Another recurrent theme is the dilemma of despotic reformism confronted by Stalin's successors. Following, as had Catherine II, Alexander I, and Alexander II, on the heels of a repressive and authoritarian predecessor, Stalin's heirs sought to rekindle popular enthusiasm by sweeping initial amnesties and vague promises of reform. The line first sounded by Malenkov with his amnesties from forced labor camps and promises of a 'new course' was taken over and given a new theatrical quality by Khrushchev. But the new ruler soon confronted the classic problem which had so perplexed Catherine and the two Alexanders. How can one introduce reforms without jeopardizing the despotic basis of control? How can one
revive initiative without stimulating insubordination? In the wake of his denunciation of Stalin in February, 1956, Khrushchev met in Hungary, Poland, and his own country the equivalent of the shock administered to Catherine by Pugachev and the French Revolution, to Alexander I by the Semenovsky uprising and the European revolutions of the early 1820's, and to Alexander II by the ideological tumult and assassination attempts of the 1860's. Faced with a revolution of rising expectations that he had helped to call forth, he was forced to reassert the authoritarian essence of his position. As so often in the past, reformist rhetoric gave way to renewed repression.
Pressures for retrenchment on reform in the late fifties and early sixties were, however, to some extent countered by yet another recurrence of an old Russian theme: the conflict of two generations. Khrushchev appeared to have sensed the wisdom of attempting to befriend the articulate young generation, whose outlook differed profoundly from that of the shell-shocked survivors and bureaucratic beneficiaries of the Stalin era. For the new generation the material accomplishments of the second, Stalinist revolution seemed as remote as the Utopian dreams of the first Leninist revolution had been to their Stalinist parents. The new generation was brought up, rather, amidst the high hopes that had accompanied the wartime effort. It was a better-educated generation, conscious of the disparity between its own technical competence and the bureaucratic sloth and psychotic excesses of Stalin's post-war rule. It had been a silent generation; but it rapidly found things to say, when Khrushchev in his own political insecurity gave it the opportunity in 1956. Even more important, the new generation kept on talking after the inevitable reaction in late 1956 and 1957. Voices began to be heard from creative periods of the Russian past; less timid they seemed, or at least less intimidated. By the early sixties some were speaking of an even more radical generation composed of those in their early twenties and known by the historically venerable term 'men of the sixties.'
The age of Stalin was at last coming to an end: a quarter of a century dominated by the idea of zagovor, or 'conspiracy.' A conspiratorial code of revolutionary expediency had been transposed into a system of government, and Stalin's own intrigues camouflaged with tales of conspiracy by Trotskyite wreckers, capitalist encirclers, Titoist vampires, or simply 'certain circles.' All these forces were united in 'a conspiracy of the condemned' against the USSR (to cite the title of Virta's violently anti-American drama of 1948). Within the USSR, Stalin's subordinates might be forming a 'conspiracy of boyars' (the subtitle of the second part of Eisen-stein's Ivan the Terrible). Even inside the Kremlin, the possibility existed that conspiratorial doctor-poisoners were secretly at work.
From the populace in general, Stalin was aided by what came to be called 'the conspiracy of silence' (a phrase used first in the 1820's by a disillusioned Westernizer, Prince Viazemsky, to describe the political passivity of Russians before the tyrannical methods of Nicholas I).1 Bruno Jasienski, a Polish Communist who moved to France and then to suicide in Russia during the purges, used the even more telling phrase 'conspiracy of the indifferent' (the title of his important unfinished work of the thirties, which was published only after the denigration of Stalin in 1956).2
After the death of Stalin, the all-important question was: What could provide an antidote to conspiratorial government supported by conspiracies of silence and indifference? A prophetic hint was provided by yet another concept of conspiracy that had been put forth on the eve of Stalin's second revolution by the last of the short- blooming crop of humorists from Odessa, Yury Olesha. In his tale of 1927, Envy, Olesha gathered together a few Old World intellectuals into a 'conspiracy of feelings'3 (which became the title of the dramatic form of the novel). Supremely superfluous people, envious of the brave new world being built about them, Olesha's 'conspirators' are implausible egg-head cavaliers (one of them is named Kavalerov) among the revolutionary roundheads: vacillating, yet still princely Hamlets in an age when this symbol of the old intelligentsia was about to be abolished from the stage.
In Olesha's novel the strong arm of Soviet power is represented by two figures, one a soccer player and the other a sausage maker, bent on building a kind of giant supermarket system for the new society. They are clearly the wave of the future, and to sustain their conspiracy Olesha's errant cavaliers flee to the world of fantasy, where they build a machine to destroy all machines and name it 'Ophelia.' But this missing Madonna for the conspiracy of feelings will not permit herself to be used. It was Hamlet's coldness that killed Ophelia; and now, brought back to life by the Hamlets of the old intelligentsia, Ophelia proves a vengeful lady-turning on them rather than the machines.
The net effect of the story, however, is to arouse sympathy for the 'conspiracy' and leave one with the impression that its apolitical opposition to the new order will somehow continue. The activity of the decade since Stalin can be viewed as a posthumous vindication of some of the feelings which Olesha's cavaliers had been unable to defend.
After a quarter of a century of Stalin's 'conspiracy of equals' (the title of Ehrenburg's laudatory novel of 1928 about Babeuf's organization of that name4), the time had come for 'the thaw' (to cite the title of the novel he published in 1954). The killing frost had stricken Russian culture in full blossom, and no one could be sure what would emerge after such a
winter. But one old branch survived unbent, and many new shoots did appear. Thus, one must turn to the envoi left by a 'survival of the past,' Boris Pasternak, and to the fresh voices raised by Soviet youth in the decade since Stalin.
The Reprise of Pasternak
Whatever his historical impact on Russian culture may prove to be, Pasternak set forth in the last writings before his death in i960 a remarkable human testament and a moving reprise on the culture of Old Russia that is deserving of study in its own right.
It was perhaps to be expected that this reprise should be that of a poet. Man's power to sing spontaneously and implausibly may well provide his only path to dignity and self-respect in an age of calculation, deception, and spiritual isolation. Boris Pasternak, one of the purest and most musical poets of the century, had that power. It put him in communion with the world of unheard melodies and higher harmony which has always been suspect to proponents of a closed and authoritarian society. Plato would have banished the poets from his Republic, and Lenin the sounds of the 'Appassionata' from his memory.
But, for Pasternak, poetry was everything: not just a form of consolation for the adversity of contemporary political and economic life, but rather a way of cutting through all artificiality to the real world-the throbbing and sensuous world of persons, places, and things. Pasternak seeks to defend that world against the less real world of abstract slogans, creeds, and statistics. Individual poetry is the language of the former; corporate prose, the medium of the latter. In a land bent on producing quantities of the most artificial prose in a pretentiously bureaucratic century, Pasternak remained an uncompromisingly lyric poet. His commitment was not to ideas but to life itself-from the verses he wrote in the revolutionary year of 1917 entitled My Sister Life to the last poems of Doctor Zhivago, whose name means 'living.'
