BORIS PARAMONOV
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force in the opposition to Soviet stagnation. The country writers and those
literary theoreticians ideologically close to them do criticize the Soviet past in
ways that are far more profound and uncompromising than the recent criti–
cism by liberals. For the liberals, it is Stalin who is the sole source of all the
crimes of the past; the country writers, on the other hand, believe that it is
the concept of socialism itself that is at the root of the tragic history of the
Russian nation. (Here, it must be made clear that we are talking about so–
cialism not in the West European social-democratic sense but as the result of
the Soviet revolution. The interchangeability of the terms "socialism" and
"communism" is common practice in the Eastern bloc, where socialism is
considered a stage preceding the arrival ofcommunism.)
An article by the well-known literary critic Vadim Kozhinov, "Truth
and Verity," which appeared in the April 1988 issue of
Nash Sovremennik
(Our Contemporary),
the magazine of the Russian Republic's Writers' Union,
has become a manifesto .for the country writers. It is ostensibly a critical
analysis of Anatoly Rybakov's novel,
Children of the Arbat.
Kozhinov cor–
rectly notes the overall artistic weakness of the book and attributes its suc–
cess exclusively to its "hot" theme, a psychological study ofStalin's character.
Yet the discussion of the novel is only superficially the subject of Kozhinov's
article. Its ultimate purpose is to address that very myth that depicts Stalin as
the primary agent of evil in Soviet history. A reader who is familiar with
Solzhenitsyn's
The Gulag Archipelago
cannot help but notice how Kozhinov
simply repeats some of Solzhenitsyn's ideas. For example, there is the
proposition that the Great Terror of 1937 was not at all the peak of Bol–
shevik crimes; that the war communism of the first post-revolytionary years
and the forceful collectivization of peasants a few years later did no less, if
not more, harm than the infamous year of 1937. The argument is that 1937
is
a date liberals tend to remember most because it was during that particular
wave of repression that the intelligentsia and the party ranks were hit the
hardest. Stalin was not the creator of the state-run, terror-wielding system,
writes Kozhinov; its roots are to be found in a certain process of truly global
dimensions, a process that evolved as far West as Madrid and spread as far
East as Shanghai. It is not very hard for a Soviet reader to understand what
process Kozhinov is talking about: the entire communist myth and the meth–
ods
of its implementation.
Igor Shafarevich, a fumous dissident mathematician and corresponding
member of the Academy of Sciences, responded to Kozhinov's article by
publishing his own supporting piece in
The Moscow News,
the most liberal
Soviet weekly Qune 13, 1988). He stated that Kozhinov was almost the
first one to approach the issue of Stalin's culpability from a correct perspec–
tive. He went on to say that blaming the years of terror on Stalin's ill tem–
pers is insulting to his victims and thus reduces national catastrophe to the
level of farce. The fact that the Soviet intelligentsia is familiar with Shafare-
