The Thinking Reed полностью

The question consequently arose: Was collectivization really necessary? Soviet historians could not and cannot, of course, discuss that question openly. Under Khrushchev all that was allowed was criticism of particular mistakes, but this criticism went quite a long way and as a result it became possible to draw, if not a complete, then at least a fairly reliable picture of collectivization and to subvert the Stalinist myth of the ‘great turning point’. Soviet historians showed that the process of collectivization proved extremely harmful both to the peasantry and to agriculture as a whole — to such a degree that, as it was agreed to put this, there had been violation of ‘Lenin’s principle of voluntariness in bringing peasants into collective farms and providing material incentives for the peasant masses’.94 This formulation may seem too mild, but it was the most that the censorship allowed. It made possible the setting forth of historical material with comparative accuracy, quoting important facts which had previously been concealed.95 The role played by Stalin, his personal responsibility, was established more or less precisely. This was of particular importance for understanding collectivization, because the question inevitably arose: Where does the boundary run between ‘mistakes’, ‘distortion’ of the Party line and the ‘Party line’ itself? What the historians could not say was said by writers. The years 1964 to 1968 saw the publication of A. Alekseev’s Bread, Noun Substantive, Tendryakov’s Decease, and many other works dealing with the collectivization period. Those books which failed to pass the censor went into samizdat. Works of fiction and works of research complemented each other. Roy Medvedev could quite correctly observe later that the outrages of Stalin’s collectivization ‘have frequently been subjected to critical analysis in our historical, political and fictional literature.’96

The truth was restored bit by bit, like a broken mirror. No question was ‘seditious’ in itself, but the mosaic picture thus assembled formed an integral representation of the past which utterly refuted the statocratic ideology. However, the demand that the knowledge which had been accumulated should be generalized remained largely unfulfilled. The facts had to be thought over in a theoretical way, but the methods employed at the beginning of the sixties for this purpose were not adequate to the task. History had to become theory. The ideological crisis which broke out after 1968 raised this question with particular sharpness, and it was as a result of this that legal Marxism began to develop new ideas.

The role of manifesto of legal Marxism was played by the book published in 1969, under the editorship of M.Ya. Gefter, with the title The Science of History and Some Problems of the Present Day. This symposium began with a preface which dealt with general problems of historiography in the USSR. The writers acknowledged that the initial reaction against Stalinist dogmatism in this sphere had been purely negative. Some of the most offensive conceptions had been cast out (such as that the Roman Empire fell as a result of a ‘revolution of the slaves’), quotations from the works of ‘the friend and teacher’ had been removed, and at a certain moment there had arisen a movement to ‘get back to Lenin’. This constituted a beginning of the transition to working out a positive Marxist theory but, as soon became clear, going ‘back to Lenin’ was not enough by itself. This slogan was replaced by another — forward to Marx. Marx, unlike Lenin, was studied as the founder of a method. From Lenin they tried to find answers to problems of the present day, which, in a certain sense, impelled them back to the past — although, after Stalinism, even this was a huge step forward. From Marx they learned, above all, the culture of historical thought. Paradoxical as it may seem, Soviet historiography discovered Marx not in the fifties but at the end of the sixties.