seventeenth century:
We may consider that the technical fruits of a foreign culture may not and should not relate to the spiritual bases and roots of the foreign culture, but can people be kept from the desire to acquaint themselves with the roots of a foreign culture when borrowing its fruits?73
For the USSR of today the answer is clearly, no. The curiosity about all things Western-art, music, sports, and manner of life-is animated and inescapable.
The scientific and technological emphases that the Soviet leaders have built into their educational system and cultural exchange proposals have led some Western observers to fear for a 'new illiteracy,'74 whereby people are successfully taught to read and even to perform difficult technical tasks without ever learning to think critically. It is difficult, however, to keep technology and ideology in hermetically sealed compartments, particularly in such fields as architecture. Garish and costly monumentalism had become a symbol of the Stalin era, which his successors were anxious to eliminate. By sending delegations to the West to study cheaper and cleaner methods of construction, the regime inadvertently stimulated curiosity about the possibility of integrating architecture with local surroundings and family needs and removing questions of aesthetic judgment from the hands of bureaucrats.75
The first important denunciations of 'degenerate excesses' in the anti-Stalin campaign after the Twentieth Party Congress in February, 1956, took place in a scientific laboratory.78 There is receptivity among scientifically trained young Russians to the proposition that Marxism, although a logical outgrowth of nineteenth-century scientific thinking, is inadequate for the more complex and sophisticated thought world of twentieth-century science. Voznesensky, the most technically sophisticated and ideologically heretical of all the young poets, reports that his largest following lies precisely among scientists. Those who work most intimately with the complexities and subtleties of natural phenomena are, he reports, sympathetic to these same qualities in art.77 Evtushenko makes a similar point by insisting that an art of the 'oxcart' age is incompatible with life in the space age.78 Increasingly, the literary heroes of the new generation are lonely scientific workers, misunderstood for the most part by their contemporaries and harassed if not persecuted by the Soviet system. Increasingly, the message they seem to be conveying is that of the lonely inventor in Dudintsev's
Not by Bread Alone: 'Once a man has started to think, he cannot be denied his freedom.'
If, as seems probable, scientifically trained and practically oriented figures are to play an increasingly important role in pressing for change inside the USSR, some of the self-defeating utopianism of past intellectual agitation may well disappear. Creeping pragmatism may not seem an exciting phenomenon to the distant observer. But to those who have seen great expectations so often give way to renewed tyranny and despair this new no- nonsense approach may well provide fortification against disillusionment in the quest for meaningful reform.
A third and even deeper reason for taking the youthful ferment seriously is the psychological need for Russians to make some sense out of the enormous suffering they have undergone in this century. Perhaps forty million people have been killed by artificial means in the last half century -in revolution, civil war, forced repopulation, purges, and two world wars. The myth of Communist infallibility in terms of which all of this suffering was justified is now dead. The papacy of world Communism has been destroyed by Khrushchevian sacrilege-or perhaps moved to Peking. In any event, Russians no longer regard their leadership with the awe and passivity that so long prevailed.
The ordinary man still seeks a credible account of recent Russian history to replace the mythic one of the Stalin era. Thus, the quest for explanation goes on. It feeds on a belief rooted in the chronicles and secularized by Hegel, Marx, and Lenin that there is an intelligible pattern and meaning to history. Behind the quest lies the desire to feel that suffering has not been in vain, that beyond statistical consolations and ideological opiates something better is really coming into being-on earth as it is in space. Many continue to call themselves Communists, because that is the banner under which Russians have worked and suffered in recent years. But Evtushenko is typical in his highly un-Leninist definition of communism as 'the decency of the revolutionary idea,' deserving of respect because it has become 'the essence of the Russian people,' entitled to authority only in 'a state in which truth is president.'79
Decency and truth demand an owning up to some of the darker pages of Russian history. Just as the younger generation has embraced a kind of philo-Semitism as a means of atoning for the anti-Semitism of past Russian history, so has it adopted a sympathetic attitude toward the small Baltic states, whose periodic despoliation and repopulation by Russian conquerors from Ivan III to Stalin has long bothered sensitive Russians. The term 'Baits' was used as a synonym for Siberian prisoners in the High Stalin era; and recent Soviet literature has tended to praise and indeed idealize
this beleaguered region. There is special respect for the Esthonians, whose integrity and fidelity to democratic forms during their brief period of independence between the two world wars won them an admiration comparable to that earned by their cultural kin and northern neighbors, the Finns. The hero of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich devotes a special paragraph to the subject:
Well, it's said that nationality doesn't mean anything and that every nation has its bad eggs. But among all the Esthonians Shukhov had known he'd never met a bad one.80
The rebellion of four youths in V. Aksenov's Salinger-like Ticket to the Stars is told in terms of their plan to flee to Tallinn, the capital of Esthonia and traditional center of Westward-looking gaiety in the eastern Baltic.81 The growing respect for decency and truth can also be measured by the increasing inability of party functionaries to gain support for their periodic campaigns of denunciation. Younger writers seem unlikely to be either fully bought off by the material inducements or fully intimidated by the partial punishments which the regime alternately employs. Sensitive weathervanes of ideological change, such as Ilya Ehrenburg, have unreservedly thrown in their lot with the younger generation. The term 'fighter of the first rank' (along with second and third ranks) has been introduced as a kind of informal patent of moral nobility; and Evtushenko has noted that 'people someday will marvel at our time when simple honesty was called courage.'82 Even Khrushchev felt obliged to sell himself as the benefactor of youthful expectations against 'Stalin's heirs,' who were blasted with his approval in Pravda by Evtushenko's poem of that name. Khrushchev's successors were, initially at least, deferential if not defensive toward dissident young intellectuals, assuring them that the arbitrary interference of the Khrushchev era would cease and attempting to present themselves as the true friends of 'genuine intellectuality' (intelligentnost'). This term became late in 1965 the latest in the long line of normative terms derived from intelligentsia, but when officially proclaimed to be 'in no way opposed to narodnosf or partiinost','83 seemed more likely to remind Russians of the three 'ism's' comprising the confining 'official nationality' of the nineteenth century than to guide them toward the new world they seek in the late
twentieth century.
A fourth and related reason for insisting on the future implications of the current intellectual ferment is the fact that it has roots in Russian tradition as well as Soviet reality. The more one looks at the younger generation and its search for positive ideals, the more one senses that they are not just opposed to their Stalinist parents (often referred to now as 'the
ancestors'),84 but are in many ways seeking renewed links with their grandparents. They are, in short, rediscovering some of the culture which was just reaching new richness in both the political and artistic spheres at
