The Icon and the Axe

The party devoted a special Central Committee meeting early in the summer of 1963 solely to ideological and cultural matters. Indications of unrest (even including occasional strikes) in the industrial and agricultural sector point to the fact that the vague desires and rising expectations of the young intellectuals probably correspond more closely to the grass roots attitudes of workers and farmers than in any previous period of intellectual ferment inside Russia.

Even more important than the numbers of people involved is the fact that this ferment is the product of something necessary for Soviet construction itself: expanded contact with the West and increased education. Though the intention of the Communist leadership is clearly to use travel and education as subordinate weapons in the development of Soviet strength, the effects of its policies may prove more far-reaching. Vasily Kliuchevsky, the great historian of the late imperial period, put the case

well in his classic study of the effects produced on Russian culture by increased Western contact in the seventeenth century:

We may consider that the technical fruits of a foreign culture may not and should not relate to the spiritual bases and roots of the foreign culture, but can people be kept from the desire to acquaint themselves with the roots of a foreign culture when borrowing its fruits?73

For the USSR of today the answer is clearly, no. The curiosity about all things Western-art, music, sports, and manner of life-is animated and inescapable.

The scientific and technological emphases that the Soviet leaders have built into their educational system and cultural exchange proposals have led some Western observers to fear for a "new illiteracy,"74 whereby people are successfully taught to read and even to perform difficult technical tasks without ever learning to think critically. It is difficult, however, to keep technology and ideology in hermetically sealed compartments, particularly in such fields as architecture. Garish and costly monumentalism had become a symbol of the Stalin era, which his successors were anxious to eliminate. By sending delegations to the West to study cheaper and cleaner methods of construction, the regime inadvertently stimulated curiosity about the possibility of integrating architecture with local surroundings and family needs and removing questions of aesthetic judgment from the hands of bureaucrats.75

The first important denunciations of "degenerate excesses" in the anti-Stalin campaign after the Twentieth Party Congress in February, 1956, took place in a scientific laboratory.78 There is receptivity among scientifically trained young Russians to the proposition that Marxism, although a logical outgrowth of nineteenth-century scientific thinking, is inadequate for the more complex and sophisticated thought world of twentieth-century science. Voznesensky, the most technically sophisticated and ideologically heretical of all the young poets, reports that his largest following lies precisely among scientists. Those who work most intimately with the complexities and subtleties of natural phenomena are, he reports, sympathetic to these same qualities in art.77 Evtushenko makes a similar point by insisting that an art of the "oxcart" age is incompatible with life in the space age.78 Increasingly, the literary heroes of the new generation are lonely scientific workers, misunderstood for the most part by their contemporaries and harassed if not persecuted by the Soviet system. Increasingly, the message they seem to be conveying is that of the lonely inventor in Dudintsev's

Not by Bread Alone: "Once a man has started to think, he cannot be denied his freedom."

If, as seems probable, scientifically trained and practically oriented figures are to play an increasingly important role in pressing for change inside the USSR, some of the self-defeating utopianism of past intellectual agitation may well disappear. Creeping pragmatism may not seem an exciting phenomenon to the distant observer. But to those who have seen great expectations so often give way to renewed tyranny and despair this new no-nonsense approach may well provide fortification against disillusionment in the quest for meaningful reform.

A third and even deeper reason for taking the youthful ferment seriously is the psychological need for Russians to make some sense out of the enormous suffering they have undergone in this century. Perhaps forty million people have been killed by artificial means in the last half century -in revolution, civil war, forced repopulation, purges, and two world wars. The myth of Communist infallibility in terms of which all of this suffering was justified is now dead. The papacy of world Communism has been destroyed by Khrushchevian sacrilege-or perhaps moved to Peking. In any event, Russians no longer regard their leadership with the awe and passivity that so long prevailed.