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PARTISAN REVIEW
·interrupted and the Dean of the Faculty, named Mescheryakov, took
the floor and said with theatrical indignation: "I have to state that the
previous speaker has made a coarse political error. The authority of our
great Party never was lesser or greater. Our great Party always was and
is an incarnation of the will of the masses, monolithically united
around the Party and around our great leader and loved teacher,
comrade Stalin" (lengthy applause). Never during Stalin's rule was it
acknowledged that the Party or its leaders had ever committed the
smallest error.
If
the Pope is infallible only while speaking "urbi et
orbi," the Communist Party of the USSR was infallible always and
everywhere. Suddenly, in this report of the Party's First Secretary, it
was announced that for thirty years or so the country had been ruled by
a cruel and ignorant tyrant who had been in the habit of annihilating
mercilessly not only Party enemies but his own devoted followers as
welL
Anyone not living in Russia at that time can hardly imagine the
shock wave that swept the entire country with these words. The
atmosphere was immediately transformed. The blow that had just been
dealt their god was actually a blow to all "Soviet men," a negation of
all of their ideas. Thus Khrushchev's report initiated many changes in
the USSR, opening a period called by Ilya Ehrenburg "the thaw."
Actually, the first signs of a thaw had been evident even before
Khrushchev's report. The feeling had first begun with certain events of
the years 1953-56: the destruction of several links in Stalin's Cheka–
chain in 1953-54, rapprochement with Tito, and the dismantling of
Beria's power among other things.
It is an old tradition in Russia that the spirit of the people is
expressed not by political figures but by writers. The first break in the
muteness of Stalin's time probably came in an article entitled "On
Sincerity in Literature" by Vladimir Pomerantsev which appeared in
the December 1953 issue of
N
ovy
MiT
magazine. The magazine'S editor
at that time was Aleksander Tvardovsky who was later to play an
important role in the appearance of Solzhenitsyn on the literary scene.
Pomerantsev's paper was not particularly audacious by Western
standards . The idea it expressed was that lies are incompatible with
real literature. But in a country still trembling with fear, his words
seemed an expression of outstanding courage. Pomerantsev's general
discussion on sincerity and lies in literature was applied by his readers
to the Soviet pseudo-literature of the Stalin era. Oppression followed
immediately. Tvardovsky was replaced by the yes-man Konstantin
Simonev, and a torrent of abuse was directed at Pomerantsev by such
official writers as Surkov, Korneichuk, and Fadeyev. But nonetheless
