The Magical Chorus

press and the repeal of censorship was not passed until 1990.

An example of this struggle was the dramatic fate of Children of the Arbat, a novel by the popular writer Anatoli Rybakov: it is well documented, for the author and his widow both wrote memoirs³ and Rybakov told me a lot himself.

Rybakov, a Stalin Prize laureate (despite having been exiled to Siberia in the 1930s for being a former Trotskyite), completed Children of the Arbat, an epic narrative about the Great Terror in which Stalin is a central character and is depicted as a devious tyrant, in 1966. He immediately offered it to Tvardovsky for his liberal journal, Novy Mir; the editor had a high regard for the novel, quite bold for those days, and planned to publish it the following year, in 1967. But the censors blocked Children of the Arbat and the manuscript remained in the author’s desk for twenty years.

Throughout the Brezhnev era, Rybakov, a persistent and energetic former soldier, tried to get the book into print, without avail. The situation should have changed with Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, but that was not the case at all: the Stalin theme continued to be a minefield. Under Brezhnev and Andropov, the Party bureaucrats told Rybakov that a novel like his about Stalin would be published only “when our entire generation is gone from this life.” Under Gorbachev they demanded huge changes and cuts: “Stalin is shown in a one-sided way.”

Stubborn Rybakov resisted in every way he could, gathering reviews of support of the novel from sixty famous writers, film actors, and directors. It was an old defense technique, but it was more effective in the glasnost era. Gorbachev recalled it grumpily in his memoirs: “The manuscript had been read by dozens of people who began showering the Central Committee with letters and reviews, calling it the ‘novel of the century.’ It became a public event before it was published.”⁴

In the new political situation, Gorbachev had to take that into account, even though he stressed that Rybakov’s book “did not impress us much” artistically. (Khrushchev read Children of the Arbat in manuscript in 1969 when he was retired, and he also criticized the Stalin episodes.)

The manuscript of Children of the Arbat became a litmus test for determining a person’s political position. Tatiana Rybakov recorded a characteristic exchange. The poet Bella Akhmadulina: “If I wake up tomorrow and see that the journal with Rybakov’s novel is out, I will say: that means the Soviet regime is over!” Her former husband, Yevtushenko, countered: “And I, on the contrary, will say: The Soviet regime is stronger and triumphant!” Yet he wrote the first letter of support for the book’s publication.

In the end, the fate of Children of the Arbat was decided at the highest political level. At a Politburo meeting on October 27, 1986, the leading conservative Yegor Ligachev attacked the novel: “The meaning of this enormous manuscript of 1,500 pages boils down to denouncing Stalin and all our prewar policies…. Clearly, such a novel cannot be published, even though Rybakov is threatening to send it abroad.” Gorbachev, as befits Hamlet, continued vacillating. “If we start exposing ourselves, acknowledging our mistakes, that would be the most expensive and most desired present for our enemy.”⁵

Gorbachev’s advisor, Yakovlev, even though less blinkered than his boss, still could not decide, either: having read it over several nights (the novel made a powerful impression on him), Yakovlev felt that the writer was wrong to treat Stalin “with prejudice.” He recalled the three-hour conversation he had with Rybakov at his Central Committee office: “He responded to all my cautious comments on the book with ferocious objections, he reacted sharply, with blatant challenge…he rejected my right as a member of the Politburo to make any criticisms at all to a writer.”⁶

Rybakov had the foresight to bring along a compilation of the letters in support for his novel to this audience with Yakovlev: “These are not simply raves, this is the mindset of the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia cannot abide Stalin.” The roles had changed: no longer was the Party functionary pressuring the writer, but the writer, in the name of the cultural elite, was pressuring the functionary. Yakovlev knew that Gorbachev needed the support of those people and he surrendered: “It must be published, since we’ve taken the course for the freedom of creativity.”⁷

When the journal Druzhba Narodov [Friendship of the Peoples] announced it would be printing Children of the Arbat, its subscription went from 100,000 to over 1,000,000. The total print run for the book, which came out in the Soviet Union in 1987 as a hardcover, was 10.5 million copies; Children of the Arbat was published in fifty-two countries, became an international best seller and a political signal of the Soviet leadership’s intentions. In the United States, Rybakov’s picture appeared (along with Stalin) on the cover of Time magazine, and President Reagan, speaking in Moscow in 1988, announced, “We applaud Gorbachev for bringing Sakharov back to Moscow from exile and for publishing Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat.”⁸ Thus the story of Children of the Arbat became one of the last examples of the huge importance of literature in political life during the Soviet era.

It seemed that the Soviet state had ideologized society to the limit. The irony was that after Stalin’s death, politics was evaporating from the surface of cultural life. It was replaced by moribund official rituals, while the real political debate moved to the kitchens of the intelligentsia. The main requirement of the Brezhnev era was not to rock the boat. Even the orthodox Andropov complained that there were a lot of Communists but no Bolsheviks (meaning that people joined the Party pro forma, as a way to get ahead, but without conviction).

Under Gorbachev, the real discussions suddenly became public. The spectrum of political views among the cultural elite turned out to be unexpectedly broad—from monarchism to anarchism. Neopaganism and neofascism, appearing from out of nowhere, flourished like wild-flowers, and Black Hundred and anti-Semitic views became fashionable. Conspiracy theories about the suicides of Esenin and Mayakovsky spread: some thought they were murdered, either by the Soviet secret police or by Jews or by both.

The cultural and political situation grew more complex: in the past, the central dichotomy had been “Soviet v. anti-Soviet.” Now, there were also the “conservative-liberal” and “Slavophile-Westernizer” divides as well. For the first time there was a dizzying array of variants of these positions: one could position oneself as an anti-Soviet conservative or a Slavophile avant-gardist.

As Gorbachev relaxed Party control, a vacuum was created in cultural power, and elite groups tried to grab as much territory as they could. The division into spheres of power went on everywhere: literature, art, music, film, and even that icon of Russian culture, the Moscow Art Theater.

Founded in 1898 by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko as the “theater of Chekhov,” the legendary company was driven before the revolution by Stanislavsky’s motto: “Be neither revolutionary nor Black Hundred.” This allowed MAT to remain above the fray and win a respect and an almost sacral authority among the intelligentsia.

After the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin became MAT’s patron, regularly attending its performances. This assured the theater a privileged position and funding, but it destroyed its former independence. Yet some of MAT’s Soviet productions were as refined as the legendary works of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. One milestone was the premiere of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play about the Civil War, The Days of the Turbins (based on his novel The White Guards), in 1926.