Postwar

XIII. The End of the Affair

‘Revolution is the act of an enormous majority of society directed against the rule of a minority. It is accompanied by a crisis of political power and by a weakening of the apparatus of coercion. That is why it does not have to be carried out by force of arms’.

Jacek Kuron and Karel Modzelewski, Open Letter to the Party (March 1965)

‘Each Communist party is free to apply the principles of Marxism-Leninism and socialism in its own country, but it is not free to deviate from these principles if it is to remain a Communist party’.

Leonid Brezhnev (August 3rd 1968)

‘It was only after the Prague Spring of 1968 that one began to see who was who’.

Zdenek Mlynar

‘Yesterday came suddenly’.

Paul McCartney

The Sixties in the Soviet bloc were of necessity experienced very differently from the West. De-Stalinization after 1956 stimulated demands for change much as decolonization and the Suez debacle did in the West, but the destruction of the Hungarian revolt made it clear from the outset that reforms would come only under the auspices of the Party. This in turn served as a reminder that the mainspring of Communism was the authority of Moscow; it was the mood and policies of the Soviet leadership that counted. Until his overthrow in 1964, it was Nikita Khrushchev who determined the history of Europe’s eastern half.

Khrushchev’s generation of Soviet leaders still believed in the international class struggle. Indeed, it was Khrushchev’s romanticized projection of Soviet revolutionary memories onto Latin American uprisings that led him to make the missteps that produced the Cuba crisis of 1962 and his own downfall. The struggle with China that emerged into the open in 1960, and afforded Moscow’s leftist critics a ‘Maoist’ alternative to the Soviet model, was not merely a struggle for geopolitical primacy; it was also in part a genuine conflict for the soul of ‘world revolution’. In this guise, the competition with Beijing placed Moscow’s post-Stalinist rulers in a contradictory position. As the homeland of anti-capitalist revolution they continued to advertise their seditious ambitions and insist upon the undiminished authority of the Party, in the USSR and in its satellites. On the other hand the Kremlin continued to favour co-existence with the Western powers—and with its own citizens.

The Khrushchev years did see real improvements. From 1959, Stalin’s ‘Short Course’ was no longer the authoritative source of Soviet history and Marxist theory.[177] The reign of terror abated, though not the institutions and practices to which it had given rise: the Gulag was still in place, and tens of thousands of political prisoners still languished in camps and in exile—half of them Ukrainians. Under Khrushchev, Stalin-era laws restricting job mobility were abandoned, the official workday was shortened, minimum wages were established and a system of maternity leave introduced, along with a national pension scheme (extended to collective farmers after 1965). In short, the Soviet Union—and its more advanced satellite states— became embryonic welfare states, at least in form.

However, Khrushchev’s more ambitious reforms failed to produce the promised food surpluses (another reason why his colleagues were to dump him in October 1964). The cultivation of hitherto ‘virgin’ lands in Kazakhstan and southern Siberia was especially disastrous: half a million tons of topsoil washed away each year from land that was wholly unsuited to forced grain planting, and what harvest there was frequently arrived infested with weeds. In a tragic-comic blend of centralized planning and local corruption, Communist bosses in Kyrgyzstan urged collective farmers to meet official farm delivery quotas by buying up supplies in local shops. There were food riots in provincial cities (notably in Novocherkassk in June 1962). By January 1964, following the disastrous 1963 harvest, the USSR was reduced to importing grain from the West.

At the same time, the private micro-farms that Khrushchev had sporadically encouraged were almost embarrassingly successful: by the early sixties, the 3 percent of cultivated soil in private hands was yielding over a third of the Soviet Union’s agricultural output. By 1965, two thirds of the potatoes consumed in the USSR and three quarters of the eggs came from private farmers. In the Soviet Union as in Poland or Hungary, ‘Socialism’ depended for its survival upon the illicit ‘capitalist’ economy within, to whose existence it turned a blind eye.[178]

The economic reforms of the fifties and sixties were from the start a fitful attempt to patch up a structurally dysfunctional system. To the extent that they implied a half-hearted willingness to decentralize economic decisions or authorize de facto private production, they were offensive to hardliners among the old guard. But otherwise the liberalizations undertaken by Khrushchev, and after him Brezhnev, presented no immediate threat to the network of power and patronage on which the Soviet system depended. Indeed, it was just because economic improvements in the Soviet bloc were always subordinate to political priorities that they achieved so very little.

Cultural reform was another matter. Lenin had always worried more about his critics than his principles; his heirs were no different. Intellectual opposition, whether or not it was likely to find a wider echo in the party or outside, was something to which Communist leaders, Khrushchev included, were intensely sensitive. Following his first denunciations of Stalin in 1956 there was widespread optimism, in the Soviet Union as elsewhere, that censorship would relax and a space would open up for cautious dissent and criticism (that same year Boris Pasternak unsuccessfully submitted the manuscript of his novel Dr Zhivago to the literary periodical Novy Mir). But the Kremlin was soon worried by what it saw as the rise of cultural permissiveness; within three years of the Twentieth Party Congress Khrushchev was making aggressive public speeches defending official Socialist Realism in the arts and threatening its critics with serious consequences if they continued to disparage it, even in retrospect. At the same time, in 1959, the authorities clamped down on Orthodox priests and Baptists, a form of cultural dissidence that had been allowed a certain freedom since Stalin’s fall.

However, Khrushchev himself, if not his colleagues, was reliably unpredictable. The 22nd Congress of the CPSU, in October 1961, revealed the extent of the schism between China and the USSR (the following month the Soviets closed their embassy in Albania, Beijing’s European locum), and in the competition for global influence Moscow set out to present a new face to its confused and vacillating foreign constituency. In 1962 an obscure provincial schoolteacher, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was allowed to publish his pessimistic and implicitly subversive novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in Novy Mir—the same journal that had rejected Pasternak not six years before.

The relative tolerance of Khrushchev’s last years did not extend to direct criticism of the Soviet leadership: Solzhenitsyn’s later work would certainly never have been allowed into print even at the height of the ‘thaw’. But in comparison with what had gone before, the early Sixties were a time of literary freedom and cautious cultural experimentation. With the Kremlin coup of October 1964, however, everything changed. The plotters against Khrushchev were irritated at his policy failures and his autocratic style; but above all it was his inconsistencies that made them uneasy. The First Secretary himself might know exactly what was permissible and what was not, but others could be tempted to misunderstand his apparent tolerance. Mistakes might be made.

Within months of taking control, the new Kremlin leadership began to press down upon the intelligentsia. In September 1965 two young writers, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, were arrested. Under the pseudonyms Abram Tertz and Nikolay Arzhak they had smuggled out for publication in the West various works of fiction. Tertz-Sinyavsky had also published—abroad—a short, critical essay on modern Soviet literature, On Socialist Realism. In February 1966 the two men were put on trial. Since no law in the Soviet Union