The Icon and the Axe

What is clear is that there are still many anonymous Christians in Russia, and that genuinely pious families often face one of the crudest of all forms of persecution: the forcible removal of children from the home.

The ferment of the Khrushchev era may have represented only the passing unrest of peripheral intellectuals: foredoomed, if not ultimately meaningless. Certainly the young revokes were more certain of what they were against than of what they favored. They were, moreover, not revolutionaries in any meaningful political sense. The ability of the regime to sustain one-party rule and to anatomize opposition lent an air of unreality to any consideration of alternative forms of political and social organization. la any case, the younger generation in the USSR-in contrast to those of other Communist states, such as Hungary and Poland-did not generally relate communism with foreign domination but saw it as an irreversible part of their history. Communism has been made to appear less odious by the fact that Russia has emerged under its banner to a position of power unprecedented in Russian history. Since there was every material inducement for gifted youth to join the managerial structure of a state able to use and reward the talented, cultural unrest seemed to some observers little more than the passing malaise of a bohemian fringe on the periphery of a growing industrial society.

To the Soviet leadership, however, intellectual ferment was a subject of the most profound concern. The extraordinary amount of time and energy spent on artistic and intellectual affairs by Khrushchev-an earthy figure, who clearly had no personal interest in such matters-must be explained at least partly in terms of the omnipresent concern of insecure autocrats for the realities of power. The Soviet leaders have vivid memories of the extraordinary role played by the intelligentsia in the genesis of their own aging revolutionary movement. They also realize that Leninist governments-no matter how "liberalized" or "de-Stalinized"-are ultimately based on an ideology. Political power in a totalitarian state is not based either on the periodic popular elections of a democracy or on the religiously sanctified hereditary succession of more traditional forms of authoritarian rule. The stated rationale for Communist rule in the USSR has remained the metaphysical pretensions of that party to represent the vanguard of the historical process on the verge of moving "from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom." Although the USSR could shed its ideological pretensions and become simply another powerful state with a permissive, pluralistic culture, there is no reason to assume (as the history of Nazi Germany demonstrates) that such developments must necessarily result from growing education and prosperity.

There are, nevertheless, at least four reasons for believing that the

ferment of the post-Stalin era may represent the beginnings of something new rather than a finished or passing episode. First is the sheer number of people involved in the ferment. Previous ideological unrest in Russian history was invariably confined to a small minority which discussed issues in relative isolation from the populace as a whole. Many more people read Katkov's chauvinistic Russian Herald than Mikhailovsky's Annals of the Fatherland, the sensationalist illustrated Niva than the World of Art. In the USSR of the sixties, however, ideological controversy was waged in the most widely circulated journals-and among a populace which has acquired elementary literacy and some schooling in ideological terminology. The monopoly of the Communist party on the organs of communication seemed of decreasing importance in a time when the exact line on many questions remained either unclear or unenforced.

Khrushchev's denigration of Stalin in 1956 opened a Pandora's box of critical questions about where and how things went wrong. The petulant explanation ad hominem that the trouble began with Stalin's "cult of personality" in the mid-thirties and his institution of purges against the party did not answer the question or even provide the kind of "profound Marxist analysis" that loyal Leninists were seeking. Some apparently view forced collectivization as the fatal departure; others blame the entire Leninist conception of a totalitarian party and compression of the two revolutions into one. The "Aesopian" tradition of discussing unmentionable political questions in terms of past history has been revived; and the great increase in the late fifties and early sixties in the number of students studying history in effect bespeaks a more lively interest in public affairs among the younger generation.