358
MAX HAYWARD
in effect a denunciation of those Soviet writers responsible for the
"thaw."
It
has an undercurrent of hostility to the intelligentsia as
a whole and contrasts it with the right-minded and loyal "prole–
tariat." There are ugly insinuations about IIya Ehrenburg, the
journal
Novy Mir
(which has consistently in the last few years
been the main forum of the more independently-minded intel–
lectuals) and the second volume of
Literary Moscow.
The latter,
incidentally, was produced by a group of Moscow writers who
evidently tried, some time in 1956, to set up a semi-autonomous
writers' organization outside the rigidly controlled Union of
S0-
viet Writers. This could easily have led to the creation of a center
of intellectual disaffection on the lines of the Petoeffi Circle
in
Budapest. Although it would hardly have been allowed to de–
velop this far, and would certainly not have made the explosive
contact with the workers which was so remarkable in Hungary,
it
is nevertheless fair to say that anything seemed possible in the
hectic atmosphere after Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin.
In his novel Kochetov made the ominous point that there could
indeed have been a "Hungarian" crisis in Russia itself and that
the Soviet intellectuals-he sometimes puts the word in a pejora–
tive diminutive form:
intelligentiki---(Jf
the type of Ehrenburg
(who though not mentioned by name is clearly alluded to)
would have been morally responsible for it. The lesson of the
book is that "revisionism" is potential treachery and that hence
the intellectuals must be kept firmly under the control of the
"proletariat," i.e. the Party leadership.
For several months after Hungary there was a violent cam·
paign against "revisionism" ; for a short time in 1957 Kochetov
was editor of the strategic and hitherto on the whole "liberal"
Literary Gazette
and there was scarcely any interesting new
literature. In general things looked black. But as in the reaction
of 1954, the situation looked more serious than it really was. The
Party got over its panic about Hungary and, its confidence
re–
stored-probably not least owing to the Soviet triumph
in
outer
