The Icon and the Axe

The destruction of a living Russian culture was made complete in 1930 with the suicide of Maiakovsky, the formal abolition of all private printing, and Stalin's sweeping demand at the Sixteenth Party Congress that the first five-year plan be expanded into a massive "socialist offensive along the entire front."11 Not a single delegate abstained, let alone dissented, as Stalin began to introduce his techniques of therapeutic purges and prescriptive uncertainty. The classical Leninist opposition to relying on "spontaneity" istikhiinost') rather than strict party guidance in preparing a political revolution was expanded into a new Stalinist opposition to tolerating "drift" (samotek) on the "cultural front" while preparing a social and economic revolution.

Moderate planners who argued that there were unavoidable limitations on the productive possibilities of the Soviet economy were denounced as "mechanists" and "geneticists," devoid of Revolutionary spirit and "dialectical" understanding. The purge of Bukharin, the apostle of relative freedom in the agricultural sphere and of balanced development of heavy and light industry, was accompanied by the purge of advocates of relative freedom and balance in the cultural sphere. Thus, Voronsky in literary theory and Deborin in philosophy were denounced for "Menshevizing idealism" and forced to recant publicly. Marxist philosophical ideas were not to be permitted to interfere with the development of the new authoritarian state; and Deborin and his followers were swept from the direction of Under the Banner of Marxism in 1930. The dominant idea in the twenties, that state law was a "fetish" of the bourgeoisie and "the juridical world view … the last refuge of the remnants and traditions of the old world," was replaced by the new concept of "socialist legality."12 The dictatorship of the proletariat would not wither away in the foreseeable future, and the authority of the Soviet state and Soviet law would have to be strengthened, Stalin told the Party Congress in 1930. This contradiction of one of Lenin's fondest beliefs was pronounced "a living, vital contradiction" which "completely reflects Marxist dialectics."13 Freud, whose doctrines of psychic determinism had been hailed in the twenties as "the best antidote to the entire doctrine of free will,"14 was denounced at the first All-Union Congress of Human Behavior in 1930 for denying the possibility of "a socially 'open'

man, who is easily collectivized, and quickly and profoundly transformed

in his behaviour."15