VADIM BELOTSERKOVSKY
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violence , intolerance, dictates , lawlessness and bureaucratism; they
learned to hate sisyphean work and demagoguery . They firmly
associate lack of freedom with cruel bureaucratic
disorder,
whereas
freedom is associated with order and not with anarchy: with an order
based on democracy and self-government . Many of them are not yet
fully conscious of all that, but nonetheless .it is deeply and firmly
rooted in them. The conscious mind of the worker or the engineer may
still be clouded by the poisonous smoke of Soviet propaganda , but in
his subconscious lives a profound antipathy to the regime , and perhaps
even a hatred of it. Whereas the opposite, unfortunately, seems to be
true of a large part of the humanistic intelligentsia. Various liberal
ideas, according to the fashion of the day, lie on the surface of their
conscious minds, but in their subconscious there is darkness , fear of
change, a foreboding that under conditions offreedom they might not
find their place and might be incapable of competing. Frequently,
there is also extreme egoism. Their talk of lofty spirirual values is often
combined with surprising disrespect for decency and goodness .
It was a large part of the humanistic intelligentsia which, more
than any other social category except the " sixth layer," became the
moral victim of the Soviet way of life . More than all the rest , they were
morally alienated and failed to learn anything of significance .
Sakharov spoke of this in a recent interview with Olle Stenholm,
the Swedish radio correspondent: " The intelligentsia is beginning to
retreat either into narrow professionalism, or into a kind of double life
at home and at work . . . leading to greater hypocrisy and further
debasement of moral and creative standards . This affects the technical
intelligentsia much less than the humanistic intelligentsia, which finds
itself at a complete dead end. " One has to know Sakharov to
understand how weighty his evidence must have been if he brought
himself to voice such a general censure .
Amalrik formulates the issue even more sharply in his open letter
to
Anatoly Kuznetsov : " Sometimes I think that the Soviet literary and
artistic intelligentsia, that is people who have become accustomed to
think one thing , to speak another, and to do a third-is an even more
repulsive phenomenon than the regime which gave birth to it. "
The dialectic here is the following : the one who accepts lies and
even believes them is less destroyed by them than the one who creates
the lies, preaches them , and does not believe them.
