The Icon and the Axe

some of the flavor of its epic transformations and violent inhumanity. The Leninist and Stalinist revolutions are retold in credible if somewhat two-dimensional terms in his And Quiet Flows the Don and his Virgin Soil Upturned, respectively. But even this scrupulously loyal (and fundamentally anti-Western and anti-intellectual) writer was harassed and delayed in his effort to tell the second of these stories. In the high Stalin era, he withdrew increasingly to the countryside of his native Ukraine, summoning up the image and authority of an enduring nature in titles and descriptive passages, publishing the full version of Virgin Soil only after Khrushchev had denigrated Stalin, and becoming after Khrushchev's fall the third Russian writei to be awarded a Nobel Prize.70

For the historian of Russian thought, the Stalin era has an importance quite apart from the personality of the dictator. For it was a period in which many long silent forces suddenly came to play an important role in Russian cultural life. Like forms of growth incubating in the frozen subsoil, masochistic and chauvinistic impulses suddenly shot forth as Stalin's mechanized plows dug below the surface and brought them closer to the light.

At the same time, the soil overturned by this "second revolution" proved hospitable to new crops that sprang up from fresh seeds of literacy and learning. Though Stalin liked to fancy himself as having infinite power to control the vegetable as well as the human world (as his deification of Lysenko's environmentalism reveals), he was faced with some unexpected crops on the steppelands that he had so systematically harrowed and burned out. If the political and economic historian must deal largely with Lenin's seeding and Stalin's weeding, the cultural historian must look at the deeper problems of the soil, and-however tentatively-at the relation of present harvests to those of the past and the future.

3. Fresh Ferment

Ihe general nature of Russian accomplishments under Bolshevism have long been evident. Urbanization and industrialization have accelerated; the sinews of military strength have dramatically increased; and centralized control has combined with a scientific ideology to achieve greater internal discipline than had previously been attained by Russian rulers. The resourceful, if brutal, leaders of the USSR have perfected-out of their own revolutionary experience-effective means of frustrating any political challenge to their authority, whether through agitation from within or subversion from without. Finally-largely because they were in power during World War II and have registered important material accomplishments since- the Communist leadership has sold itself to the long-suffering Russian people as something more than a passing phenomenon in their long historical experience.

But the plans and accomplishments of the ruling oligarchy have always been only a part of the complex record of Russian history. Just as the Russian heritage influenced in many ways the official culture developed under Stalin, so also the problems that came to perplex him seem strangely familiar. The historian can, of course, never know precisely how the past relates to the present, particularly when surrounded by the unprecedented problems of the atomic age. Nor can he know precisely how the inherited forms of art and thought affect the world of power politics and economic necessity. But it is his duty to point out those themes which sound like echoes from the past, and there was a hauntingly large number in the late Stalin era.

To begin with, there was the stimulus of war: a recurrent theme of modern Russian history. The sense of exhilaration, self-sacrifice, and increased social mobility had traditionally combined with new Western contacts to stimulate reformist sentiment in modern Russia. Indeed, radical agitation had almost invariably followed important wars and enlisted the services of returning veterans: the Decembrists following the Napoleonic

wars; the "new men" of the sixties, the Crimean War; the revolutionary populists, the Turkish War; the Revolution of 1905, the war with Japan; and the Revolutions of 1917, World War I. It was not unreasonable to suppose that the dislocations and exposure to the West during World War II would lead to similar reformist pressures-coming in the wake of the suffering and deception of the 1930's. Many Russians did, indeed, defect to the Germans; and Stalin went to extremes to limit contacts with his wartime Western allies. The purges and violent anti-Westernism of the early post-war period were, in large measure, attempts to prevent what might otherwise have been an irresistible drift toward some form of political liberalization and accommodation to long-suppressed consumer needs.