The last fifty years have also witnessed great change and great achievement in the arts and pure thought. Novel approaches to philosophy and religion, sociology and historiography, have been matched by exciting experiments with new styles, forms and materials in painting, sculpture, music, letters.

       In those areas Soviet Russia has been not merely passive but actively reactionary, hostile to everything fresh, innovative, experimental, unorthodox. The mercenaries of a state theology have crushed every assertion of individuality at home and blocked its infiltration from beyond the frontiers.

       Intellectually the nation was sealed off and isolated as thoroughly as Japan before it was pried open by Western gunboats. The guardians of a vulgar materialism have invented cultural crimes—"formalism," "cosmopolitanism," "idealism"—rating suppression, banishment to Siberia, even death. Ideas and forms unacceptable to the total state, or simply beyond the mental grasp of its rulers and gendarmes, have not merely been attacked as "wrong," they have been punished as heresy.

       For nearly half a century a great nation has had only one permissible truth, Marxism-Leninism, and only one permissible mode of thought, Dialectic Materialism. Merely to suggest that there might be other truths and methods made one an "enemy of the people." Actually to stray beyond the confines of the prescribed verities as defined by their custodians at any given time, brought anything from ostracism to death. (326)

       All art and culture was squeezed into a strait jacket called "socialist realism," which required the representation of Soviet life as happy and heroic, and that in styles so simplistic that even a Stalin or Khrushchev could understand them and whistle their tunes. Socialist realism—-still the official doctrine reaffirmed by the last Party Congress—is plainly a dishonest formula: there is nothing socialist or realistic about coloring or denying the facts of life. At bottom it is a propaganda device, limiting art to poster-like chromos and literature to political advertising, above all prohibiting free self-expression. Creativity was thus stultified or driven underground.

       Max Eastman wrote in 1955, in his Reflections on the Failure of Socialism:

       Earlier, in 1951, a Russian concert violinist who had known the Soviet music and theater worlds from the inside, Juri Jelagin, by then with the Houston (Texas) Symphony Orchestra, wrote a remarkable book, Taming the Arts. It is a moving personal and political account of what happens when thought and esthetics are totally subjected to a vulgar state. In the concluding chapter he wrote: (327)

       And so in the arts, as in science, few works of surpassing originality, let alone genius, have come out of Soviet Russia. The one novel worthy of standing beside Tolstoy or Turgeniev, Chekhov or Gorki, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, was written in secret ("for the drawer," as Soviet writers say) and, though available to the rest of the world and awarded the Nobel Prize, has been denied publication in its native land. Shostakovich and Prokofiev, composers ranking with great forebears like Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, were repeatedly attacked, humiliated and silenced for periods, their work twisted by official pressures and some of it outlawed.

       The old Russia had been a cornucopia of creative works even under the limitations of Romanoff absolutism. Its Russian Ballet and the Bolshoi Opera, and to a more limited extent Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theater, are still the main adornments of Russian culture. As long as writers avoided overt attacks on the monarchy, they could explore any ideas and pull apart any institutions. Russian literature was then openly committed to reform, liberty, and a compassionate humanism. Czarism had constrained free expression—Soviet communism choked it off entirely.

       The propaganda claim that the Soviets have fostered intellectual and artistic progress is fantastic on the face of it. The country has produced no significant Soviet philosopher or inventor, lamentably few men in the arts comparable to those of the preceding half-century. The life of the mind and spirit has been arid and. sterile. (328) The dictatorship, with the rise of Stalin to its apex, turned deeply anti-intellectual, suspicious of those who, because they think, may think1 differently.

       Since the demise of Stalin, of course, there has been a thawing and a stirring of talent—so remarkable and newsworthy after the decades-long drought that its scope and its quality have been unduly magnified. But the regime still deals with the intelligentsia as if it were an alien power, to be tranquilized or intimidated into conformity.

       The Kremlin had few more obedient servants and stalwart defenders among writers of talent than the novelist Alexander Fadeyev. An enthusiastic communist, he repeatedly figured as the regime's spokesman at international conferences and in polemics with Western writers. His war novel, The Young Guard, which appeared in 1945, was hailed and rewarded by officialdom and circulated in huge editions. Some years later, however, it came under delayed criticism for an alleged lack of emphasis on the role of the party in his story. Submissively he rewrote it to correct the "errors" in a new version in 1951. But in 1956, at the age of fifty-five, he shocked the country and the party by committing suicide.

       Three years after the passing of Stalin, soon after the launching of de-Stalinization, even a Fadeyev cracked under the continuing pressures. Surely the "new freedom" for the creative minority has been grotesquely overrated.

• Progress in Education

       The one aspect of cultural life where the Soviet regime has achieved greatly is education—not in quality, to be sure, but in quantity. Nearly the entire population has learned to read and write; 95 per cent, to be exact, a figure exceeded by only twenty other countries. Although the number of students in higher education generally is smaller, in proportion to the population, than in Sweden, Canada, or the United States, the Soviets hold first place for graduates in engineering, science, and agriculture—a reflection, of course, of their extreme specialization.

       Russian women have made enormous progress in education, representing, as of 1960, some 40 per cent of the total enrollment in the institutions of higher learning. (329) This percentage is not significantly different from what it is in other advanced nations, but more of the women students take degrees in science, engineering, and especially in medicine and pedagogy than in the West. Relatively few, considering their great numbers, occupy top posts in scholarship, engineering, and science—a pattern of male domination very much as in the rest of the world. Even fewer women reach leadership levels in the party and in government. While they make up 50 per cent of the country's work force, they constitute only 20 per cent of the party membership. There are only five women (2.6 per cent of the total) in the Central Committee, and there has never been a woman in the Politburo.

       None of this, of course, detracts from the credit due to the regime, against the background of their relative retardation before 1917, for the education of women. It should be noted, too, that the Kremlin has brought its own brands of culture, such as propaganda plays and cinema, to millions in the provinces. Even second-echelon cities now have local theatrical groups and are visited by major companies on tour—very much as in the United States.

       The authentic achievements in education, however, have been deeply impaired by the restraints on free thought inherent in a totalitarian society. In the nature of the case, the coercion prevailing in intellectual life generally affected the schools. The humanities have been neglected. What passes for "social science" has been, certainly until the most recent years, no more than indoctrination by rote in Marxism-Leninism.

       Large areas of knowledge and inquiry are still blacked out. Education has been almost wholly functional, without room for the free mind and spirit, geared to prevention of independent thinking rather than its encouragement. At every point where they might conflict, the premises of the state ideology have foreclosed uninhibited inquiry and discussion in the educational process.

       It is not true, as so many nowadays appear to believe, that Russia before the revolution was almost entirely illiterate. (330) The compulsory schooling law of 1910, geared to embrace the entire population by 1920, was being earnestly implemented when war and civil war intervened. Professor S. Timasheff, with Fordham University in New York and a leading authority on Russian history, wrote in The Great Retreat, published in 1946: "If the peaceful development had continued, from 1920 on, all Russian children would have had access to the primary school." He rejected the Soviet figures on illiteracy under Czarism. "It is possible to make an estimate which yields the index of literacy as 40.2 per cent in 1914," he wrote.

       In the youngest generation, the one subject to military service, the index was much higher. According to official records for 1914, 67.8 per cent of army recruits, the young men of twenty-one, were literate—a percentage above that in some American states at that time. It was the exceptional extent of illiteracy among peasant women that pulled down the national average as calculated by Professor Timasheff. He cited a census of industrial workers only taken in 1920 that showed a literacy index of over 77 per cent among those between fourteen and twenty, evidently reflecting the compulsory schooling law of 1910.

       This is a far remove from the nearly complete illiteracy implied by communist propaganda. The fact is that there was a great recession in schooling in the early Soviet years, due to war and civil war, famine, and dislocation of life in general. The boastful Soviet percentages of increase in literacy take that low point as their base, rather than true pre-war figures.

       More important, the values of literacy have been vitiated by the state monopoly of the printed word. As Professor George S. Counts of Columbia University wrote in a book on Soviet education, the drive to end illiteracy "was designed, not to liberate the mind of the individual but to hold it captive . . . . Literacy without a free press can scarcely be a truly liberating force in society." Under communism mere literacy in the first place gives the regime readier channels for polluting minds with official lies. Its goal is not enlightenment but indoctrination. What would be the advantage of a state monopoly of all reading matter, if the people couldn't read? (331)

       In the old Russia, there was a small highly-educated class; in the new Russia there is a large half-educated class. From kindergarten to university, the worst sin Soviet teachers could commit was to cast doubts on prescribed ideas and facts. Being human, they played it safe, no matter how outraged they may have been, in their secret minds by the curriculum and textbooks. Meekly they taught that "everyone knows the irresistible, shattering power of Stalin's logic, the crystal clearness of his intellect, his iron will, devotion to the party, his modestly, his artlessness, his solicitude for the people and mercilessness to enemies of the people." The quotation, from the Short Biography of the dictator, was prescribed for classroom use by the Teacher's Gazette in 1947.

       The prime duty of teachers, the journal Pedagogica declared, is "instilling in children hatred for the enemies of the people." Eastman's indictment of the "robot-factories they call schools" is justified by perusal of any Soviet textbook for the young, even now.

       There has been only marginal improvement in this connection under Stalin's successors. Not only children but college and university students are still taught a version of the history of the revolution and the civil war that doesn't mention Leon Trotsky. The story of industrialization and collectivization is told in classrooms without mentioning the unspeakable horrors of those processes. In history books, the USSR still won the war, not only against Germany, but also against Japan, practically single-handedly and despite betrayals by the Western Allies. Now schoolbooks produced in the Khrushchev years are being busily edited to reduce or obliterate his stature.

       The intention here decidedly is not to underrate the potentials of education and literacy, even under totalitarian conditions. Reading provides access to the treasure-house of classic Russian literature, replete with mental and spiritual stimulation. As John Scott of Time magazine wrote not too long ago on returning from another trip through Russia: "The human mind cannot easily be fettered, even in the Soviet Union. (332) You cannot teach a young man or woman to read, to make mathematical analyses and scientific instruments, to use computers and other complicated instruments—without having him learn to think." The deep-reaching restiveness of Soviet youth today and its increasing defiance of authority confirm that he was correct.

• Persecution of the Arts

       Russians, I remarked earlier, are a naturally creative people. Even during the civil war, amid general slaughter, hunger and epidemics, their country experienced a burst of artistic energy. The world repute the USSR long enjoyed for theater, cinema and literature, indeed, rested chiefly on works in the first dozen years or so, before the Stalin era went into full stride. Those involved in that minor renaissance for the most part had already been active under the old regime but drew new inspiration from the revolutionary upheavals. The names and achievements upon which Soviet culture has nourished its self-esteem even to the present all date back to that first period. Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Nemirovich-Danchenko, in the theater; Eisenstein and Pudovkin, in motion pictures; the poets Pasternak, Yessenin, Mayakovsky, Mandelstamm, Akhmatova; the prose writers Zamyatin, Pilnyak, Bulgakov, Babel, Alexei Tolstoy, Zoshchenko; Prokofiev and the young Shostakovich in music—the list is heartwarming. But their relative freedom was shortlived. Yessenin and Mayakovsky in the end were unable to adjust themselves to the new Soviet life and committed suicide, Yessenin in 1925, Mayakovsky five years later. Another talented writer, Andrei Sobol, took his own iife in 1926.

       A few, like Pasternak and Akhmatova, remained alive and free but reduced to virtual silence. Many gifted Russians, of course, had escaped to the West where, despite the material and psychological limitations of life as émigrés, they made or continued brilliant careers; men like Bunin, Nabokov, Merezhkovsky, Mark Aldanov, Leonid Andreiev, Mikhail Artzibashev, Konstantin Balmont, in literature: Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky, in music; Diaghilev, in ballet; Sikorsky and de Seversky, in aeronautics. (333) Dozens of Russian exiles attained positions of eminence in the most important Western universities.

       The rest, along with thousands of their fellow artists, were driven to barren conformity or physically destroyed in the eclipse of thought and culture that came with industrialization and collectivization. The hacks, the sycophants, the politicians of the arts took over. It was not enough to refrain from attacking the regime; the luxury of neutrality was denied them. To remain alive, as Pasternak would say in Doctor Zhivago, you had "to praise what you most hate and to grovel before what makes you unhappy." A fog of mediocrity settled over the land.

       At the time Hitler was burning books, an outrage that drew horrified protests from the civilized world, Stalin in effect was burning authors. But the same world hardly noticed and many of its intellectual spokesmen even applauded rapturously. A double standard of judgment, one for communists and another for other brands of despotism, had by then become fashionable.

       Persecution of the arts and intellect was no less fierce in the postwar Zhdanov years. The cruelties were as savage, the regimentation as total. Again there were waves of suicide among intellectuals. The excitement churned up by the "thaw" after the demise of Stalin is less a measure of the "new freedom" in the arts than it is of the deep-freeze that was being defrosted, but freethinking, especially where it touches on the political system and its ideology, is stall kept within narrow limits.

       The posthumous "rehabilitation" of writers after the so-called de-Stalinization in 1956, incidentally, reminded the Soviet public of how many hundreds of gifted men and women—now officially declared innocent of any crime— had been destroyed. Among them, to mention only a few, were Alexander Voronsky, one of the truly great Russian literary critics; Isaac Babel, novelist and short-story writer; the poet Pavel Bespalov. The rehabilitated also included a striking number of literary men in the national-minority regions, creating in their native languages: Abdulla Aman-tai, a Bashkir poet; Rukhula Akhudnov, an Azerbaijan journalist and scholar; David Bergelson, who wrote in Yiddish; the Armenian, Aksel Bakuntz. (334) The executioners did not discriminate—they exterminated Russian and non-Russian innocents alike.

       Novels like The Thaw by Hya Eherenburg; Not by Bread Alone by JDudintsev; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn; the poetry of Yevgeny Yev-tushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Buiat Okudzhava, and many others —these have electrified the Soviet people and the world. Truth-speaking authors, and poets in particular, are all but deified by Soviet students and the youth generally. They turn out by the thousand to hear their favorite poets. For a time, until the police intervened, they gathered for open-air readings.

       Without derogating their literary quality, however, it must be said that as artists these, men and women are hardly in a class with the Russian masters of the past. Their fame derives not only from literary merit, but also from the social and political overtones of their work. The most popular writers are those who show most valor and skill in defending humanist values and virtues, and not necessarily the most gifted. To a people long tormented by thirst, good clean water can be as intoxicating as champagne.

       Some fourteen thousand people, overwhelmingly youngsters, jammed a sports stadium outside Moscow on the evening of November 30, 1962. They were noisy and excited, like fans anywhere gathered for a major event. Thousands more were milling around unhappily outside. It was not a sports event, but a Poet's Evening that had drawn this multitude, which greeted the three writers, two men and a woman, with thunderous applause.

       The enthusiasm had less to do with the quality of the poetry, though all three are first-rate artists, than with then-boldness in dissecting and indicting aspects of Soviet existence. It was in essence a political demonstration, and no one knew this better than the men in the Kremlin. Probably it was not coincidental that Khrushchev chose the very next day for a violent attack on unorthodox art and artists that marked a new period of toughness against dissident moods in culture. (335)

       The new writers, and older ones emboldened by their example, dared write of love, justice, mercy, conscience, the soul, and other long outlawed themes—especially about truth. They dared complain of drab and regimented lives. New heroes appeared in their works—or rather the old heroes of the old Russian literature: sensitive men and women concerned with private conscience and happiness. Small wonder that the enthusiasm evoked was unbounded.

       It is, in fact, close to a miracle that after decades of absolute suppression and the virtual destruction of two generations of artists, the fountains of sincere emotion and creativity had not dried up. This seems to me the most meaningful aspect of the new period. Assuredly it holds out hope for a genuine rebirth of Russian genius once the yoke of autocracy has been thrown off.

       But it would be a factual error—and a disservice to the intellectuals straining against state controls—to suppose that the yoke has already been removed. Socialist realism remains the only "safe" doctrine. Those who speak out still risk loss of their livelihood and worse, particularly if they are on the lower rungs, without the shield of national and international fame. Abstract and other unorthodox painters and sculptors still cannot be exhibited, despite a few brief token shows through the years.

       Even the limited permissiveness in culture continues to be anxiously policed by a hectoring, threatening state, and the trend at this time is toward less not more freedom. The areas of the permissive are not expanding but shrinking. The new rights stop short where they might challenge the official truths. Writers and artists are jailed more rarely than in the Stalin era, but punitive measures against free spirits have not been ended. Surveillance of non-conformers has been increased under the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime; young writers have been more often interrogated by the police. The ugly practice of committing recalcitrants to mental institutions has not been called off. The inquisitors are ubiquitous and tireless.

       A recent Czechoslovak defector, Jan Lukas, described as his country's leading creative photographer, said on arriving in America: (336)"Whenever the regime feels that the danger point has been reached, the door is promptly and unreservedly slammed in the artist's face. The artist therefore often feels akin to a yo-yo—manipulated openly or covertly, depending on his stature." This is no less true for Soviet Russia.

       Joseph Brodsky, a modernist poet, was imprisoned a few years ago as a "parasite"—full-time dedication to the muse was defined by the authorities as willful idleness. About ten days after Sinyavsky and Daniel were convicted in a blaze of world attention, the young poet Vladimir Batshev was sentenced to five years in a labor camp without benefit of publicity at home or abroad. Only the authorities know how many more have suffered such martyrdom in total darkness. In the summer of 1966 at least seventy Ukrainian writers were arrested, at least twenty of them shipped to labor camps; whatever the formal charge, their real crime was excessive pro-Ukrainian sentiment. Many others have been repressed on other pretexts. Most authors, including some of those who get their work published, still write also "for the drawer"—works they know have no chance of passing the censors. After all, there is only one publisher, the state, and it is sensitive to every nuance of direct or elliptical criticism. Writers who get published in foreign countries, with or without their connivance, are at once visited by "literary critics in plain-clothes."

       "Many writings are not being published at the moment," Max Frankel reported to the New York Times after a visit to the USSR in 1963. "Films are being made but not shown; canvases are completed but not displayed. Ordinary people here still do not dare to write an honest letter abroad, not to mention a politically sensitive statement at home."

       There was a measure of relaxation in the last year of Khrushchev's reign, but by the summer of 1965 harsh winds were blowing again and are becoming more biting at this writing. The new weather was signalized by the dismissal of the chief editor of Pravda, A. M. Rumyantsev, who had written a couple of editorials on the temperate side. (337) In 1966, the reaction was in full blow. Brezhnev and Kosygin obviously had decided that the intellectuals needed a taste of the whip.

       The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, now serving seven-and five-year sentences at hard labor, was to be the demonstrative whipping. Their sin was that they had permitted their novels and essays, unpunishable at home, to be published abroad under pennames, "Abram Terz" and "Nikolai Arzhak" respectively. Their arrest, according to a New York Times dispatch, drew a bitter comment credited to the poet Yessenin-Volpin. The men were lucky, he said, because "there were so many others about whom the world knows nothing—as little as people know of a rabbit eaten by the wolves in the forest."

       Clandestine poems, stories, essays are circulated in typed or handwritten copies on a scale amounting to another, unauthorized literature challenging the published literature. Within the country some of the best known and most widely recited poems, especially those of the late Boris Pasternak, are precisely those that the government has denied publication. A spiritual cult has developed around Pasternak's memory; people, mostly the young, make pilgrimages to his grave in a Moscow suburb and it is a matter of self-respect to know his proscribed poetry by heart.

       Even celebrated authors enjoying vast reader demand find much of their new work prohibited. The foremost Soviet prose writer, Solzhenitsyn, for example, has been refused publication of two novels and many stories and as a result is known to be in serious, economic straits. The KGB searched his rooms and confiscated many of his manuscripts, he revealed recently. One of his novels, The Cancer Ward, slated to run in Novy Mir, failed to appear, but its content became known in the West and illicit copies are being passed from hand to hand in the Soviet Union. Novy Mir and another literary magazine, Yunost, have published daringly, sometimes close to the political danger line. The tenure of the editors is uncertain—the Kremlin may fire them without notice, as happened to their predecessors. (338)

       (These words were barely off my typewriter when news came through that the two editors who were running Novy Mir during the illness of Alexander Tvardovsky, the chief editor, have been removed, as the United Press phrased it, "in an apparent blow at the country's liberal literary movement." The rumors were to the effect that it was punishment for having accepted the Solzhenitsyn story.) The important point is that none of the supposed new freedoms are permanent or confirmed by decrees. They are exercised on sufferance subject to good behavior. The Kremlin gives and the Kremlin takes away.

• Note on a Poet

       Yevgeny Yevtushenko1 is no Pushkin—in fact, he is no Yevtushenko. I mean that for all his literary glibness and youthful charm, he does not measure up to the inflated fame that has come to him. All his instincts are deeply humanist, and his writings abound with evocations of long-forbidden values. That is enough to make him an idol of Russian youth. Yet his personal situation is not without an aspect of pathos, for his fate is typical of the badgered intellectual in a totalitarian society.

       The sad truth is that Yevtushenko, at home or on his foreign tours, has never uttered a line critical of communism as a faith or as a way of life. Its superiority over non-communist nations is implicit where it is not explicit in all his works and lectures. "I am proud because they cannot break me down or force me to my knees," he exclaimed in one of his earliest poems. But "they" could and they did. Following Khrushchev's denunciation of the new tendencies in December 1962, Yevtushenko was among those who "recanted" his alleged sins. For a year or two thereafter he was in the "doghouse," silent and denied the foreign travel he loves.

       Unlike more outspoken colleagues who end up in forced-labor camps or lunatic asylums, he knows the limits of his new freedom and exercises caution in safeguarding his career and comfort. He has not said a word in defense of, or sympathy for, Sinyavsky and Daniel, or other recent victims of literary suppression. (339)

       In a curious way, given his fame as a truth-speaker, he serves as a court poet. The Kremlin knows that it can trust him to go to the bourgeois infidels of the West; that he will limit himself always to fine poetic flights without reflecting on the Soviet regime and its oligarchs. At his American lectures his worshipful audiences sometimes asked embarrassing questions with political implications, and always Yevtushenko evaded them with wisecracks. The Kremlin can count on him also to return home to attack and ridicule the world of its freedom, which had lionized him. America, he informed his Soviet admirers in early 1967, on getting back from a much-publicized tour, is a land of "frozen lies," its skyscrapers about to skid on the slippery frauds.

       Yes, the masters can depend on him confidently. He is their talented press agent, a showpiece of the bogus freedom so dear to liberal hearts abroad. But one wonders what is really in his own heart. Does he enjoy his celebrations of truth and justice, knowing as he must that he dare not go beyond the limits set by thought-police? More courageous Soviet writers, those willing to take more chances, do not hold him in great esteem, literary tests aside—and they are not allowed to go abroad.

• Revolt of the Intelligentsia

       It would be a mistake, given these facts, to believe that the arts and sciences and education have been liberated. They seem free only in contrast to the total blackout that proceeded. Compared with open societies or pre-1917 Russia, they remain in dire bondage. Yet many intellectuals venture far more than is strictly allowed, apparently gambling that the dictators will hesitate to make martyrs of them, or simply in a mood to take the medicine of punishment if they must. Their new self-confidence is the most fateful element in the cultural equation.

       Confirmation of this fact has come, of all people, from the daughter of Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva. (340) On arriving in the United States as a refugee in April 1967, she explained that she was seeking the freedom of expression and of conscience denied in her native land. "I can say," she declared in a press conference, "that I lost hopes which I had before that we are going to become liberal somehow." Other intellectuals, she indicated, shared her despair and are producing honest works in defiance of the authorities. [*In the June, 1967, issue of The Atlantic magazine, Mrs. Alliluyeva wrote, about the "martyrs of Russian literature" in the past and at present: "As before, it is given to gendarmes and policemen to be the first critics of a writer's work. Except that in Russia under the Czars neither Gogol nor Shchedrin was ever brought to trial for the sharpness of his satirical fantasies, and they were not punished for laughing at the absurdities of Russian life. But now you can be tried for a metaphor, sent to a camp for figures of speech!"] Many of the men who now rule the Soviet world, she emphasized, were as guilty as her father of the crimes they hypocritically charge against him alone. The blame, as she saw it, must be put where it belongs—on "the regime and ideology as a whole."

       Her testimony, one hopes against hope, may awaken those abroad who have mesmerized themselves into the belief that "liberalization" has come to the Soviet Union. The New York Times (April 30) called her declarations "the most devastating critique of communism and the Soviet system since the denunciations of Stalin and Stalinism," But evidently they were not devastating enough, to dislodge consoling delusions, even in that newspaper. It continued editorially to plug for American foreign policy resting on the assumption that the USSR has undergone a fundamental change.

       No one would denigrate the moral courage and mental clarity of Stalin's daughter. Yet it should be made clear that other defecting intellectuals, dozens of them, have said approximately what she did, sometimes in almost the same words, only to be ignored in the free world.

       People habituated to life in freedom do not find it easy to understand the heartbreak involved for a Soviet citizen in fleeing to the West. (341) How many of us, under similar circumstances, would abandon the earth we love, out families and friends, our language and careers, to start life anew—often in middle age—in alien countries frightening in their sheer strangeness? Always the elation of escape is mixed with feelings of guilt for having found sanctuary while others are facing the challenge of totalitarian oppression back home.

       Another recent defector, Yury Krotkov, whom I quoted in an earlier chapter, conveys this touchingly in the introductory chapter to his book, I Am From Moscow, titled The Angry Exile in its London edition. A successful writer in his homeland, with prestigious "credits" for conformist plays and film scenarios, he was tormented by the price of success and comfort. "All I have ever written," he' exclaims, "is a lie, dishonorable fabrications of situations, images, conflicts, pseudo-values, nothing but hackwork and propaganda."

       Krotkov points to "the struggle that is going on in literature, the arts, and all fields of intellectual endeavor in the Soviet Union," and expresses admiration for colleagues "who are risking their careers, perhaps their freedom, in the cause of artistic emancipation." But for himself, he felt unequal to such heroism—he is no Pasternak, he says sadly—and chose the easier course of flight. Like so many other émigrés, he hoped to make the West aware of the battles for human and artistic values under way today in his native land. And like them, alas, he found the free world indifferent or worse, steeped in self-deceptions about a "new freedom" in the USSR.

       The chief value of Svetlana Stalina's defection is that because of her identity, because of the drama of truth telling by the daughter of Stalin, her voice could be heard above the babble of Western confusions. Perhaps, as a byproduct of the drama, some of the unknown Krotkovs, too, will now be listened to. Free-world opinion has worked itself into a sad misunderstanding. It supposes that the Kremlin masters are willing, even eager, to "liberalize" life in their country, when in fact they are thoroughly alarmed by the process and are resisting it at every turn. (342) As a result the outside world awards credit for victories of the human spirit to the dictators, though the credit belongs solely to valiant men and women who risk all in defying the regime.

       In underlining the lack of creative freedom which impelled her to seek asylum, Svetlana mentioned the harsh punishments meted out to Sinyavsky and Daniel. The true significance of that case is not in the prosecution itself— standard in a police-state—but in the reaction of the Soviet intelligentsia, of which hers is typical. The arrest and the ferocious sentences were clearly planned, by Brezhnev and Kosygin as a warning to others, but they failed to intimidate. On the contrary, they touched off a bold show of sympathy for the victims.

       The only major writer asked to address the 1966 Party Congress was Mikhail Sholokhov, recent winner of a Nobel Prize and a "dogmatist" or Stalinist. He not only defended the conviction of the two men but said that the sentences were too mild. In the good old days, he exclaimed, "these renegades would have received a different measure of punishment, let me tell you!" He meant execution, of course, and he drew wild applause in the Kremlin hall: a sufficient indication of where the ruling party stands in the war on intellectual liberty.

       But the result of Sholokhov's lynch speech, according to an American observer on the scene, is that he is "probably the most hated man in Soviet letters today." A noted woman writer, Lydia Chukhovskaya, addressed an open letter of rebuke to Sholokhov, an eloquent defense of the free mind that was as much a rebuke to the regime as the novelist personally. The Soviet press ignored it, of course, but later it was included in an illicit "white book" on the Sinyavsky-Daniel case, circulated inside Russia and widely republished abroad.* According to an Associated Press story from Moscow on January 24, 1967, the young poet who compiled the "white book," Alexander Ginsburg, was arrested.

       One of the youthful leaders of a demonstration against the arrest of writers, Vladimir Butovsky, was locked into an insane asylum. Others were arrested for "plotting" an anti-Stalin demonstration in Red Square to mark the anniversary of the despot's death. On January 22, 1967, a group of students demonstrated in Moscow's Pushkin Square, at the base of the statue of the national poet, against the law under which writers were being convicted. One of the organizers, Victor Khaustov, was condemned to four years of hard labor.

       The danger of police repression, however, does not seem to deter the more spirited critics of cultural policies. In late 1966 a compilation of unpublished materials, what Russians call a "literary almanac," was circulated in manuscript form in Moscow and presumably elsewhere under the title Phoenix 1966. Copies reached Europe and parts of it have seen print there. Demonstratively, it included two of the essays by Andrei Sinyavsky which had brought his imprisonment.

       The most remarkable feature of the illicit Journal was an editorial addressed to the rulers. Referring to a decree of September 16, 1966, setting more drastic penalties for anti-regime writings and activities, it charged that "the authorities wanted to create a legal base from which to repress the democratic spirit that is beginning to emerge," and added: "You may win this battle but all the same you will lose the war, the war for democracy in Russia." The youthful editor of Phoenix 1966, Yuri Galanskov, and at least two collaborators, Vera Lashkov and Piotr Rodzievsky were duly arrested, as no doubt they expected to be. The rock-bottom importance of such episodes, and they are numerous, is in their spirit of defiance. What is under way is not, as supposed abroad, a change in the essential nature of the Soviet system, but a historic struggle between the intelligentsia and the rulers. The deepest significance is not artistic but political.

       Tensions are not yet at the breaking point, perhaps will never reach that point. But there are no signs of conciliation on either side. The Kremlin gives some ground, then retrieves it, swinging uncertainly between moderation and toughness. (344) It mollifies, threatens, and negotiates with the communities of mind and spirit as if they were alien forces to be contained if not conquered. A British observer who has made many trips to the USSR and uses the pseudonym Timothy McClure concluded a recent survey of cultural life there with the words: "The leaders have demonstrated that the party's bias remains anti-intellectual, resistant to change and distrustful of the arts."

       On that celebrated occasion, on December 1, 1962, when Khrushchev threw a tantrum at an exhibition of modern art, he stalked out of the place with a final exclamation: "Gentlemen, we are at war with you!" The heartening fact is that the "gentlemen" have not been too frightened. A number of writers, and artists (among them Yevtushenko, as already noted) did recant their "errors," but most of them, including some of the recanters, after lying low for a while, resumed their heretical ways with renewed courage. Actually the authorities carry on their offensive in the war so cautiously, by Soviet standards, that it looks more like defensive action.

       After an interval of eight years and many postponements, the Fourth Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers finally met in Moscow in June, 1967. The delays were needed to assure that the gathering would be "disciplined" in the party sense. And it was—controlled from above, and obedient. Of the 473 delegates, 403 were party members. Only eight were under thirty—suggesting the exclusion of or a boycott by youth. The regime wanted no rebellion in its "jubilee year."

       The whole thing seemed tame, arid. Yet something exciting did happen—the only dramatic event being discussed in the Soviet Union. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, denied the right to speak, disseminated a bold letter among the delegates in which he accused the Union of cowardice, denounced literary censorship, and recounted his own persecution by the police. (The full text has been published in the Paris Le Monde, the New York Times and other foreign papers, but not, of course, inside the USSR.) Not only did the authorities not dare arrest him but also scores of the seemingly tame delegates have publicly joined him in demanding an end to censorship. (345)

       Valentin Katayev, best known abroad for his comedy of some forty years ago, Squaring the Circle, could write in 1966 (in fiction, to be sure), "Break down the barriers, let the people see clear light and magnificent open spaces!" His message was that people must "patiently, heroically build bridges from man to man, because human corpses clutter the path and stone monuments obscure the horizon." No one, least of all the Kremlin hierarchs, could fail to understand that he was pleading for broad, humane approach.

       Alexander Yessenin-Volpin, son of the Sergei Yessenin who took his own life in 1925, wrote in a book published in America in 1961:

       That was from one of the essays which, predictably, led to his temporary confinement in an insane asylum. Yessenin-Volpin, it seems to me, underrated the role of society itself—the "church" did what it did not as a cat-and-mouse amusement, but in the hope of easing dangerous tensions. They have not been eased. The struggle between the total state and the majority of the intelligentsia becomes more embittered. Despite its overwhelming advantages of physical force, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the state will win in the long-run. (346)

       Judgments on the milder cultural climate since Stalin and on its portents for the future naturally will differ. But any implication that it somehow cancels out the thirty-five years of appalling inclemency would be, to put it mildly, extraordinary—a cruel affront to the millions of victims. The fifty-year record clearly shows that the Russian peoples, under a more open government, would have achieved infinitely more and better. As for those who cling to the myth that Soviet communism has actually fostered culture, one can only marvel at their historical ignorance. (347)