The Icon and the Axe

The fact that the key purges of 1948-9 are referred to in Soviet literature as "the Leningrad case" points to a second traditional feature of recent Soviet history: the recurrence of the old tension between Moscow and Leningrad. The revenge of Muscovy had perforce to be directed against its ancient rival for pre-eminence in the Russian Empire. Leningrad was still a "window to the West," and, within the Communist Party, the Leningrad organization had traditionally represented revolutionary idealism and broad international culture from the time of Trotsky and Zinov'ev. These figures had been among the earliest victims of Stalin's intrigues; and he began the purges of the thirties with the murder of their successor as head of the Leningrad Party, Serge Kirov. His successor, Andrei Zhdanov, perished in turn with mysterious suddenness in the midst of the post-war decimation of the Leningrad Party. Having suffered nearly three years of blockade during the war, Leningrad had emerged with certain credentials of heroism that commanded respect in the post-war USSR. It had become the center not only of artistic and intellectual ferment but also of a relative emphasis on light industry in future economic development. Leningrad was still, as it had been in the days of tsarist St. Petersburg, the center and symbol of patterns of development closer to those of the West than those favored in Moscow.

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."