The Politics of the Dissenting Intellectual. Reprinted from Critique Volume 5 issue 1

Mick Cox on 30 Oct 2024 in Critique Vol 52, Issue 2-3

To mark Critique’s 50th birthday last year we are reprinting gems from the archive. This is from the fifth issue, published in 1976.

Intellectual dissent in the USSR has been an important feature of the political scene there since the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, in February 1966, and the appearance of the Chronicle of Current Events in April 1968. Inevitably it has generated a wide ranging debate in the West, not only about its character and long term perspectives, but also about those forces of the society which produced it. Indeed, the manifestation of intellectual discontent appeared to some as sui generis; a sudden, unannounced, but welcome relief. The dissidents seemed like a godsend. Academic empiricists, starved of reliable data; at last had some hard facts to work on. Professional anti-communists, possibly worried about the Soviet Union's apparent and disconcerting stability, could point a knowing finger at what they considered to be a significant ‘anti-Soviet’ tendency. Marxists, critical of the USSR, but still optimistic about its socialist potential thought that they could detect a force ready and willing to take up the fight for Leninism and the reconstitution of a genuine communism. The dissidents were indeed all things to all people in 1968.

Today, it is perhaps sobering to recall the euphoric terms with which many Western socialists greeted the dissidents. Solzhenitsyn was to many a new and important revolutionary writer.¹ Sakharov was then widely regarded as a militant in the battle for socialist democracy inside the Soviet Union. This early optimism has been badly if not completely shaken. Clearly, the hopes of many Western socialists have not been fulfilled. It is my view that if a more careful analysis had been made of Soviet society then, we would not be witnessing the political confusion which is occurring now. In short, if a serious attempt had been undertaken to account for the origins of intellectual dissent, its subsequent and general right-wing evolution would have come as no surprise.

To understand why dissent took the form it did – its emphasis upon rule of law, its moderation, and its analysis and solution of social, economic and political problems from the point of view of the intelligentsia alone—it is essential to analyse the shifting position of the Soviet intelligentsia² in relation to the phenomenon euphemistically referred to as ‘de-Stalinization’. As I shall argue, following the death of Stalin the basis upon which this strategy rested was an attempted integration of the intelligentsia into a stable contractual alliance with the elite through a series of concessions. This failed, and intellectual opposition was one consequence. In this respect, the emergence of the dissenting intellectual marks an important water-shed in the post-Stalin period: the end of one phase and the beginning of another. One of my tasks will be to account for this transition.

To achieve a reasonably coherent and comprehensive account of dissent, I have planned my analysis in the following fashion. The first and second parts examine the present dilemmas for the elite and for the dissidents, and attempts to explain why both are in an impasse. The third discusses in a polemical way, the existing body of Marxist work on intellectual dissidence and suggests that, to date, little of theoretical value has been said. The fourth analyzes a number of theories of Soviet intellectual opposition, rejects two and attempts to apply a third, namely: that dissidence reflects a conflict between the Soviet elite, as organizer of the whole society, and the intelligentsia pursuing its self-interest. The fifth proposes a framework within which to study de-Stalinization, and the sixth looks at the intelligentsia in relation to this process. My main conclusions are set out in the seventh section, where it is argued that all attempts by the Soviet elite in the years after 1953 to meet the demands of the intelligentsia were almost bound to fail. In this respect, open dissent was almost inevitable given the contradictions inside Soviet society and the limited basis for any reform movement there. The eighth and final section deals with the period between October 1964 and 1968, between Khrushchev's removal from the party leadership and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, for it was during these crucial years that the accumulated tensions finally manifested themselves in the form of open intellectual dissent.

Intellectual Opposition and the Dilemmas of Soviet Rule

The trial of Pyotr Yakir and Leonid Krassin in September 1973 seemed to indicate to many Western specialists and non-specialists alike an end to intellectual opposition in the USSR. The ‘movement’, as it was affectionately referred to, appeared dead. The Soviet elite seemed to have been successful in their aim of eliminating an outstanding political problem. The evidence to support such an assessment was indeed weighty. On 30th December 1971, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had taken a decision to eliminate both the intellectual and Ukrainian nationalist groups. By the end of 1972, there had been arrests throughout the country. In the same period, the samizdat journal The Chronicle of Current Events, often referred to as the organizing centre of the Soviet Civil Rights movement, had been closed down. The same fate befell the Ukrainian nationalist organ Ukrainsky Vysnyk. 1972 and after could accurately be designated the ‘Years of Repression’. With alarming ease the elite had managed to stifle, by arrest and detention, the two most important sources of open discontent which had existed in the USSR since 1966.

However, it is necessary to maintain a balanced view of what the Soviet elite have actually accomplished. They have not totally eliminated opposition, either intellectual or nationalist, as was at first thought. The two movements continue, although in different forms, attended by less publicity and, for the dissident intellectuals at least, with different political perspectives than before. Two factors make it difficult for the regime to destroy all opposition—particularly intellectual. One derives from internal sources and the other from external. Both however have long-term implications.

Firstly, the internal factor. Although the USSR has maintained a powerful apparatus of repression since 1953, it has not dared to utilize this in the classic Stalinist fashion. To do so would be dangerous both politically and economically. Politically, because it would threaten the collective safety and stability of the Soviet elite. Economically, because a wave of Stalinist terror would have extremely serious consequences for management initiative and labour productivity. Unable therefore to use the repressive potential of the secret police to the full, the authorities have had to accept the consequences of what one Sovietologist has characterized as ‘totalitarianism without terror’. One of these consequences is the likely continuation of opposition. As Byrski has cogently argued: ‘It is quite clear that the authorities are in full control and could impose much harsher sentences on dissidents. The fact is, that the security organs tolerate them so long as they do not exceed certain limits. This is the price the bureaucracy must pay for the elimination of the Stalinist terror as a method of rule and it is perfectly conscious of this fact.’³ The second reason why the Soviet elite will find it extremely difficult to eliminate intellectual opposition, relates to the increasing pressures upon them arising out of detente with the West, especially the USA. Detente, it is clear, is by no means a simple and equal ‘Super Power’ deal. The West is the more powerful of the two sides and has already managed to extract political concessions from the USSR, which on balance, needs detente more than the West. This, as with the elimination of terror as a mode of control, involves a diminution in the freedom and range of choice of the Soviet elite.

Since 1973 the Soviet Union has therefore been unable to move with complete ruthlessness against the intellectuals. Sakharov's freedom in, and even Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from, the USSR are, and were, indirect Soviet concessions to the West. With powerful Cold War forces in the West willing and able to exploit all adverse publicity against the USSR in an attempt to discredit detente, it can only be surmised that this too will act as a brake upon the Soviet political leadership in their handling of actual or potential dissidents. It is clear that the future of opposition inside the USSR will depend in part upon both pressure and forces outside the country. Detente will act as an effective political shield for many, if not all, Soviet intellectual dissidents.⁴

Detente and the elimination of terror, therefore, mean that intellectual opposition will continue and perhaps flourish, as long as it presents no major threat to the system. Thus we can envisage the following pattern emerging. A number of sanctions will be taken against certain intellectual dissidents. Arrest and detention: myriad forms of intimidation; psychiatric treatment and the loss of employment. The repression will obviously vary in pattern and type. But there will not be the full-scale repression characteristic of the Soviet political system before 1953. However severe and execrable the sanctions, we can be sure that there will not be a return to the situation where over ten million inmates languished in labour-camps, and arrest by the secret police was a daily possibility for many Soviet citizens.

The Problems of Soviet Intellectual Opposition

If a number of dilemmas face the Soviet elite in their formulation of policy towards the dissidents, the latter in turn are not without their problems. Although intellectual opposition cannot be eliminated, for the domestic and international reasons cited, it is also true that it has reached an impasse. As Karel Van Het Reve has argued with sombre clarity:

The opposition has not even managed to arouse the Soviet intelligentsia, the very group whom they claim to represent, the very group which the opposition claims is to be the regenerator of the Soviet Union.⁵

Many explanations have been offered for the present political impasse of Soviet intellectual dissent: repression; historical discontinuity: censorship; and the ‘mistaken’ tactics of the oppositionists. Important as each of these factors are, they do not take us to the heart of the matter. The origins of the impasse go deeper.

In the last analysis, the intellectual's dilemma is social in origin and character. The expression of this is seen in the single-minded determination to build the Civil Rights movement on the intelligentsia alone, and in the political elitism which has made any desire to broaden the movement unthinkable. Neither of these ‘mistakes’, as they have superficially been called by some Western journalists, are at all accidental. On the contrary, they derive from the social basis, and thus the political character, of the Civil Rights movement! That movement was, in 1968, as it was always to be, an opposition of and for the intelligentsia, opposed not only to the elite, but also indifferent to the working class.⁶ Given this, its failure to generate change was inevitable.

The political reflection of the antagonism of the intelligentsia not only to the elite, but also to the interests of the working class, was to be found in their demand for a rule of law, the programmatic axis around which intellectual dissent has organized itself. The law would guarantee to the intelligentsia individual rights against the ubiquitous incursions of the state in a classic liberal fashion. It would at the same time regularize social relations between elite and intelligentsia, providing a guaranteed and stable social contract to replace the uncertainties of the Stalin period. But the law would also stand as a guarantee against disorder and instability. Law must also mean order; in other words, control over the working class. Not surprisingly, with such a demand, the intelligentsia were forced into a Utopian strategy against the elite and away from any possible alliance with the working class.

In this situation the dissidents, and the intelligentsia as a whole, appear to be trapped between an unreformable and oppressive bureaucracy and an inert, passive and potentially dangerous ‘narod’. Indeed this is how many dissident intellectuals have themselves analysed the dilemma of opposition. The most notable example being Andrei Amatrie's much celebrated Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? In this work, Amalric attempts to explore the character of the Civil Rights movement and pessimistically concludes that there can be no hope for it, because the forces opposing it are too powerful. His criticism of the ‘bureaucracy’, and his disdain of the working class, the two forces he sees as opposing the spread of civil rights in the USSR, perfectly reflects the Soviet intellectual's dilemma and the movement's impasse.

In a state of immobility it is, therefore, not surprising to discover deepening pessimism and thus a general shift to the right amongst intellectual oppositionists. Selective repression, the failure of economic reform and the very slow rise in their living standards has also facilitated this. Anti-socialist and anti-Marxist opinions are widespread. The October revolution is often described in Soviet samizdat as a disaster.⁷ The Western economic system is praised.⁸ The dissenting intellectual is alienated both from the system, which he cannot transform, and from the only social force capable of generating that transformation, the Soviet working class.

A twin dilemma exists: for the regime and for the opposition. The former cannot eliminate the latter and the latter are obviously unable to change the former. Many oppositionists, and Amalric earlier than most, have drawn the logical conclusion that nothing can be done to alter the system from within, Amalric believed that war with China would be necessary to generate change. Sakharov and Roy Medvedev in their different ways look to detente.⁹ All three look to externally induced transformation. It is hardly surprising that many dissidents have now decided to leave the Soviet Union.

In the period between 1968 and the present, there has inevitably been a certain transformation of intellectual opposition. Today there is little left of its former vitality, energy and optimism. Samizdat still circulates, but there is no longer the belief that it will affect change and reform from above. This was, after all, the major weakness in the intellectuals’ political strategy in 1968. Significantly, when reform from above failed, the dissenting intellectuals who were still active did not then attempt to generate change from below, but waited on pressure from without. The Western bourgeoisie, rather than the Soviet working class was to become its main hope.

Western Marxism and Soviet Dissent

Since Trotsky, marxist analysis of Soviet society has declined gradually to the point where the modern student has to look elsewhere for anything approaching an accurate account, theoretical or empirical, of the contemporary scene. Whereas the recent renaissance in European marxism has led to new and interesting advances in many areas of research, the debate on Eastern Europe has remained, as it has been for over two or three decades, intellectually stultifying and methodologically stagnant, trapped within the vice of conservatism and sectarianism. So long as serious and leading theorists, of whatever school, can combine the view that the USSR is a workers’ state with the view that a workers’ state must by definition generate a higher rate of growth and technological innovation than capitalism; or, can argue that the East European economics are a species of capitalism; or, can assert that the distinction between ownership and control of the means of production is simply a semantic question, then real scientific progress cannot be made. This more general ossification has been reflected directly and indirectly, in the literature on dissent.¹⁰

My first criticism of most Western marxist treatment of dissidence is political. It appears that too many have for too long, been unnecessarily ‘understanding’ and uncritical of the positions adopted by the dissidents.¹¹ Their far from revolutionary strategy and statements have been either ignored or interpreted as meaning something different in the Soviet context. An unwritten rule has emerged that criticism of the dissidents is secondary to making solidarity with them. To be critical of the dissident intellectuals, one can only suppose, is seen as providing the Soviet elite with means for undermining the oppositionists’ credibility.

Such a short-sighted stance generates many problems. At one level it is naive to suppose that the Soviet elite needs such justification in order to pursue repressive policies, and at another it is dangerous, because an uncritical view could easily lead to illusions about the dissidents. The optimistic misinterpretations about the character of dissent, which have been fairly widespread amongst sections of the Western left, have already proved extremely embarrassing. And if the role of intellectual dissent in the scenario of change and possible upheaval proves crucial, as it has in other East European countries, e.g. in Czechoslovakia before and during 1968, it becomes essential to know now in which direction Soviet intellectuals will move and with which social and political forces they will ally themselves in such a situation. Clear critical analysis, rather than polite applause from afar, will facilitate this.

Until 1973, an almost uncritical support was given to the dissidents. Their elitism, their generally anti-Marxist views and their hostility or indifference to the Soviet working class received hardly any attention. Quite the contrary. At times, one was almost led to believe that the dissidents in general, and certain individuals in particular, were the legitimate revolutionary heirs of the 1920s and 1930s: a claim which, strangely, no mainstream dissident has ever made.¹² To assume, as many have done, that a ‘democratic anti-bureaucratic’ opposition is for the reconstitution and regeneration of genuine socialism in the USSR is manifestly false. Intellectual dissidents might be opposed to what they see as a bureaucracy’, but for reasons which in my view have little to do with socialism and its rebirth in the Soviet Union today.¹³

A second criticism of marxist accounts of Soviet dissent is that in being unable to integrate the phenomenon of dissent into their established theoretical analyses of the USSR, they make an implicit admission that the latter are irrelevant in this particular discussion. Even a superficial acquaintance with the two most influential schools of thought, state capitalism and workers’ state, proves this. Neither have been able to account for intellectual dissidence in terms of their respective theories. It is significant that both Trotsky¹⁴ and Cliff overlook even the possibility of any potential antagonism between the intelligentsia and the controllers of state power. Needless to say, their followers have not attempted to rectify this deficiency in the writings of the ‘founding fathers’. Intellectual dissidence appears to be inexplicable in terms of the two theories which have dominated critical Marxist discussion of the USSR for almost three decades.

Finally, it is clear that the two most important marxist theories of Soviet society have, in their different ways, extremely crude characterizations of the social structure. Neither the workers’ state nor the state capitalist thesis appears to recognize the existence of the Soviet intelligentsia as a social category. Apart from the workers and peasants, it would appear that only the ‘bureaucracy’ or ‘ruling class’ are admitted as being real. Theories which do not recognize the very grouping which has given birth to dissent will have great difficulty when attempting to analyse it.

There has been no recognition of the simple but crucial connection between intellectual discontent as a political manifestation, and the intelligentsia as a social grouping with its specific problems and grievances. The result has been that no marxist account to date has attempted a materialist explanation of dissent in terms of the structural situation of the intelligentsia. Instead, we have had purely political accounts with no foundation in socio-economic analysis. The dissidents are not, as it would appear in some accounts, free-floating radicals. They are firmly anchored within a social group and milieu. Unfortunately the work to date has failed to recognize this. For this reason, as well as those already mentioned, the character of dissent has been misunderstood.

Whether the necessary rectifications can be made within the existing theoretical parameters remains to be seen. This is not the place even to attempt to answer such a crucial question. However, it is clear that the failure of serious and critical Western marxists to provide anything like a satisfactory account of intellectual dissent raises a question mark, not only against the utility of the established theories of Soviet society, but also permits the continuing intellectual hegemony of empiricism in the one area, Soviet studies, where marxism must prove its superiority. A failure to apply a living marxism here makes the wider debate on the transition to socialism either sterile or impossible.

Theories of Soviet Intellectual Opposition

Although most writers are agreed on the specific factors and events which precipitated the foundations of the Civil Rights movement in the years after 1966, little thought has been given to the more difficult problem of developing a theory of opposition. Several schemes of classification for the opposition have been devised, but these are static in conception and unhelpful in developing an analytical framework. Such theories as have been suggested are inadequate, as we shall now see from examining two of them.

The first of these consists in situating the antagonism between regime and intellectual within the theory of an industrial society. The conflict is here represented as one between two different functional groups: A class of specialists and a party bureaucracy.¹⁵ Those with the requisite knowledge functional to the operation of an industrial society, and those who hold power simply in virtue of being members of the party. This particular theory is influential both within the USSR and outside it. Amalric, for instance, analyses the Civil Rights movement as being the product of the inevitable clash between the newly educated ‘communist middle-class’ and the ‘party’ as a whole. This view is mirrored in the writings of some, if not all, orthodox Western sociologists. Knowledge confronts power and rationality counterposes itself to ideology in this appealing scheme.

Herman Achminow, a right-wing Sovietologist, has put the case clearly, revealing at the same time his own political hopes, and those of the industrial society's, for the Soviet Union's future evolution. He summarizes fairly accurately the way in which the industrial society thesis can be adapted to an explanation of Soviet intellectual dissidence in the 1960s. He writes:

In the course of a Communist revolution ‘a new class’, an aristocracy of Communist bureaucrats, comes to the fore. Soon, however, this new privileged class is split up into two hostile camps - the Party apparatus, and a class of specialists, or ‘technical intelligentsia’ destined to be the grave-diggers of the very communism which bred them.¹⁶

There are, however, great problems associated with this school of thought. The most important of them is empirical.¹⁷ It has been shown by many writers that the party, especially at the leadership level, derives precisely from the intelligentsia as a social group. Rigby for instance, in his study of Party membership, has shown the process by which industrialization not only created a new technical intelligentsia, but also the way in which party membership came to reflect this.¹⁸ Jerry Hough, in his detailed work, illustrates that if and when conflicts between local party secretaries and industrial managers occur, it is not because the former are without technical expertise.¹⁹ In brief, from two of the more detailed and empirical studies of the party, a picture emerges of ‘intelligent’ domination and technical capability, especially within the apparat.

It is ludicrous today, as in fact it has been since the latter half of the 1930s when the intelligentsia began to swamp the party, to conceive of party members, especially those who are full-time, as untrained and irrational bureaucrats. This is a parody of reality. In this respect, the modern theory of industrial society has unconsciously, and rather ironically, adopted a view close to the old and outdated Cold War image of the CPSU. Either as a theory of opposition or of society, the industrial society thesis, if it is examined with any care, reveals both its empirical limitations as well as its ideological assumptions.

A second view of dissidence can be derived from a group conflict theory of the Soviet Union.²⁰ This theory, which was developed by a new generation of anti-Cold War political scientists, held that the totalitarian thesis was both methodologically unsound and historically dated. Groups and group conflict was their answer to the theoretical shortcomings and unacceptable political implications of the totalitarian school. The Soviet Union, it was now argued, was no longer monolithic, monopolistic and terroristic. Policy and power were now subject to more pressures: policy-making had become more complex, and power more diffuse. Elite groups were replacing the single leader at the apex of the political system, and group loyalty and interests were now the main determinants of behaviour. Orthodox Western political science, could now abandon the sinking totalitarian ship,, and jump into the group-conflict lifeboat.

As with the industrial society theory, the group thesis can be adapted to explain intellectual dissidence. Indeed it has a certain appeal as an analytic construct. It demands a close empirical study of each atomic part and section of the intelligentsia, thus coinciding with the Anglo-Saxon academic disdain for generalization. Furthermore, it has the apparent advantage of coinciding with the history of intellectual dissidence. The creative intelligentsia had their specific group interests, and the scientists were later to express theirs. Hence many scholars imply that it was these two groups which made up the ‘movement’. Rothberg²¹ and Lewis Feuer,²² for instance, analyse intellectual dissidence as being the combined development of the aspirations of these two groups within the intelligentsia, thus assuming that writers and scientists are a special case within the USSR.

Group theory, however, in fragmenting the social structure into a number of competing and interacting groups, each with its own specific interest, completely eliminates the possibility of utilizing broader concepts such as class or intelligentsia. It is difficult to comprehend the intelligentsia as a meaningful social category if one attends merely to the study of groups. Although certain individuals within specific groups have been more vociferous than others, for instance, writers such as Solzhenitsyn and scientists such as Sakharov, we must remember that they are speaking for more than their own career groups. This is crucial.

Although writers and scientists appear to have been in the vanguard of intellectual dissent, we still have to determine in whose interests they are speaking. An analysis of their statements over time makes it clear that they do not operate for any one group, but for the intelligentsia as a whole.

One explanation of the popularity of a group analysis of Soviet society in general, and of dissidence in particular, could be that it does, at least in a superficial way, register the actual atomization inside the USSR. The object of study, in this case the intelligentsia, is treated atomistically or at least-semi-atomistically in the group theory framework. The result has been, however, to provide a non-explanatory description of reality, which still leaves us without an adequate theoretical framework with which to understand intellectual dissidence.

Whereas the main weakness of the industrial society thesis is empirical, the central difficulty with the group theory is its inability to explain why intellectual opposition does not simply reflect the grievances and aspirations of each of the groups, e.g. writers or scientists, but instead reflects these of the intelligentsia as a whole. If the industrial society thesis can be criticized for its super-abstractness, the group thesis can be challenged for failing to distinguish between the main participants within the movement and its actual programme. Furthermore, the group theory, by implying that the Democratic movement is principally a writer-scientist manifestation, fails to provide an explanation of why other fractions within the intelligentsia, such as academics, administrators, high-ranking party members, managers, etc., have supported the call for Civil Rights and a rule of law. This is clearly revealed in samizdat. The group thesis must, by definition, under-estimate the widespread nature of dissent, which is not limited merely to a few writers and scientists, as the Western media suggests and group theory implies.

Ticktin provides a partial resolution to these theoretical difficulties. He argues that the basic condition of the Soviet intelligentsia is one of extreme insecurity, for in a non-democratic, administered economy, their ‘income and position are totally at the mercy of the regime’, leaving them in a situation of complete ‘bureaucratic dependence’. Logically they are driven to demand protection and ultimately ‘freedom’ from the state which enforces this dependence, by putting forward a programme of civil rights. The elite are forced to act out of fear of the political consequences, not because they are opposed to the intelligentsia's ideas and aspirations in principle, quite the contrary, but because of their position and function within the system. As controllers of state power they ‘have to administer the society as a whole’, whose affairs, paraphrasing Marx, they have to manage. What is involved therefore, is neither an antagonism between those who do and do not possess technical expertise, nor between writers and scientists and party ideologists, but a structural contradiction between an elite which has to organize the whole system in the long term, and an intelligentsia pursuing its immediate self-interest.²³

There are therefore three notions which seem crucial to Ticktin's analysis:(1) the dependent position of the Soviet intelligentsia as being basic to the understanding both of their discontent, and of the demands which that discontent generates; (2) the structural location of the antagonism of elite and intelligentsia as focusing upon a different relation to state power; and (3) an assumption that when and where the elite opposes the actions of the intelligentsia, it is for essentially functional, rather than ideological or programmatic reasons. This last point is of special interest because it raises the very real possibility that no major differences exist between dissidents and elite other than the difference of position. Hence the elite is suppressing an opposition with which it agrees in theory, but which in practice it cannot permit to exist on any large scale.

In posing the problem thus, Ticktin permits us, happily, to escape from an analytical dead-end. It is now possible to reconstitute the discussion, in marxist terms, around the problem of the relationship between state power (and its controlling elite) and other fractions within civil society which are outside of the state.

There are perhaps two gaps in Ticktin's analysis. The first of these is historical: no detailed account is given of why discontent emerged when it did; consequently no theoretical guide is provided for the analysis of developments in the USSR after 1953, that is, to the dynamics of de-Stalinization. Secondly, although ‘bureaucratic dependence’ accurately characterizes the essential point of the antagonism of the intelligentsia to the Soviet regime, it seems that Ticktin has yet to explore the full range of the relationship between the intelligentsia and the elite. What must be done, and what we will now attempt, is a detailed examination of the complexity of the intelligentsia's position in Soviet society, and its changing situation in the post-Stalin period.

The historical backwardness of the Soviet Union, compounded by the social consequences of the Civil War, brutal collectivization and primitive industrialization, was to find its ultimate superstructural expression in a political system, which, by the latter half of the 1930s, could only be maintained by extreme bureaucratic centralization in an apparently unlimited, absolutely autonomous state power, and terror. Trotsky characterized it as ‘a Bonapartism of a new type not before seen in history...rising above a politically atomized society, resting upon a police and officer corps, and allowing of no control whatever … ’²⁴ The novelty of classical Stalinism as a system should not be underestimated. Governed by neither the law of value nor the plan, it lurched forward under the twin propulsion of bureaucratic command and the NKVD. It lacked a solid social basis, its economic ‘achievements’ were purchased at an extremely high social cost, and it was politically dominated to an extraordinary degree by one man. In other words, it was a potentially unstable, manifestly wasteful system which ultimately provided little security, even, and perhaps especially, for its dominant stratum. Despite appearances, full Stalinism could only be a temporary manifestation. For contrary to what most writers imply, some modification was likely even without Stalin's death in 1953, which should be seen as the catalyst rather than the cause of de-Stalinization.

The political leadership was confronted with two immediate tasks in 1953. Firstly, to extend its area of potential social support, and secondly, to establish a new political modus operandi for the elite. To achieve the former, it became necessary to make price concessions to the peasantry, who were literally starving, and to raise the minimum wage level of the working class, whose actual living standards had dropped absolutely since 1928, and were almost certainly lower than they had been in 1913. Whilst these changes directly affected the peasants and workers, the specifically political reforms were aimed primarily at the elite, masquerading under the banner of ‘socialist legality’ and the ‘restoration of Leninist norms’, and motivated by a desire for security. The result was the political subordination of the partially autonomous secret police and the transition from ‘one man dictatorship’ to ‘collective leadership’ at the apex of the party. Inevitably this ‘revolution at the top’ as Amalric has characterized it, was to find a partial but noticeable reflection in the wider society as terror receded. Releases from the camps and the rehabilitation of many of the victims of the purges contributed towards the partial thaw in Soviet life.

It was not necessary to share the naive optimism of an Isaac Deutscher in the period up to and including 1956 (the year of Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20th Party Congress), to realize that important, if limited, changes had been carried through from the top which affected the whole system. The basic structure of power, while unaltered, had undergone modification in its uses, giving privilege to the elite and a certain security to the rest of society from the dangers of repression. The significance of the 1956 speech, contrary to Maoist fantasies, is that it made sure of these reforms whilst at the same time posing the possibility of going further, though in a controlled fashion.

The long term problem for the Soviet elite, however, lay in the economy, which was to provide the continuing dynamic to reform in the period after 1953. The inherent limitations of a nationalized, but non-democratically socialized economy, such as the transition from extensive to intensive industrialization; the increasing complexity of economic decision-making; the countervailing attractions of an expanding democratic capitalism; and the necessity of raising the living standards of workers and peasants were clearly exposed. The living proof of the wonders of the Webbs’ ‘new civilization’ and of the ‘necessity’ of the man who had guided it for over twenty years, was a moribund agriculture and an undeveloped consumer sector on the one hand, and low labour productivity, poor quality goods, lack of innovation and generalized waste on the other. The result of having attempted to carry through an over-rapid agrarian and industrial revolution without the active support and participation of the majority of peasants and workers, were becoming even more plain. Reform was not simply important, it was essential.

The elite clearly recognized that the removal of terror and the limited economic concessions to peasants and workers were the necessary preconditions for any solution, but it did not constitute the solution itself. Something more had to be done. Thus, the Khrushchev period witnessed a staggering array of administrative experiments in both industry and agriculture; among the countless ingenious but worthless schemes which were devised, tried and ultimately shelved were: the abolition of the Machine Tractor Stations; the Virgin Lands scheme; the sovnarkhoz decentralization of 1957, and the bifurcation of the party in 1962 into agricultural and industrial branches, to name only four. Even the elite recognized, in its own way, that there could be no administrative solution to what was essentially a socio-political problem. The question posed for the elite was, to which group or class could they turn to achieve the long term objectives of de-Stalinization?

Clearly the peasantry, who were shattered by the experience of collectivization, and who quantitatively diminished under the impact of urbanization and industrialization, could not fulfil such a role. At the same time, de-Stalinization could not be based upon an expanding Soviet working class, who stood in a fundamentally antagonistic relation to the elite. The unspoken premise of what one writer has called ‘bureaucratic reformism’²⁵ in the post-Stalin period, was the continuing depoliticization of, and strict control over, the working class. Although the working class might expect and indirectly force economic concessions from the elite, any sign of independent self-activity would meet with the bloodiest response as events in Novecherkask in 1962 proved.²⁶ Logically, therefore, the elite had to seek some form of accommodation in the long term with the Soviet intelligentsia, the one group which had a direct material stake in both the economic expansion, and the political stability of Soviet society. This was at the heart of ‘liberalisation’ or ‘de-Stalinization.’

The Intelligentsia and de-Stalinization

The degree to which Stalinism advanced the broad socio-economic interests of the intelligentsia has been noted by nearly every writer analysing the Soviet Union between the years of 1929 and 1953. The conclusions of Rigby, Fainsod, Lane, Moore and Schapiro are surprisingly uniform in this respect. But the intelligentsia had a number of outstanding grievances, and thus could not provide a long-term stable basis for the maintenance and operation of the system. Almost in spite of itself, the regime had alienated the very layer which should have constituted its firmest supporters. In this respect the case of Victor Krawchenko, the industrial manager who ‘chose freedom’ in the USA in 1944, was perhaps only the tip of a very large iceberg.²⁷

The aims of de-Stalinization could not, of necessity, be limited to offering pacifying concessions to the working class and peasantry. By attempting to meet the outstanding demands of the intelligentsia, the elite hoped to widen the dangerously narrow social foundation of the system in a fairly permanent way, and at the same time, to provide the impetus to substantial innovation in scientific, technical and economic development. Here the immediate interests of the intelligentsia, and the long term aim of the elite, converged to set the stage for reform. In the years after 1953, the need to integrate the intelligentsia became pressing in the absence of the traditional forms of Stalinist political control. Without a more cohesive bond between the elite and intelligentsia, the long term objective of de-Stalinization, economic rejuvenation, would prove a chimera.

We can now identify the main points of conflict between the elite and the intelligentsia as follows: police terror and surveillance; centralization; censorship in various forms; economic priorities, which meant for the intelligentsia a limited choice of consumer goods; and the absence of contact with, and travel to, the West. These were the major sources of discontent for the Soviet intelligentsia in 1953.

The first was of the greatest immediate importance. It is an extreme comment upon the character of Soviet Russia that it had to use widespread police methods against that section of the population which, under Western capitalism, would have been one of the main social supports of the status quo. The intelligentsia needed and desired its relative privilege without repression. Eliminating terror was, therefore, a priority.

The second demand, for a reduction in the ubiquitous and detailed central control which was characteristic of the Soviet policy and economy in the Stalin period, was crucial since it affected all groups within the intelligentsia. For example, the managers and scientists, because of their strategic importance, had been subject to the severest and most careful direction from the centre. One manager writing in December 1955 expressed the anguish and aspirations of his group: ‘We are fettered by the framework of the present organization of administration. A charter of the rights of the director has got to be worked out.’²⁸ Merle Fainsod has convincingly argued that one of the ‘freedom to manage, to exercise greater discretion in operational decision making, and to enjoy an area of functional autonomy in fulfilling state obligations.’²⁹

The case of the scientists has by now been well documented by both Western commentators and Soviet dissidents, many of whom are scientists themselves, e.g. Sakharov and Zhores Medvedev. Many areas of Soviet scientific endeavour were severely retarded by political ideological control, which was sometimes carried to ludicrous extremes, and produced enormous frustration for the scientific intelligentsia.³⁰ It also produced an absurd imbalance between pure and applied research, for in order to escape the restrictions and controls associated with applied research, most scientific workers had chosen pure research.’ However, for the intelligentsia as a whole, the extreme and bureaucratic central control probably appeared as the most immediate proof of their subordination to an oppressive state. ‘Pin-pricking’ from the outside combined with the continual interference of the police in generating an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, and the famous Soviet phenomenon of avoiding responsibility.³¹

Censorship, the third point of conflict, has been widely discussed in the West and has become the most obvious indication to many that the Soviet Union has remained fundamentally the same in the post-Stalin period. The controversies within Soviet literature, especially in the 1960s, seemed to symbolize the effects of censorship on at least one group inside the intelligentsia. It is significant that a major landmark in the post-Stalin period, the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial, revolved around this issue. In the period between the mid 1930s and 1953, however, the situation was even more desperate, and went much further than simply preventing free expression in literature. Censorship over the whole society in the Soviet Union in 1953 was almost total, and acted as one of the most important forms of control. It was an essential ingredient in the process of atomization, which would have been impossible without detailed control over information.

Although censorship was general, different classes and groups responded to it differently. Censorship, whilst affecting all layers in Soviet society under Stalin, performed the broad task of what I would call informational atomization, and this affected mental labour more directly than manual labour, since perfect information was a major prerequisite for performing the socio-economic functions of mental labour. The mental labourer faced obvious difficulties in performing with limited, distorted or withheld information.³² Thus, censorship prevented the ‘efficient’ performance of the intelligentsia, with disastrous consequences for the system. For example, in the field of science, Zhores Medvedev has demonstrated the way in which Soviet censorship of a particular kind, the preventing of making free international contacts, severely hampered scientific research.³³ But clearly all forms of intellectual advance, whether directly useful for scientific and technical development or not, had been drastically retarded by Stalinist censorship, and this had created a deep reservoir of accumulated discontent. Historical research, the social sciences, and especially marxist theory, all emerged as stunted and decayed rumps of what had existed in the extraordinarily rich years before Stalin's final ascendancy. As with terror and centralization, the demand made by the intelligentsia after 1953 for a reduction in censorship, mainly as it affected them, coincided with the elite's long term strategy of intelligent integration and economic renovation. The specific demand appeared to correspond to the general interest and would in the long run, it was hoped, serve it.

Even though the intelligentsia emerged as a beneficiary of Stalinism, both socially and to a lesser degree politically, it must be remembered that the intelligentsia were still left economically dissatisfied. In sacrificing everything to the priority of rapid growth in heavy industry and the building up of a military capability, Stalin deliberately chose not to develop light industry and all those sectors in the economy which would have been employed producing goods for personal consumption. This mainly affected the intelligentsia, as the budgets of workers and peasants went almost entirely on necessities; for them, the absence of consumer goods and various personal luxuries was an academic problem.

This was not the case for the intelligentsia who had, in differing degrees, a surfeit of money with little or nothing to spend it on. In this situation, money became secondary to access, since there was no regular way of converting money into goods. The prerogative of the intelligentsia and elite, was to obtain access to the ‘special shops’, but this favoured the higher sections of the intelligentsia. The consumer demand of the whole intelligentsia could not be satisfied in any real or long-term fashion. The intelligentsia's higher money income had still to be translated into related consumption patterns.

Consumption had, therefore, to be rationalized and developed beyond the existing informal patterns of privilege. A shift of priority in planning had to be made in order to allocate a greater proportion of resources to the light industry and the consumer sector. Consumerism, so-called in the post-Stalin period, was partly an attempt by the elite to create more goods for the intelligentsia to buy with the money they could earn over and above the working class. But their money privilege had as yet to be fully actualized into consumer goods. Thus the irregular and informal methods used hitherto by the higher intelligentsia to obtain goods, had to be formalized and placed on a more impersonal and rational basis for the entire intelligentsia.

Finally, although internal and international travel was severely restricted for all Soviet citizens, it was the intelligentsia who were especially hampered and antagonized by the absence of contact with the West. Their education, income and aspiration generated a much greater desire to travel and have contact with the West than was the case with the peasantry and even the working class. How greatly the intelligentsia cherished travel to the West in 1953 was, can only be gauged by the esteem held even today for any member of the Soviet intelligentsia who has spent any period of time outside of the Soviet Union, other than as a tourist. For all his attempts to diminish interest in things non-Soviet, by force or persuasion, Stalin could not eliminate the deep desire by the Soviet intelligentsia to explore all aspects of Western reality, directly or indirectly.

A picture therefore emerges of an intelligentsia in 1953 which was not only totally dependent upon the regime for its income and position, as Ticktin argues, but whose general situation was entirely unsatisfactory, in spite of its relative privilege. Cowed by terror, hampered by central control and censorship and limited in terms of its consumption and contact with the West, it could hardly be characterized as being either integrated politically, or productive economically. The crucial question was could the post-Stalin elite change this situation and lay the basis for long-term stable reform? Could the profound grievances of the intelligentsia be met?

The Balance-Sheet of a Period: 1953–1964

The removal of direct police control was the first measure to be carried through after 1953. This was to generate a greater sense of security within the intelligentsia. As long as they did not engage in dangerous political activity, they were assured a peaceful life. Discussion, albeit limited at first, began within the circles of the intelligentsia, and slowly the habit of fear was eradicated. The shackles of the NKVD, which had penetrated to the factory floor and laboratory, were modified to the point where physical retribution against erring managers and scientists became the exception rather than the rule.

The removal of terror was not only the first authentic measure of de-Stalinization, it was also in the long-term the most important. As it receded so did atomization. It was only after the elimination of terror, that a reactivation of Soviet society could occur. This can already be detected by 1956, most obviously amongst large layers of students in Moscow and Leningrad universities. As time passed and further criticism of Stalin appeared, a partial but important re-politicization occurred amongst the intelligentsia. Certainly, by October 1964 few feared a revival of the terror, although the intelligentsia remained cautious. Discussion was contained within a group of close contacts, but it was now at least possible. The secret police remained largely as a warning to the intelligentsia that they must not overstep certain political bounds, but they existed nonetheless. Even if terror had been removed, pervasive surveillance continued. The fear had passed, but the controls remained.

The question of centralization raised an insuperable problem for the elite, vis-a-vis the intelligentsia. It was, after all, hardly an accidental or incidental feature of the Soviet system. On the one hand, it made possible some organization and command over a non-market economy, and on the other it facilitated the tight political control necessary in a society characterized by extreme contradiction. Any major modification, therefore, presented a threat to the operation and stability of the system. The debate on economic decentralization and greater management autonomy was to be especially dangerous, for it could only be a matter of time before demands for parallel political changes would be raised. The economic and political were hardly mutually exclusive spheres.

The decentralization of other spheres of activity created similar problems for the elite. It is clear that they could not concede on this question since it directly threatened their overall control of society. In fact, what is striking in the period after 1953, and especially between 1957 and 1964, was the limited degree of decentralization, most obviously in the economy, but also in other spheres of Soviet society. In the eleven year period after the death of Stalin, one of the major grievances of the intelligentsia remained. In the same period, the constant combat between centre and periphery, ministry and region, and plan and enterprise only reflected the conflict of interest between the elite in its role as organizer and controller of the whole society, and intelligentsia in its pursuit of its own self-interest.

Censorship restrictions, the third major grievance of the intelligentsia, underwent only qualified modification in the post-Stalin period. For instance, with the death of Stalin, Soviet journals became at least readable. Soviet fiction entered a new phase with the publication of llya Ehrenburg's the Thaw in 1954. Though it should be said that non-fiction was always subject to more effective control than fiction, partly because fiction allowed the possibility of saying a great deal that was critical and realistic through an aesopian form of expression. For these reasons, literature was to become the real battle-ground over censorship in the Soviet Union in the 1960s.³⁴

Following Khrushchev's important speech at the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, there was a greater relaxation of censorship. 1962 has been seen as a ‘high-point’ not just in literature, but also in non-fiction. Such a generalization is broadly correct, but care should be taken not to picture the period after 1962 as simply being one of clampdown and repression. Novy Mir and Yunost kept publishing useful material. Questions involving Stalin's historical role were still being posed.³⁵ The replacement to the Short Course of 1938 went ahead. Economists continued their discussion of the economy, and were often critical of aspects of it, although much of what they had to say was technocratic in style and elitist in content. Orthodox Western political science and sociology began to gain widespread acceptance. Soviet sociology, while never a healthy growth given the sensitivity of the area, consolidated, but remained extremely empirical. A careful reading of much of the material, however, threw important light on previously obscured areas. In short, between 1962 and Khrushchev's overthrow in October 1964, nothing dramatic occurred which indicated either new restrictions on, or extensions of, Soviet censorship. 1962 might have been a landmark, but neither 1963 nor 1964 gave any indication of the clampdown to come.

The boundaries of debate and expression for the intelligentsia had noticeably expanded between Stalin's death and Khrushchev's fall. But it was clear that censorship remained very much a reality for the intelligentsia, and that their grievance had only been partially met while their expectations had been considerably raised. It was this combination which made the question so sensitive and potentially dangerous for the elite. Thus the regime and the elite were in an insoluble contradiction. They seemed ready to extend the range of discussion, but feared the political consequences of doing so. The experience of 1962 had shown that any moves towards even a reduction in censorship could only encourage demands for further liberalization.

The conflict over consumerism in the post-Stalin period was one of the main features of the internal party struggles. Three points should be made. Firstly, attempts had been made to raise the consumption level of all sectors of Soviet society at least since the 17th Party Congress of 1934. What was different in the post-Stalin period was that these efforts were partially rewarded. Secondly, the main beneficiary, in relative terms, after Stalin's death was not the intelligentsia, but the working class and the peasantry. The interests of the intelligentsia were sacrificed in the short term to secure immediate political stability. Thirdly, and most importantly, the more general attempt to shift resources to the consumer sector failed miserably: although there was a partial re-orientation there was no major re-allocation as promised and expected.³⁶ We might, therefore, deduce that the position of the intelligentsia did not dramatically improve in consumer choice in the period under review. The elite were the victims of cross-pressures: they wanted to increase the intelligentsia's level of consumption, but the level of arms spending and the inbuilt waste in the Soviet economy made a significant shift of resources extremely difficult, if not impossible. At the same time, it became expedient to forego the long term aim of substantially raising the consumer choice of the intelligentsia, for the short term goal of political stabilization, achieved by socially and economically ‘discriminating’ in favour of the working class and peasantry. Given the limited economic surplus, it had to be one or the other; it could not be both. While the elite desired to increase the consumption levels of the intelligentsia as part of a wider strategy, the immediate need of placating the working class and peasantry, plus the seemingly inbuilt inability to shift economic resources, made any easy answer to this problem impossible.

Finally, on the question of contact with, and travel to, the West, it is obvious that de-Stalinization did permit a certain ‘opening up’ of the USSR. Khrushchev's 1956 speech on peaceful co-existence was welcomed by the intelligentsia, since ‘Liberalization’ in East–West relations would directly benefit them as a group. From the reports available it is clear that they reacted extremely negatively to all those events which held back friendly accords with the USA and the West in general. Khrushchev was held personally responsible for a number of embarrassing faux pas in foreign policy, because, in the eyes of the intelligentsia, this not only discredited the USSR but also slowed down the rapprochement from which they would gain. (Penkovsky's betrayal of the USSR owed not a little to this factor.)

Despite the fact that the Krushchev period between 1956 and 1964 favoured a slow move towards friendly East–West relations, events such as Berlin, the U-2 incident, and above all Cuba in 1962 indicated its tentative character. However, by 1964 many had been allowed visits to the West, and nearly as important, foreigners were visiting and staying in the Soviet Union more regularly. Contacts with foreign visitors acted as a partial substitute for travel in the West.

By 1964, the Soviet intelligentsia, especially those living in Moscow and Leningrad, had had enough direct and indirect contact with the West to compare their own situation with what pertained in the West. Under Stalin they had had little with which to compare their own situation: under Khrushchev such a comparison was possible. Its impact could only be destabilizing, once it was learned that their Western counterparts earned far more, had independence in their work and lived in what to the Soviet intelligentsia seemed like super-democratic societies. A feature of intelligent opinion in the years between 1956 and 1964 was the gradual growth of a strong pro-Western current. The Soviet elite were not unaware of the dangers involved in this ‘freer movement of ideas and people’.

To understand the potential for unrest within the intelligentsia in 1964, one further problem should be considered. With the elimination of the purges and the gradual decline in economic growth rates after Stalin's death, social mobility was noticeably affected. The intelligentsia suffered most, as an enormous bottleneck developed between secondary and higher education. What was at issue was the fact that there were not enough places in the tertiary sector of education for the children of the intelligentsia and those aspiring to enter the intelligentsia. The political escape valve of rapid upward social mobility was gradually being closed, especially for those children of the lower intelligentsia whose parents had few contacts and little ‘pull’. For a society in which education had been the main means of upward mobility, the alienating impact of a reduction in opportunity was immense.³⁷

Thus, for the intelligentsia the years between 1953 and 1964 were full of false starts. Police terror had been eliminated in its most odious form, but controls of an important character remained. A modified form of de-centralization seemed to be promised after 1957, notably to the managers, but the last two years before Khrushchev's fall were marked by a reversal of this process. In other areas centralization never underwent modification. Censorship restrictions had been lifted only to a degree. In consumer choice the intelligentsia had gained far less than they had expected. The position of the ordinary intelligentsia in particular had declined in relation to the working class and peasantry. Contact with the West had increased, but only enough to stimulate the demand for more. The demonstration effect of the West, and especially of the position of their Western counterparts, increased the aspirations and thereby the potential discontent of the Soviet intelligentsia. Finally, adding to these tensions were the problems which the children of the intelligentsia were increasingly encountering in educational mobility.

The problem for the elite was clear. Each attempted concession to the intelligentsia, if it was to be serious and provide for their permanent integration into the system, could only create instability for the system as a whole: either because it threatened a major source of social and political control, such as police control, centralization and censorship; or because it demanded the economically impossible. Waste, high arms spending and the prior need to raise the standard of living of both workers and peasants, sharply defined the limits of any material concession which the elite could make to the intelligentsia.

It has been fashionable among Western academics to ascribe the obvious conservatism of the Soviet elite in the post-Stalin period, when faced with the objective need for reform, to either a slothful bureaucratism or an atavistic attachment to an outdated ideology. Unfortunately, neither Kafka, nor indeed Marx, are much help in this case. The elite followed the course which they did in the post-Stalin period, particularly in relation to the intelligentsia, the same might equally be said for the Soviet elite. De-Stalinization had its limits for both. By the time of Khruschev's fall in 1964 a complete impasse had been reached. However, four years were to pass before de-Stalinization was finally and completely shelved. Until 1968 at least, the reform movement remained alive.

There is a persistent myth, propagated by Kremlinologists, that Khruschev's fall in October 1964 was, notwithstanding his many undisputed failures in domestic and foreign affairs, a victory for a neo-Stalinist wing inside the party leadership.³⁸ This erroneous view is inconsistent with the earlier actions and policies of the new leadership. Censorship, far from being extended, was partially loosened with the abolition of the Ideological Commission in 1965. The production of consumption goods received vigorous support in one of the first statements of the new leadership on economic policy.³⁹ Furthermore, the general extension in the range and freedom of debate for the intelligentsia for at least a year after Khruschev's fall, followed in September 1965 by Kosygin's announcement of economic reform, all seemed to point towards a continuation of de-Stalinization, rather than a retreat from it. In other words, in the year after Khruschev's fall, the elite was making a renewed attempt to win over the intelligentsia, while at the same time trying to overcome the Soviet Union's deep economic problems, the long term objectives of de-Stalinization were still being pursued.

By 1968 this whole strategy stood in ruin. The trials of Sinyavsky and Daniel in February 1967 and Ginzburg and Galanskov in January 1968; the increasing repression and open discontent of many intellectuals; the re-introduction of the most rigorous censorship in the journals and in literature; the partial rehabilitation of Stalin; the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the almost complete retreat from economic reform: all these events indicated the end of serious de-Stalinization, and with it, the possibility of permanently integrating the intelligentsia into the system. Thus was born the Civil Rights movement. Open letters, small demonstrations and an increasing circulation of samizdat indicated the growing alienation of the Soviet intelligentsia from an increasingly moribund society. Developments after 1968 show that the alienation of the intelligentsia and the crisis of Soviet society were to deepen still further.

The final retreat from de-Stalinization demonstrated the insolubility of the problems which the elite faced in organizing an economy propelled neither by the law of value nor by the plan, and which consequently exhibited the highest degree of contradiction and generated the minimum amount of economic surplus. In this situation the elite were to find reform impossible, but not before they had thrashed around desperately seeking for solutions. They had moved delicately between a number of contending forces before finally realizing the narrow range of choice possible within the limits of their own system of a declining economy, and to bind the intelligentsia closer to them, the elite was confronted with an even greater danger. The market reforms objectively counterposed the working class unrest in the Soviet Union. The removal of terror, and the enormous growth of an hereditary proletariat in the post-Stalin period, made the possibility of such an event more likely and its consequences less containable. Later developments in Poland in 1970, and in a less dramatic way in Hungary in 1972, proved that the fears of the Soviet elite in 1965 were not without foundation. Thus, in pursuing a course of action which was considered necessary both to overcome the problems of a declining economy, and to bind the intelligentsia closer to them the elite was confronted with an even greater danger. The market reforms objectively counterposed the working class and the intelligentsia to each other. The antagonism already existing between them, which had historically facilitated the elite's control of both, was given a sharper definition.

There were perhaps two phases in the policy of the elite between 1965 and 1968 underlying the surface movement of events. In the first phase, it was hoped that a limited economic reform would forestall working class unrest, while perhaps achieving some improvement in economic performance providing certain economic benefits for the intelligentsia. At the same time, it was decided to cut back the specifically political gains which the intelligentsia had made during the process of de-Stalinization, hoping, presumably, that the economic gains of the reform would compensate. Reform and reaction were thus logically related.⁴⁰ The second phase, coinciding with events in Czechoslovakia and the increasing manifestation of intellectual protest in 1968, witnessed the final collapse of reform. Political controls were further tightened, and economic reforms were virtually shelved. Confronted with the possibility of instability, the elite was forced to retreat. The dangers of working class unrest arising from the implementation of economic reform was too high a price to pay for the chance of winning over the intelligentsia.

The elite's inability to implement complete de-Stalinization implied the final recognition of the impossibility of an economic rejuvenation based upon the long term integration of the intelligentsia. The long term objectives of the elite had met with little success. Grievances which had been outstanding in 1953 had been only partially met. The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial ushered in a wave of political reaction which was to take the intelligentsia back to the position they had ‘enjoyed’ in 1956. The deepening economic crisis made any rapid improvement in their situation unlikely. By 1968 the hope of reform was much diminished.

In permitting a wide ranging discussion after October 1964 the elite discovered, possibly for the first time, the depth of discontent within the intelligentsia. All of their accumulated grievances were brought to a head. What was latent became manifest, as one eye-witness of the period observed:

The fall of Khruschev in the autumn of 1964 had a dramatic effect on public discourse in the USSR. The new CPSU leadership apparently hoped to bolster its own position by encouraging criticism of Khrushchev's policies; the regime was not averse to providing information on some of Khrushchev's most dramatic errors of judgement to discredit theousted leader. But this policyratherthan winning support for the new leaders, stimulated widespread discussion of major problems in Soviet society and of the policies necessary to solve them. The intelligentsia responded dramatically to the new opportunities by public and semi-public criticism not only of Khrushchev's alleged failings, but of more fundamental aspects of the social and political system.⁴¹

The elite was finally confronting the contradiction of attempting both to win and to contain the intelligentsia simultaneously. The degree of intellectual unrest, however, was profound as Harriss shows. At the same time, the implementation of the market reforms, if it was to be genuine, posed the real possibility of instability emerging from another and yet more powerful social group. The necessary corollary of reform - price rises, unemployment and increased differentials between workers and intelligentsia⁴² - only raised the political spectre of working class unrest in the Soviet Union. The removal of terror, and the enormous growth of an hereditary proletariat in the post-Stalin period, made the possibility of such an event more likely and its consequences less containable. Later developments in Poland in 1970, and in a less dramatic way in Hungary in 1973, proved that the fears of the Soviet elite in 1965 were not without foundation. Thus, in pursuing a course of action which was considered necessary both to overcome the problems.

Intellectual opposition represented a plea by the intelligentsia to continue the strategy of de-Stalinization. Ironically, what they were demanding in 1968 was only what the elite themselves had once promised.

It might be objected that this oversimplifies the picture and thus ignores the different currents within the broad movement for civil rights. This I will concede, but only partially. The differences in practice between Yakir, Grigorenko, Medvedev and Dakharov were never more than purely tactical. None has argued for equality. Even today the apparent gulf between a ‘self-declared Marxist’ like Roy Medvedev and a self-confessed anti-communist like Sakharov should not be exaggerated.

The picture is not, however, a totally pessimistic one. The current recession in the West will undermine one of the main props which has underpinned the intelligentsia's political assumptions for over thirty years. Although in many cases this will lead to even deeper apathy, in some it will certainly induce a re-orientation in their thinking. More importantly, the continuing docility of the Soviet working class cannot be guaranteed forever. In a situation of working class activity, the intellectuals will begin to overcome their present feeling of hopelessness about their situation. Sections of the ordinary intelligentsia will be forced to choose between supporting the elite or the working class. It is at this decisive point of reunion that the position of the Soviet elite will be at its weakest, and only in this situation can a genuine process of de-Stalinization begin.

Michael Cox is a Founding Director of LSE IDEAS. He was Director of LSE IDEAS between 2008 and 2019 and now holds a senior fellowship. He is also Emeritus Professor of International Relations at LSE. Professor Cox, as well as his positions at LSE is Associate Fellow for the US and the Americas Programme at Chatham House, an advisor to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and as Guest Professor at CERIS, He is one of the co-founders of Critique and a member of the editorial board. Email: m.e.cox@lse.ac.uk

Notes

D. Taylor, ‘Alexander Solzhenitsyn – A New Historic Impulse,’ International Socialist Review, 33:66 (June 1972).
There are two major lines of division within the Soviet intelligentsia. (i) Higher and ordinary (ii) Groupings within the intelligentsia corresponding to profession. Most writers usually suggest (i) or (ii). In my view both dimensions must be analysed. Having said that, it is possible nonetheless to talk of the Soviet intelligentsia as a whole in terms of its grievance's and aspirations. I accept L.G. Churchward's definition of the intelligentsia: ‘persons with a tertiary education, tertiary students and persons … who are professionally employed in jobs which normally require a tertiary qualification’. He estimates the size of the Soviet intelligentsia in December 1967 as being 10,676,000. The Soviet Intelligentsia (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 6–7.
A. Byrski, ‘The Communist Middle Class in the USSR and Poland’, Survey, 73 (Autumn 1969), p. 85.
Western opponents of detente have inevitably tried to show the opposite, which betrays more about them than it does about the future of intellectual dissent in the USSR.
The Observer, 26 August 1973, p. 9.
An example of the intelligentsia's view of the working class is in N. Gorbanevskaya, Red Square at Noon (Penguin 1973), pp. 260–1. ‘A distinction was drawn during the 19th Century between the people and the mob. In our century, however, all that could be destroyed was annihilated in the name of the people. Everything dirty and cruel in our history was covered up in the name of the people and greeted with roars of popular approval.’ Tragically this elitism abounds in samizdat.
This is also the underlying theme in Solzhenitsyn's novel August 1914.
Programma Demokraticheskovo Dvizheniya (Amsterdam, 1970). This appeared in 1969 and was hailed in the Chronicle as being a document of great importance.
Sakharov, like the right-wing opponents of detente in the West, urges the immediate extraction of concessions from the USSR by the USA. Medvedev like Kissinger, albeit for different reasons, assumes that the real dynamic of detente is long-term.
It should be made clear that this is woefully limited in quantity. It is significant that the New Left Review in Britain, undoubtedly the foremost marxist journal, has not yet published an analytical article contributing to a theoretical understanding off Soviet dissent.
The following remarks are directed mainly against the American Trotskyist journal Intercontinental Press. Despite the admirable service it has rendered in translating documents and statements of the opposition, it has unfortunately differences between itself and the Civil Rights movement.
Grigorenko, who is considered to be on the extreme left of the opposition movement, made the case quite forcefully. In his Diary From Prison, after having confessed to the errors of his former Leninism he went on to argue [‘The old approach was typically Bolshevik: the creation of a strictly conspiratorial illegal organization, no leaflets, just open bold attacks on obvious tyranny … Before, the call was for a return to the point at which Lenin left off. Now the call is to remove the visible evils of society, to fight for the strict observance of the existing laws and for the realization of constitutional rights. Then the call was for revolution. Now the struggle is an open one, within the framework of the law for the democratization of the life of our society.’ Cited in G. Saunders (ed), Samizdat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (Monad Press, N.Y.), p. 357.
G. Saunders, (ed), ibid., p. 9. ‘The rise of Samizdat … (is) … part of a world-wide revolutionary upswing. The struggle for socialist democracy in the Soviet Union in recent years has centred around Samizdat to a great extent.’ The danger in this statement is the easy assumption that intellectual opposition is for genuine socialist democracy in the marxist sense.
This is less a criticism of Trotsky, who was writing under extremely difficult consitions in the 1930's, than of those of his followers who have not attempted to move, if only chronologically, beyond 1940.
A. Parry, The New Class Divided (MacMillan, 1966), p. 9. As the author argues: ‘My purpose is to investigate the possibility that the scientific-technical personnel is essentially a group distinct, or potentially distinct, from the Party zealots and that we may expect an emerging political influence and a rising political role for such technocrats in opposition to the country's Party bureaucrats.’
‘The Opposition Formulates Its Ideology’, Bulletin for the Study of the USSR, XVII:10 (October 1970), p. 24.
S. White, ‘Contradiction and Change in State Socialism’, Soviet Studies, XXVI:1 (January 1974), pp. 41–55.
T. Rigby, The Communist Party Membership in the USSR 1917–1967 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1968), p. 197. ‘Between 1933 and 1938 (the party) was purged from top to bottom, and restocked with new members drawn predominantly from the new intelligentsia.’
J.F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial Decision-making (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P., 1969).
H.G. Skilling and F. Griffiths, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1971).
A. Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime, 1953–1970 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U.P., 1972).
L.S. Feuer, ‘The Intelligentsia in Opposition’, Problems of Communism (Nov-Dec. 1970), pp. 1–16.
Precisely because his view of intellectual opposition cannot be analyzed separately from his general theory of Soviet society: see both ‘The Political Economy of the Soviet Intellectual’, Critique 2, pp. 5–22; ‘Towards a Political Economy of the USSR’, Critique 1 (Spring 1973), pp. 20–41.
L.D. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (Merit, N.Y., 1970), pp. 277–278.
C. Conner, ‘The Twilight of Bureaucratic Reformism in Eastern Europe’, International Socialist Review, op cit; pp. 20–31.
M Holubenko, ‘The Soviet Working Class’, Critique 4 (Spring 1975), pp. 5–22.
V. Krawchenko, I Chose Freedom (London 1947). The memoirs of a Soviet industrial manager who defected to the USA in 1944. It provides a great wealth of detail on the hazards and restrictions facing a member of the higher technical intelligentsia in the 1930's.
Literaturnaya Gazeta, December 1, 1955.
Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled (1962: Harvard U.P., 1965), p. 509.
See A. Parry (ed), Peter Kapitsa on Life and Science (New York, 1968); P. Kapitsa, Theory, Experiment and Science (N.Y. 1968), p. 21, ‘The Working efficiency of Russian scientist is half that of our American counterparts.’ Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko (Columbia U.P. 1969) argues that the degree of centralization in the USSR is one of the most important factors retarding Soviet scientific development.
V. Krawchenko, op. cit., provides illustrations of this.
R. Medvedev, A. Sakharov, and V. Turchin, ‘Appeal to The Party-Government Leaders of the USSR’, Survey (Summer 1970), pp. 160–170. ‘It is in seeking exchange of information and ideas that we come up against the greatest stumbling block in our country … Freedom of information and creativity are necessary to the intelligentsia because of the very nature of its work, because of its social function. The urge of the intelligentsia to increase this freedom is both legal and natural … . It is not even a question of opposition at all, but simply a desire for information.’ Z. Medvedev, op. cit., p. 249: ‘censorship stood guard over all officially supported concepts and even matchbox labels had to pass through it.’
Zhores Medvedev, The Medvedev Papers (Macmillan, 1971).
M. Hayward and E.L. Crowley, Soviet Literature in the 1960's (Methuen, 1965).
N. Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union (MIT, 1971). Heer argues that the 1956 Khruschev speech had ‘unintended’, but ‘enormous’ consequences for Soviet historiography, (p. 66). The period 1957–1961 she sees ‘as one of consolidation, relative stability and continuity of official policies …’ (p. 96). 1962 was a ‘landmark in the maturation process of Soviet historiography’, (p. 130). However she shows that no real change in policy occurred after October 1964. ‘Even after the 23rd Congress there was still much freedom of debate … developments of 1966 do not warrant the simple analysis of organized official repression …’ (p. 173).
P. Hanson, The Consumer in the Soviet Economy (Macmillan, 1968). Although his study discovered ‘a growing prosperity in the 1950's’, by the late 1950's and early 1960's, the advance was ‘slower and more difficult’. (p. 83) He also argues that ‘the changes of more recent years are part of a complicated transformation intended to favour the consumer. It is the apparent difficulty of this transformation which now casts doubt on the long-run effectiveness of Stalin's policies - at any rate from the consumer's point-of-view.’ (p. 206).
R. Osborn, Soviet Social Policies (Dorsey, 1970). ‘In 1957 alone, more than 800,000 secondary school graduates found no place in either system; (higher education or technicians) during the period 1954–7 a total of 2.5 million graduates had found themselves in the same position.’
Nearly every book written about the post-Khrushchev era implies this. A 'Golden Age' mythology about this era has emerged; to cite just one example: J. Dornberg, The New Tsars (Doubleday, N.Y. 1972), p. 43. ‘To the men who toppled him however, Khruschev must have appeared not only as a threat to their establishment but as a traitor to their cause. One of their first logical steps was to halt what he started.’
On this see Pravda. 17:10:64; Brezhnev's speech reported in Tass, 19:10:64; Bespalov in Pravda, 18:10:64; Izvestia, 20:10:64. In an article in Pravda, 23:10:64 we find the following statement: ‘…(We) must not reduce or stop the output of consumer goods without the agreement of trade organizations. It is necessary to resume production of those goods now in demand, the output of which has ceased.’ In Political Self-Education (no. 11, 1964), a monthly issued by the C.C. of the CPSU, the first full-length detailed discussion of investment priorities took place. Samsonov, in the main report, made it clear: ‘… within heavy industry, the output of means of production for the manufacture of consumer goods shall grow more than twice as fast as the output of the means of production for the branches in the first sub-division.’
L.G. Churchward, op. cit., noted: ‘Since 1965 the K.G.B. has strengthened its supervision over Soviet intellectuals. The 6th Department, which supervises intellectuals, has grown more rapidly than other departments of the K.G.B. over recent years.’ (p. 58).
J. Harriss, ‘The Dilemmas of Dissidence’, Survey, 16:1 (1971), pp. 107–122.
Even some Soviet sources hinted at the inegalitarian aspects of the market reforms. Sotsialisticheskii Trud, no. 2, 1967, p. 28. Planovoe Khozyaistvo, no. 4, 1967, p. 8. Experience in other East European countries gives support to the view that one logical consequence of the reforms was greater inequality between intelligentsia and the working class. Otto Sik clearly argued for it: ‘Thus over the years, and particularly since 1959, there occurred an increasingly damaging levelling of wages, which in turn had a harmful effect on progress in science and technology.’ Eastern European Economics, Fall 1965, p. 22.

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