The Icon and the Axe

Yet, there has also been at work within the USSR an unmistakable and extraordinary ferment, which is popularly identified with those under thirty-five even though many older people participate in it and many younger ones do not. The crucial question for the historian is to determine the nature and significance of this process: to say how present ferment in the USSR relates to the Russian past, and how it might bear on the future. For all its confusing and often contradictory qualities, youthful ferment in the USSR can be divided into four essential aspects or levels.

The first and least elevating is the impulse toward purely negative protest. This restlessness has expressed itself in a variety of ways: the violent delinquency of "hooligans" (khuligany), the flamboyant innovations in style

and dress of the "style boys" (stiliagi), and the compulsive opposition to all dogma of the nibonicho (an ingenious contraction for the Russian words "neither God nor the devil").

The antagonistic official press has referred bitterly to "nihilists in short pants,"26 and the most radical of Russia's restless youth have adopted the term "men of the sixties." Thus, both extremes of opinion in the USSR point to a resemblance with the original nihilists and "men of the sixties" who appeared after the repressive reign of Nicholas I just a century before. The opportunity for communal social experiments and revolutionary organization that had given elan to the young nihilists under Alexander II was, of course, absent a century later. But the sense of persecution and a need for new answers was, if anything, even more intense.

Certainly, the Communist regime was both distressed and profoundly perplexed by the antagonism of so many young people to official culture. The leaders of the mammoth Communist Youth League are now nearly a decade older than in Lenin's time, and veteran Bolsheviks petulantly acknowledge their inability to understand the indifference of youth to the paths that they have prepared for them to follow. Speaking at a congress of the Young Communist League in March, 1957, Voroshilov complained almost pathetically of "young people among you, in our midst, who are maneuvering. They are dreaming about something-but certainly not what they should be dreaming about." His only prescription for "these bugs and beetles" was to "say 'they shall not exist' and take all steps in this respect."27 But the "bugs and beetles" continued to exist and even proliferate. At the next congress of the Communist Youth League in March, 1962, the attitude of the Communist leadership was equally despairing. Khrushchev, having set up new boarding schools to help condition a new Communist elite and a compulsory work period between high school and higher education to help young people "overcome their separation from life," was vehement in his denunciation of the continued nihilism and "parasitism" of

the young.28

This continuing indifference to official ideals and seemingly pointless search for novelty in clothes, sex, and crime is, of course, part of a more universal antagonism toward the depersonalized and urbanized modern world. This first level of protest is not simply a Soviet phenomenon but rather a particularly unrefined expression of the widespread desire in advanced civilizations to penetrate beyond the monotony of daily routine to more authentic kinds of individual experience.

A second, more positive aspect to the youthful ferment is the rebirth of Russian humor. Genuine comedy had all but vanished from the Russian scene in the Stalin era. All that remained were the crude vulgarities of the

dictator himself, compounded largely of lavatorial allusions and heavy-handed insults to national minorities. The rich traditions of literary satire and peasant humor which had flourished under all but the most extreme periods of tsarist repression were severely crippled by Stalin's psychotic sensitivity to all forms of implied criticism in his declining years. Denied the opportunity for public laughter at their system, the Russian people turned increasingly to private bitterness. This damming up of the humorous stream that had traditionally been a free-flowing part of the "broad Russian nature" had dangerous consequences which even Stalin's long-delayed last Party Congress recognized, with its call in 1952 for new Gogols and Saltykovs.29 The rehabilitation of Russian humor was further aided by the rise to power of Khrushchev, who had a better sense of humor than any preceding leader of Russian Communism and made a jocular style part of his new political technique.

The humor that arose in the post-Stalin era acquired, however, a sharper bite than even reformist Communist leaders could readily accept. Pointed fables and colorful plays on words revealed subtlety, lightness, and irreverence for pretense-attitudes which contrasted sharply with official Soviet culture and provided fresh resources for the fast-evaporating stock of human satire.