Isaac Deutscher 1949
Source: The Reporter, 16 August 1949. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
Russia has not only been healing the terrible wounds that the war inflicted upon it, but has continued to expand its industry and culture into the vast Asiatic periphery. So much has been obvious to any student of Russia; and it is impressive enough. But what has been going on in the minds of the people who have been pumping water out of the flooded coal mines of the Donets, rebuilding the cities of the Ukraine and Byelorussia, founding new cities in and beyond the Urals, irrigating drought-stricken kolkhoz land, and planting protective belts of forest on it? What has been going on in the minds of the Soviet intellectuals, whom the regime has been continually treating to hot and icy showers, lauding them as the civilising force in Soviet society, then picking on them for the obstinate vices of ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘servile admiration for the West'?
On the surface, Russia appears to be immutably stable. Elsewhere, wartime rulers have died or been voted out of power, but not in the USSR. Only minor reshufflings have occurred in the Politburo. Nothing seems to have been altered or shifted for many years in the structure of society and in its political and cultural ‘superstructure’. Day after day, newspapers carry the same sort of news, the same comment, the same eulogies of Stalin. It is easy to succumb to the uncanny feeling that, in that exceptional country, history, breaking all the laws of evolution, dialectical or otherwise, has come to a standstill.
The surface, as usual in Russia, is deceptive. One recalls that during the war the old Holy Russia of the Tsars, with its traditions and symbols, seemed to reappear from the depths. Then, toward the end of the war, and after it, fragments of revolutionary, Leninist Russia came to the top again. Ever since, queer official campaigns, one moment directed against nationalism and the next against cosmopolitanism, have been reflected onto the surface, testifying to mysterious commotions underneath.
It is difficult to define the trends in Russian society because the totalitarian organisation of the state makes such trends inarticulate. No social or political tendencies can crystallise unless people have a modicum of freedom to express their views and form their ideas. But nothing can prevent people, even under totalitarian rule, from instinctively feeling in different ways about the major problems of their society. The fluctuations in Stalin’s domestic policy can be explained only by the fact that his government understands how heterogeneous the Russian mind is. Even more difficult than tracing trends is trying to define their weight and strength. Only deductive reasoning or guesswork is possible.
In the first weeks after the armistice, I talked to crowds of Soviet citizens in west German DP camps. [1] The vast majority was preparing for repatriation. Only a few had made up their minds not to go home. The rest were motivated by ardent Soviet patriotism, or homesickness, or merely a wish to get back, whatever might be awaiting them in their homeland.
I put some questions to the inmates of several camps in an informal questionnaire, and we then took the answers up. The Russians turned out to be rather voluble. One question was: ‘Which is more important to you - Communism or the national Russian interest?’ At first, about a quarter of the DPs came out for Communism and another quarter for Russia, while the others seemed undecided. At last, though, the lines of division became blurred or faded altogether, when, sooner or later, somebody got up and said that there was no reason to choose between Communism or Russia; the interests of the two were identical.
This was how the DPs who wished to return to Russia reacted. The prevalent mood among those who were staying away was a mixture of extreme nationalism and fierce anti-Communism.
‘Do you think’, I then asked, ‘that public ownership and planned economy have justified themselves? Would you like to see private capital re-admitted to Russia?’ The answer was almost unanimous: ‘Our public ownership is good. We do not want any capitalism.’ As a rule, this answer came even from the anti-Communists who had refused repatriation. Only people from the lands that had come under Soviet rule as recently as 1939 and 1940 were, on the whole, opposed to public ownership. To the Soviet citizens proper, private enterprise appeared an almost ludicrous, as well as an anachronistic, concept.
A young mechanic from Dnepropetrovsk, who was not going back at once, told me this: ‘Life in Russia is unbearable, and that is why I have not returned home. You do not know what it means to live in constant fear of deportation to a labour camp and not to be able to speak one’s mind.’ Yet he planned to return home eventually: ‘Life is nice here in the West’, he went on. ‘I can talk to my heart’s content. But it is a silly and degrading business to work for the private profit of another man, and not for the good of the community. I cannot stand this either. It will be a nice diversion to stay here, but I think I will have to go back. If only they gave us some freedom, there would be no country in the world better than ours.’
‘If only they gave us some freedom...’ How often these words recurred. But they had different meanings for different Russians. The farmers meant less taxation, less governmental requisitioning of agricultural produce, less control over the collective farms, and perhaps also a loose combination of private and collective farming. To an employee of the Soviet Military Administration in Berlin, talking without witnesses, ‘some freedom’ meant disbandment of forced-labour camps, free access to foreign books and periodicals, free intellectual intercourse.
Some Soviet citizens, of course, were not concerned about freedom. Nadya Z, a girl in her early twenties and a former member of the Komsomol, was not returning to Russia because she had married a foreigner, but she could not understand criticism of the regime.
‘But we do have freedom in Russia’, she said.
‘Well, do you have real elections?’
‘Of course.’
‘How is that possible when people are not free to form separate groups or parties and put forward conflicting points of view? Don’t you see that to elect means to choose between different views of parties?’
Nadya could not see what I was aiming at. ‘Why should there be two or three parties, when it is really much better for the people to be united behind a single party?’, she asked. Nadya simply had no sense of freedom, at least of what the West means by freedom. She was in her early teens when the trials of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and Tukhachevsky took place. Of these events she had only the faintest memories ('Yes, father used to come home and read aloud something about it from the papers’); and all she knew about them was what she had been taught at school and in the Communist Youth. (’they weren’t people of any importance, were they? Just a group of traitors who had to be punished.’)
At least in some sections of Soviet society, the war and the subsequent contact between Russia and Europe weakened the habits of thought cultivated by the regime, and stirred a vague longing for freedom. During the war, party men spread the rumour over the countryside that Stalin himself would order a ‘new deal’ for the peasants when peace came. The millions of Russian soldiers who marched into foreign countries were, true enough, not converted into admirers of capitalism, as some people in the West all too wishfully thought. But many Soviet citizens began to see the unpleasant aspects of their political system and started thinking about improvements and reforms. Victorious feats of arms heightened their self-confidence: surely, they, the proud victors of Stalingrad, Leningrad and Moscow, the conquerors of Berlin and Vienna, were entitled to their own government’s trust and to more liberal treatment. Such moods were expressed in poems, novels and short stories. Immediately after the war there was indeed a visible relaxation of ideological control, partly as the result of economic. and administrative confusion. The screws were loosened. Discussions, timid but real, on many topics of national interest cropped up in books and newspapers, to the astonishment of those who remembered the rigid uniformity of the prewar era.
It was in this context that Zhdanov initiated his ideological campaigns. They represented a massive attempt on the part of the rulers to force the Russia of the late 1940s back into the frame of mind of the late 1930s, to kill some of the hopes born during the war, and also to shake the people out of their postwar weariness and frustration. This endeavour has probably worked two ways: every blow inflicted upon libertarian hopes breeds frustration, and frustration may impede the country’s material and moral recovery.
The rulers have, up to a point, now succeeded in tightening the screws and reimposing the old disciplines. In this they have been helped by the demands of economic rehabilitation and by the gravity of the international crisis. Finding their political hopes thwarted, many intellectuals and workers have devoted themselves to jobs of construction and education. Stalin has opened inspiring vistas: the next three or four Five-Year Plans, which should bring Russia’s industrial wealth nearly up to the American level. This objective will claim all the physical and mental energy of the generation that has now entered active life.
The diplomatic war, too, has had its domestic effects. The threat of war was bound to have a depressing effect upon a nation that lost about seven million people. Even with ceaseless diplomatic and propagandistic warfare, there has been no sabre-rattling inside Russia, little brandishing of novel weapons, no warming up of militaristic moods. On the other hand, the war of diplomacy apparently has helped the government rally opinion and recreate stimuli to material and social progress, stimuli which might have been lost in postwar apathy. ‘Keep your old grim temper!’ is the maxim of a somewhat puppet-like hero of a popular Russian postwar novel. It is also the theme of all the propaganda machines.
And yet it seems unlikely that the Russian mind has been pressed back altogether into the old moulds of orthodoxy. The moral shock of the war cannot be altogether overcome, even though its effects may manifest themselves very slowly. Stalin’s foreign policy, too, cannot help keeping up the domestic ferment. It is, in the long run, impossible for the Soviets to be one of the two greatest world powers, with a stake in every issue of international significance, and at the same time to keep the people in a state of narrow-minded, bizarre isolationism. Hence the queer campaigning against ‘cosmopolitanism’ - that elastic and somewhat phony label for unorthodoxy.
Early this year, Literaturnaya Gazeta unwittingly threw a light upon significant intellectual stirrings. ‘Since when’, one of the Russian writers criticised by the paper was quoted as asking, ‘do we speak about Russia and not about Europe, about Russian and not European culture?’ Even more illuminating were the views attributed to a group of excommunicated men of letters. These, according to Literaturnaya Gazeta, protested against ‘primitive crudeness’ in literature and drama, and against the habit of painting the world in black and white. Much more than a literary ‘deviation’, an incipient political revolt, was revealed there. The ‘primitive crudeness’ in literature and art have merely reflected the same features in official politics and in the Stalinist outlook at large; and it may be only a matter of time before the criticism turns from the secondary to the primary manifestations of that ‘primitive crudeness’.
In this development one may see, paradoxically, the result of the civilising work done by the regime. It is precisely because Stalinism has, in its own way, done so much for the education of the new Russian generation that it has become more and more difficult for the advanced elements of the nation to reconcile themselves to the ‘primitive crudeness’ of the Soviet officialdom.
One deviation doesn’t, of course, make a revolt. Symptoms of literary unorthodoxy are not signs of an imminent political upheaval. But in Russian history, the swallows that portend political change have more than once made their first appearance over the fields of literature. In the post-Napoleonic era, political restiveness among men of letters foreshadowed the famous Decembrist rising of 1825. That rising had its origins in the Napoleonic Wars and the way in which they brought Russia and Europe together. It took ten years before the dissatisfaction of literary men was followed by political revolt. Nobody can say whether or in what way history is going to repeat itself; but the indications of a repetition are certainly too many to be ignored.
History has not come to a standstill, even at Stalin’s command. A Russian officer I met casually expressed this conviction in a curious way. I asked what city he came from. He mentioned a town that was some years ago renamed Ordzhonikidze, in honour of one of Stalin’s late close associates. ‘What was the previous name of the place?’, I asked. ‘It was Zinoviev’, he said. ‘And before that, it had been named after a famous Tsarina.’
‘Do you think its present name will endure?’, I asked. ‘Oh, history is a great reviser’, the officer answered philosophically. ‘It will still revise many a name and revalue many a value.’
1. Displaced Persons camps - MIA.