conditions for selling modernist works created in our country to foreign consumers.”54 An active role in the organization of some exhibitions of unofficial Soviet artists in the West was played by Victor Louis-Levin, the Moscow correspondent of the London
As prices in the West grew, nonconformist art became ever more acceptable for the Soviet authorities, comparable in hard-currency revenue with tours by the Bolshoi Ballet or the Igor Moiseyev Ensemble of Folk Dance. Mutually beneficial deals had been worked out in music and ballet with Western impresarios like Sol Hurok. Now the Ministry of Culture agreed to the auction run by Sotheby’s in Moscow in 1988, where the heated bidding brought in sensational prices—for example, Grisha Bruskin’s
Sergei Paradjanov stunned the audience at the New York Film Festival in 1988 when he announced that he wanted to film Gorbachev in the role of Hamlet. Some in the audience ascribed the statement to the director’s well-known eccentricity.
But in November 1991, when Alexander Yakovlev was in New York, I asked him what he considered the main character trait of Gorbachev, who by then had lost his title of President of the USSR, and the country to boot. His reply was brief: “Hamletism.” Yakovlev knew what he was talking about: that cunning fellow with prickly eyes was Gorbachev’s leading liberal advisor. He was the polar opposite of the former chief ideologist of the USSR, Mikhail Suslov, the
Yakovlev changed rapidly, starting out with a solid career in the Party as a former military hero with a peasant background, a nondrinking, hardworking, and commonsensical man. When he was thirty-five, Yakovlev came to New York and spent two years in graduate school at Columbia University. Then he was the Soviet ambassador to Canada for ten years. Those experiences influenced him strongly. (The KGB even accused Yakovlev of being recruited by the American intelligence services, but Gorbachev ignored that report.)
It was in Canada, which Gorbachev visited in 1983 as a member of a Soviet delegation, where he became friends with Yakovlev, sensing that they shared the same ideas. In 1985, as the new leader of the Soviet Union embarking on a reform program of perestroika and glasnost, Gorbachev assigned Yakovlev to bring in the intelligentsia, for he saw that without its active support the country would be slow to change. Thus, Yakovlev became the Party patron of the liberals, even though he was not quite comfortable in that role at first, sometimes displaying the very Hamletism (that is, indecision and fear of change) for which he later rebuked Gorbachev.
Gorbachev’s aim was socialism with a human face. He first thought he could achieve it relying only on Party cadres. But encountering fierce resistance to his reforms within the Party, Gorbachev decided to use cultural forces as a battering ram. As his aides attest, his plans regarding the intelligentsia were thoroughly pragmatic, even cynical: it was to service, theoretically and in practice, the new course of comparatively greater freedom of speech and limited relaxation of economic and political restrictions, reminiscent of Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s.
The liberal Soviet intelligentsia responded to the call enthusiastically, describing themselves as the contractors of perestroika (which literally means “reconstruction”). For the first time in many years they felt needed by the state and they began attacking Gorbachev’s opponents at meetings, in the press, on television—especially since the conservatives had long been their personal oppressors.
The liberals had good reason to see Gorbachev as their patron. He had begun to realize that the stubborn and influential conservatives, recovered from their original shock, would use the first opportunity to get rid of him, as Brezhnev and his friends had done to Khrushchev. He met with writers in 1986, and Anatoly Ivanov, a Hero of Socialist Labor and author of the patriotic potboilers
Learning that the head of the Writers’ Union, Georgy Markov, also a Hero of Socialist Labor, had managed to get his works printed in twenty-seven publishing houses in 1985 alone (and, as it turned out, had 14 million rubles in his savings account), Gorbachev was outraged. “Talentless, senile old men. They praise themselves. They offer their own candidacies for awards. They give themselves prizes and titles.”2
Responding to my question in 2003 on which contemporary poets influenced his worldview, Gorbachev named Okudzhava, Yevtushenko, and Voznesensky. A response like that from Brezhnev or even Andropov would have been impossible. At the urging of Gorbachev and Yakovlev, administrators were replaced in the “creative” unions of writers, artists, and filmmakers, and new people appeared as heads of the leading newspapers and magazines. The weeklies
Journals and then book publishers unleashed an avalanche of previously unavailable literature. It began with the publication of poems by Gumilev, executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921, and then came other banned masterpieces—Akhmatova’s
As the list of officially rehabilitated figures once considered “enemies” (Bukharin, Trotsky, even Nicholas II) expanded in the political sphere, the cultural gates opened more widely, too: the Russian avant-garde was rehabilitated—Kandinsky, Chagall, Malevich, Tatlin, Filonov, and the Russian Dadaist writers Kharms, Oleinikov, and Alexander Vvedensky.
After that, conveniently deceased emigre writers, from Zinaida Hippius and Khodasevich to Yevgeny Zamyatin and Nabokov, and religious philosophers Berdyaev, Lev Shestov, Semyon Frank, and Ivan Ilyin were published in the USSR. The genius of Stravinsky and Balanchine was recognized in full. And then came the turn of living emigres: Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Rostropovich and the writers Aksyonov, Voinovich, Sinyavsky, Maximov, Brodsky, and to top the list, Solzhenitsyn. A popular witticism of the time was, “Today reading is more interesting than living.”
In hindsight, it might appear that this was a spontaneous, unstoppable flow. In fact, the “process went” (to use Gorbachev’s favorite expression) in fits and starts, with the fear that liberalization could cease at any moment. Some people joked, “What will we do when perestroika and glasnost stop? We’ll read old magazines and newspapers, if they’re not confiscated.”
The long-awaited leaps toward greater freedom were interrupted by sudden halts, and almost every publication of an important, previously banned work involved a tense behind-the-scenes struggle. The law on freedom of the
