The Icon and the Axe

The ordinary man still seeks a credible account of recent Russian history to replace the mythic one of the Stalin era. Thus, the quest for explanation goes on. It feeds on a belief rooted in the chronicles and secularized by Hegel, Marx, and Lenin that there is an intelligible pattern and meaning to history. Behind the quest lies the desire to feel that suffering has not been in vain, that beyond statistical consolations and ideological opiates something better is really coming into being-on earth as it is in space. Many continue to call themselves Communists, because that is the banner under which Russians have worked and suffered in recent years. But Evtushenko is typical in his highly un-Leninist definition of communism as "the decency of the revolutionary idea," deserving of respect because it has become "the essence of the Russian people," entitled to authority only in "a state in which truth is president."79

Decency and truth demand an owning up to some of the darker pages of Russian history. Just as the younger generation has embraced a kind of philo-Semitism as a means of atoning for the anti-Semitism of past Russian history, so has it adopted a sympathetic attitude toward the small Baltic states, whose periodic despoliation and repopulation by Russian conquerors from Ivan III to Stalin has long bothered sensitive Russians. The term "Baits" was used as a synonym for Siberian prisoners in the High Stalin era; and recent Soviet literature has tended to praise and indeed idealize

this beleaguered region. There is special respect for the Esthonians, whose integrity and fidelity to democratic forms during their brief period of independence between the two world wars won them an admiration comparable to that earned by their cultural kin and northern neighbors, the Finns. The hero of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich devotes a special paragraph to the subject:

Well, it's said that nationality doesn't mean anything and that every nation has its bad eggs. But among all the Esthonians Shukhov had known he'd never met a bad one.80

The rebellion of four youths in V. Aksenov's Salinger-like Ticket to the Stars is told in terms of their plan to flee to Tallinn, the capital of Esthonia and traditional center of Westward-looking gaiety in the eastern Baltic.81 The growing respect for decency and truth can also be measured by the increasing inability of party functionaries to gain support for their periodic campaigns of denunciation. Younger writers seem unlikely to be either fully bought off by the material inducements or fully intimidated by the partial punishments which the regime alternately employs. Sensitive weathervanes of ideological change, such as Ilya Ehrenburg, have unreservedly thrown in their lot with the younger generation. The term "fighter of the first rank" (along with second and third ranks) has been introduced as a kind of informal patent of moral nobility; and Evtushenko has noted that "people someday will marvel at our time when simple honesty was called courage."82 Even Khrushchev felt obliged to sell himself as the benefactor of youthful expectations against "Stalin's heirs," who were blasted with his approval in Pravda by Evtushenko's poem of that name. Khrushchev's successors were, initially at least, deferential if not defensive toward dissident young intellectuals, assuring them that the arbitrary interference of the Khrushchev era would cease and attempting to present themselves as the true friends of "genuine intellectuality" (intelligentnost'). This term became late in 1965 the latest in the long line of normative terms derived from intelligentsia, but when officially proclaimed to be "in no way opposed to narodnosf or partiinost',"83 seemed more likely to remind Russians of the three "ism's" comprising the confining "official nationality" of the nineteenth century than to guide them toward the new world they seek in the late

twentieth century.

A fourth and related reason for insisting on the future implications of the current intellectual ferment is the fact that it has roots in Russian tradition as well as Soviet reality. The more one looks at the younger generation and its search for positive ideals, the more one senses that they are not just opposed to their Stalinist parents (often referred to now as "the

ancestors"),84 but are in many ways seeking renewed links with their grandparents. They are, in short, rediscovering some of the culture which was just reaching new richness in both the political and artistic spheres at the time of the Stalinist blight.

In a short poem written in a Soviet youth magazine in the old folklore form a young Soviet poet seeks to rehabilitate the symbol of Westernization desecrated by Stalin, to free it even of its Leninist name and revolutionary symbols:

Tell us something of St. Petersburg,

For as yet we have not seen it.

Long ago we implored the producers

Please, do not bring us all those miscellaneous films

About lovely, deserted ladies,