VADIM BELOTSERKOVSKY
53
rungs of the party ladder). People with other reasons and motives
began to stand up: the despairing, the misanthropes, the undercover
agents , the petty criminals (as a samizdat tape satirizes: ''I'm sick and
tired of the bandit's life. It's time to go over to the anti-Semites ... "),
and those who were simply faddists in pursuit of a new style. Everyone
was fed up with the official ideology; not to be a dissident was
tantamount to being an idiot. This way, however, you were in
opposition and not prison camp! "Sincere" fanatics appeared, of
course, ready to go to the stake for the idea (and ready to send others).
This opposition of the sixties had been preceded by an earlier
"semiopposition." In 1957, frightened by events in Hungary, Krush–
chev had turned the helm to the right. Literary hacks and ignoramuses
under the leadership of the "mad troika" -Kochetov, Gribachev,
Safronov-decided that the time had come to clear the literary ladder of
the mass of "revisionists and Zionists," i.e., all the real writers warmed
by Krushchev's "thaw." The hacks united and signed a collective
denunciation and appeal to the top officials, demanding a purge. A
copy of the denunciation, in the form of a series of articles by Safronov
entitled "Asleep and Awake" was published in
Literaturnaya gazeta,
whose chief editor at the time was Kochetov. The articles contained a
list of proscribed writers. All those named in the denunciation were
expecting a call in the night, or, for a start, expulsion from the Writer's
Union. But Krushchev took thought, stopped the campaign (which of
course had not been begun without aid from someone on high), and
gave the denouncers a light rap on the knuckles. Kochetov was even
forced to leave
Literaturnaya gazela
"by his own wish." The aggrieved
denouncers-Kochetov, Shevtsov, and the others-sat down to write
their now famous lampoon, saturated with hatred for the pro-Jewish
and pro-West intelligentsia, which had seized "all " key posts and was
hostile
to
everything Russian. Of course their covert purpose was
agitation against the party leadership, which could not bri ng itself
to
finish off its enemies as Stalin would have.
That was how the semiopposition Russian nationalist movement
came into being.
It
was a "semi" opposition because the participants
were already on the rungs of the career ladder and
did
not want to risk
too much and fall off. They then seized the journals M
olodaya gvardia
and
Nash sovremennik,
grouped themselves around the Society for the
Preservation of Monuments of Antiquity, created a "Russian Club,"
and received support from Safronov's journal
Ogonyok
and Kochetov's
Oklyabr.
All this of cO!.1rse was accomplished with the aid of the
"national-Bolshevists" (as they then began to be called) at the very top.
