This panoramic account of political culture in the Soviet Union, by one of the leading voices of unofficial radical socialism, examines the way in which cultural life in the arts, philosophy and historiography has been able to withstand the persistent efforts of the "statocracy" to extinguish independent thought.
Part One of this book, ‘The Thinking Reed’, was completed in 1982 and subsequently circulated in
We would like to thank the editors of
We are grateful to Dr Nick Lampert and to Tamara Deutscher for editorial help with this volume; and we would also like to thank Brian Pearce, who translated ‘The Thinking Reed’ and the essay in NLR 164, for tracking down English versions of works cited in the endnotes.
‘Manuscripts don’t burn!’ These words from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel
The history of our culture provides some wonderful examples to confirm the truth of what Bulgakov wrote. Vasily Grossman’s outstanding novel
Grossman indeed did not live to see the publication of his novel. Nevertheless, even in Suslov’s lifetime, at the beginning of the 1980s, a copy of Grossman’s manuscript which had secretly been saved from destruction was in the hands of foreign publishers, and in the summer of 1987 the Moscow periodical
This is also true, to some extent, of the present book, most of which was written as long ago as in Brezhnev’s time. I was arrested in April 1982 just as I had, as I thought, completed the work, and had handed it over to be read by my friends. And so while I was in prison under Brezhnev, while, under Andropov, they were deciding whether to release me, and while, in Moscow’s kitchens, people were arguing about how long Chernenko could survive, my manuscript was passing, through channels unknown to me, in and out of several publishing houses, to end up, in Gorbachev’s time, in the hands of the editors of
