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Late Soviet Culture
From Perestroika to Novostroika
By Thomas Lahusen, Gene Kuperman Duke University Press
Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9713-7
CHAPTER 1
Mikhail Kuraev
Perestroika: The Restructuring of the Past or the Invention of the Future?
Having heard this question posed to me, I have felt the necessity to become either a prophet of perestroika or its historian. Neither role suits me—despite the fact that my personal fate has become intimately tied to the cardinal changes in terms of power and the ruling party, above all in questions of ideology and cultural policy.
Ten (and even five) years ago, I had no illusions regarding the possibility of publication of my works. If five years ago I had been told that Kapitan Dikshtein (Captain Dikshtein) and Nochnoi dozor (The Night Watch) would be published without a single alteration from the censors, and that with the first journal publication I would be accepted into the Union of Writers, all of this would have struck me as a nasty joke. Nevertheless, my works are being published, books are being prepared for introduction—the publishers even complain that I cannot offer a greater volume of material.
In Russian, the word prizvanie (calling) has two meanings. One kind of calling is the pressure of creative forces within—musical, visual, artistic, etc. Driven by these forces, the person takes up a pencil, gets up on a stage, sits behind a piano. Yet "calling" is also the person's summons from without. Social calling. Being called upon by society. In my own experience, and within the context of my literary activities, I have had the opportunity to come to terms with the full energy of these words. While remaining a "thing in itself"—until publication and actual contact with the audience (unless he or she is a genius, in which case he could not care less about the crowd, or a vain peacock, who ignores the audience for other reasons)—the writer is inevitably plagued by doubts about the value of his or her work, full of doubt regarding one's own calling.
The fact that the writer's situation in Russia is significantly different from that in the West is quite commonplace and needs no commentary here. It is simply that social calling, the society calling upon the writer, the reality of the concept of the "writer's obligation" within the Russian culture—all of this creates a new psychological situation. For some, this situation opens fairly good opportunities to secure, as they say, a solid situation for oneself, by means of flattery, catering to wishes, and serving social and political prejudices. For people of a different bent, who do not exaggerate their capabilities and constantly question them, outside interest in their work is not a call to change, to please, or to accommodate, but on the contrary, to acquire some measure of inner confidence in the fact that the work to which one devotes both time and emotional energy is indeed of interest to others.
In fact, it is impossible to qualify the society's calling—one's "social calling"—in any categorical way: for the way in which every person, even a writer, understands society determines the "calling." For me, the fact that my works were not only published, but produced a certain resonance and reaction, was a decisive factor in my life: I have left the cinema studio, where I had worked for twenty-seven consecutive years, and decided to risk concentrating on literary work. Thus, if I am to be seen as a writer, as such I am undoubtedly a child of perestroika. Can a "child" have pretensions to be either a prophet or a historian? If the latter role is hardly within my range, the former is quite frankly hardly appropriate for my age.
After having shown (persuasively, I hope) my incapacity to answer the question posed in the title, nothing else remains but to proceed to answer the question to the extent allowed by the circumstances within which we currently live.
Of all the slogans of perestroika—which in many ways recapitulate those of the October Revolution in 1917—it seems to me that so far the one that has been realized to the greatest extent has been that ofglasnost. In a society that is in a near-revolutionary state, it is impossible to be satisfied with what has been achieved: one must consolidate the gains and pursue others.
But here the movement forward and the gains appear before one's own eyes. Even during the fall of last year, Novyi mir (The New World) was not allowed to acknowledge Solzhenitsyn's birthday by publishing his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The speech was set, slated for an issue, taken out, the chief editor traveled for talks with the top party leadership—all without result. Today Novyi mir has completed the publication of chapters of The Gulag Archipelago and is in the process of publishing other works by the exiled author.
In connection with this, one cannot help recalling the position of those who observed our affairs from the side. Remember, they gave us conditions: "Well, when it will be possible to trash Gorbachev...." "Well, when it will be possible to trash the KGB...." "Well, when there will be a multi-party system...." "Well, when you will print Solzhenitsyn...."
A sharp, intense battle goes on in this country: in a cauldron heated by passions, a new system of all interrelations among peoples, nationalities, and professional, political, and ideological structures is being forged, sought out, tried out. The process is difficult, painful, and when others attempt to put us in the position of schoolchildren who must pass the exam "on glasnost," "on pluralism," "on democratization," the examiners' own position seems naive, devoid of credibility.
Today, the striking Soviet miner carries on a dialogue with power, caring little about how his speeches and actions will be judged by the "examiners." When peasants refuse to accept land without having legal and economic guarantees regarding their work and income, they do not run to their radio sets in order to find out whether somebody likes this or not.
It is not by accident that I speak of this. So that my semiserious tone does not become somewhat misleading, I must say that my theme and subject involve matters of utmost importance: the country's internal and external life. It seems to me that it is in fact in the consideration of the unprogrammed internal development in the country, as well as the external development that as a rule is programmed, that we can find an answer, or at least come closer to answering the question posed in the title.
This question, to which I have not given any special thought before, is highly interesting: it is interesting in the dialectical mobility of these interrelated, mutually enabling and complementing categories: the internal and the external. The oddity, fantasticality, unpredictability of these transitions prompts either seriousness and depth—or flight into skepsis or irony.
History's poetry is paradoxical. Pericles, who gave Athens its democracy and tearfully begged the people's council for the life of his friends, the rights of his own children.... The French Revolution, which began with the execution of the king and ended with the proclamation of the emperor.... The bloodless abdication of the throne by the heir to a three-hundred-year-long dynasty in Russia, and the history of the power that replaced him, written in blood.... An example is not proof, one may collect and list the curiosities of history, marvel at its paradoxes, having reduced this activity to an intellectual amusement of sorts. For me, the paradoxicalness of history is a lesson in humility, a reproach to our pride which claims, "grasp the future, create plans, prescriptions, instructions for the invention of this 'future.'" Nevertheless, it is impossible to pass over one stunning historical paradox.
I hope it is not necessary to prove that perestroika has become a reality due to the will of the state, as well as the political courage that was to be found in a place the most farsighted prophets could not predict. It was precisely within the party, in its highest echelons bearing the bulk of the responsibility for all that was taking place in the country during the long years in power, that a program for the political and social transformation of society was formulated and adopted for action. Without political competition, without prompting from the opposition, the party that has amassed vast amounts of power (which was essentially uncontrolled), the party that had the most effective means of defending this power, including repression, undertook to realize, or at least to create the preconditions for the development of processes of democratization, glasnost, the rebirth of the national culture. Are these not the contradictions that Hegel called the irony of history?
I can recall no instance in history when the ruling party, while possessing unchallenged power, would set the transfer of power into other hands as its main political goal. It may be said that this was in the slogans of October—"All power to the Soviets"; yet it is sufficient to recall what happened when attempts were made to question the identification of the power of the Soviets with that of the Bolsheviks—cases such as the Kronstadt and Tambov events of 1921.
I am convinced that the processes taking place in the country today are in fact democratic, that they evidence the fact that the society's development is organic and not artificially prescribed—processes destined to reveal the society's inner powers. In this respect, our reality is reflected not only by the "tumultuous process" in the Baltics, in the republics of the Caucasus and Middle Asia, but also by the conservatism of the significant portion of the Congress of People's Deputies, a principally new institution of government. The society is tired of building decorations: this has taken too much energy, time, materials; as if for a long time it was not let in on the fact of its reality, the internal life has finally burst into the open. Today the nation is subject to no "examination": it is beginning to get acquainted with itself, seeing itself in a mirror and not before an official holiday banner—seeing and not recognizing itself. It has no examination, but is rather engaged in a stubborn and ruthless process of genuine political self-education. And the strikes, which inflict great economic losses—this is the price that the people are willing to pay for such lessons.
Could such a set of developments be predicted in 1984—such an explosion, the discovery of an internal life, hidden under seven seals? I think probably not. How can one learn to encounter the unforeseen? How can one be ready for the unforeseen, fantastic zigzags of history? It is not possible to become used to this even within the confines of private life.
Returning to the literary sphere, I shall take an example from my private practice. In the journal Druzhba narodov (The Friendship of Nations), the well-known critic Natalia Ivanova wrote of the writers of the "new wave," in which I am included:
The consciousness of this generation of writers shuns publicity. They write practically no publicist articles advancing the cause of the renewal of society, which is something that their older colleagues constantly do, there are no opuses exposing the country's past, they do not take part in the heated discussion of the problems of de-Stalinization, they do not subject to analysis the economic and cultural state of the society. If one may put it this way, they have become the most "noncommitted" ("bespartiinye") of the contemporary literary and social process.
Having read this judgment, I readily agreed with the critic, not suspecting that within a month I would be disproving the line of thinking that seemed fair to me at the time.
I received a questionnaire from the journal Voprosy literatury [Issues in Literature), all of the questions being of a sociopolitical nature. And I answered. During the period my wife and I were visiting Sweden, and because of the release of my book there, we had to deal with the press, radio, television, speak at the University of Uppsala, etc. So what about "noncommittedness"?
I had barely finished telling the audience in Uppsala about the freedom achieved by the press in our country, when I returned and found out that at a meeting of the highest party level the editors of papers and journals which, in the leadership's view, were overly disposed toward critical, negative materials, had been severely reprimanded. Words were followed by actions.
Something else is significant. If in the conditions of the previous system, no argument, struggle, or questioning was possible, today a great deal depends upon ourselves. Zalygin, the chief editor of Novyi mir, could have let it go, having been forbidden to publish Solzhenitsyn in 1988: he did not let go and he won. Knizhnoe obozrenie (The Review of Books), the paper that in recent years has become a notable forum for public opinion, turned out not to be ready for the struggle: here the conservatives won, while Novyi mir and others appear ready to struggle for their positions, and there are reasons to consider their chances for victory to be quite high.
The point is that glasnost is the practical achievement of perestroika, but all the other realities are not that clearly defined. So one may wonder whether glasnost is capable of serving a renewal of the past way of life that is above all based upon enclosure, non-glasnost. On the whole, I do not believe this will be the case—I can think of no historical analogies. The restoration in France was not a rebirth of the monarchy of the feudal times, and indeed the Renaissance was not a rebirth of the ancient way of life, but rather a return to reconceptualized moral values of the past.
It is understandable why the question of cosmetic improvements arises. It is not unfounded. Today we hear economists' proposals to return for a time—tactically, so to speak—to the old system of organization of the economy. Attributed to such acknowledged proponents of perestroika as the academician Abalkin, such proposals appear to be prompted by the sense of the uncontrollability of the ongoing processes, the inefficiency of production, the worsening inflationary processes. It is already not a question of conquering new and greater frontiers, but rather of stabilizing the situation. While I am not an economist myself, I am convinced that here the economist is thinking too narrowly, taking no account of what is called the psychosocial condition of the society. The revolutionary state of mind does not heed the arguments of economists or the reasoned recommendations of sociologists and historians: instead the logic of political struggle simply takes effect—the struggle for rights. Regardless of the logical and economic arguments (some of which are quite persuasive) offered to the people of the Baltic republics in favor of the preservation of their political and state dependence upon the Soviet Union, one may be quite certain that they will not be heard. It is amazing that the situation of 1917—19 is repeated: extremely persuasive arguments were offered that the Bolsheviks must not take power, that the people would not follow them, that, having taken power, the Bolsheviks would not be able to retain it. All such arguments were not to be heard and could not be heard. Brought to the point of despair, the masses jumped behind the banners of the party, which promised a complete and immediate break with the accursed past life, as well as the immediate—within one generation's lifetime—construction of an amazing new life.
Why is this historical excursus necessary? Only to attempt to show concretely the impossibility of returning to the old ways in intranational relations, economics, and politics—to show the revolutionary character of our contemporary life, as well as attempt to make a case for some healthy skepticism in regard to the fortune-tellers, prophets, and seers of whom there are always aplenty during the pivotal epochs.
Within the context of the discussion of the "internal" and the "external," another moment cannot be omitted. In the "Cologne Address" of the Russian émigrés (March 1988), it is categorically declared: "There is no perestroika [reconstruction]—only building anew." A paradoxical demand. While the émigrés who have signed this "address" have a critical, even negative attitude toward the socialist revolution, they adapt what is in my view one of its most destructive slogans. For those who are obsessed with "building anew" have wasted countless human energy, effort, material, and moral resources on trifles that acquired state proportions. The most telling in this respect is not even the "novyi byt" ("the new everyday life"), which produced a great number of nonsensical, uncomfortable-for-life commune buildings that have been reconstructed more than once since their appearance during the 1930s. The most telling—and it would seem to me, instructive of these trifles—was the invention and implementation of the "new life" for the peasant: indeed, here "anew" was really "anew"! Is it still not clear that history gives no blank pages to either revolutionaries, progressives, or reformers and managers of people's lives?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Late Soviet Culture by Thomas Lahusen, Gene Kuperman. Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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