did not take into account the interruption of production which would lower his output for the current year...

...A typical plot —that of Kirshon's play Miraculous Alloy—presents an inventor who refuses to cooperate with a group project in developing a new alloy...

...Literature of the past few years presents a picture of a class of rulers, of an elite, which lives a far different life from the ruled, isolated from the population socially and personally...

...therefore the picture presented by Dudintsev must be false and his critics correct...

...Khrushchev's attacks on Stalin have tended to isolate Stalinism as a phenomenon unrelated to other aspects of Soviet life...

...the bulk of the population seems to constitute an inert, hostile, self-deceived organism...

...As long as there is no confidence in the simple peasant on the collective farm, there will be no real order...

...His separation from the people is evident at every turn...

...The hero is an inventor who has designed an excellent new centrifugal pipe-casting machine...

...Three—Another form of contradiction is shown in portrayals of evil men who have climbed up the hierarchy of industrial or scientific institutions, abuse their power to enrich themselves, and build "personal empires" or "monopolies...

...The harvest is small, people work unwillingly, they eat badly," and attacks official optimism: "The village would be much better off if there were fewer government cheerer-uppers...

...Go and disagree with them at the Region...

...If we ever lie down, we don't get up any more...

...He would work his way up a little...

...The villagers look at him from across a wide gulf: "They say you are now one of the leaders...

...Carry out the Party line," he had told them...

...most criminal, sending an opponent to years of forced labor on trumped-up charges...

...His wife leaves him and falls in love with his main antagonist...

...to be successful, one must shut one's eyes to many unpleasant truths...

...Incidentally, it also explains a great deal of what is behind Khrushchev's recent moves for improvement of agricultural conditions...

...He conformed...

...Kurganov expresses his conclusions: "Contradictions of class societies were studied for centuries and resolved by bloodshed...

...The delicacy and importance of his answer were underlined by its deletion from the text published in Moscow...

...To be honest, one must resign oneself to being an outcast and a failure...

...The hardships of the workers and peasants are known to the rulers only from the vantage point of their city office desk...

...The contradiction here is between the privileged members of the elite, set apart in splendid isolation, and the bulk of the population...

...He is correct in trusting his own judgment above that of many bureaucrats and technical experts...

...He decided everything by himself...

...The outlook of this upper class is very different from the lower class...

...The Soviet writer, permitted during the "thaw" to indulge in freer criticism than under Stalin, has gone beyond the limits which the government assumed he would observe...

...When she is ill and taken to an over-crowded hospital, she finds out that other patients were moved out of a ward into the corridor in order to provide a private room for her...

...He is the author of "Tolstoy and Shakespeare" and articles on Soviet and world literature in the New Republic, Russian Review, Problems of Communism, and Comparative Literature...

...Hence the many "contradictions" between the thousands of little Stalins helped upward by various institutions (or not prevented from rising by any institutionalized checks) and between the masses of the population...

...It is dangerous not that they exist but that sometimes we are afraid to see them...

...he is also the theoretician and spokesman for the group, of whose position in society he is aware and to which he has become reconciled...

...Not only his early years on the lowest steps of the hierarchy, but all his life will be sacrificed to expediency, compromise, hedging...

...But Minaev cannot put his intention into effect...

...One character says that only one thing can be of help—-Kramov's death...

...He suppresses new inventions, plays ball with groups of other powerful leaders, and even descends to false accusations leading to the sentencing of innocent opponents...

...Only other members of the elite should be invited—the head of the coal trust, party officials, industrial executives...

...And our strength lies exactly in studying and removing them consciously...

...They use anonymous denunciatory letters to newspapers and medical journals to attack scientists whose rise they are attempting to halt, and even slander, leading to the frame-up of the heroine's husband and his sentencing to years of imprisonment...

...They wish to be trusted, consulted, listened to...

...In a recent novel, Galina Niko-laeva's A Battle On the Way, one of the most courageous and artistically outstanding books of 1957, printed in five installments of the monthly Oktyabr, we encounter a character named Kurganov who wrote his dissertation on the subject of contradictions in Soviet society and who is now working in the provinces, concerned with problems of Soviet agriculture...

...Kramov's motives in wishing to suppress Russian investigation of penicillin and his advocacy of buying the English patents for its manufacture are purely selfish...

...Stalinism pervaded life...

...I get over my illnesses on my feet...