The predominant force in the student movement, however, was not the socialists but the neo-Bolsheviks. Burg, although very displeased with the fact, acknowledges that ‘the leaflets issued by clandestine groups generally expound the neo-Bolshevik line.’76 Even Bukovsky wrote later, with irritation, that among those who took part in the student movement at that time ‘were a lot of neo-Marxists and neo-Communists of various kinds.’77 The activist in the youth opposition, Volodya Bukovsky, easily found a common language with them and they even thought him one of themselves. The present émigré Bukovsky, of course, disowns such acquaintances in every way and tries to depreciate the part played by ‘those people’. Nevertheless, all participants in the movement recognize that the neo-Bolsheviks predominated in it during the 1950s. That was to be expected. The Twentieth Congress had revealed Stalin’s distortion of Lenin’s line, and it was precisely Lenin’s line that was counterposed to Stalinism. Lenin’s ideas were well known and his writings accessible. Clearly, it was to him that the anti-Stalinist rebels turned in the first place. Paradoxically, both the rulers and the opposition were appealing to the same ideas and values.
Another source of new ideas was the Yugoslav experiment, which had shown that workers’ self-management in production was a possibility. This experiment also remained within the limits of Communist ideology, while at the same time widening those limits. Both the neo-Bolsheviks and the socialists looked towards Yugoslavia, although what interested the former was the system of selfmanagement, whereas the latter focused their attention on the market mechanism and competition between nationalized enterprises. But, as Burg notes, ‘the liberal socialists differ little from the neo-Bolsheviks on overtly political questions.’78 However, the neo-Bolsheviks were still disposed to support a one-party system of the Yugoslav type, supplemented by self-management in the economy. On the whole they maintained the positions of the official ideology, although representing a ‘purer’ variant of it.
That was dangerous enough. In 1957 the tone of the official newspapers changed. Trud published an article by M. Tsutskov which attacked the student youth. The author complained that in the Komsomol aktiv at the Leningrad Institute of Precision Engineering and Optics, the student Gorelik ‘spoke of suppression of the students’ creative initiative’; in Moscow University the wall-newspaper Tribuna contained ‘slanderous attacks on the Soviet press’; in Uralsk Political Institute, ‘under the flag of criticism and development of democracy, certain students made demagogic statements counterposing the Komsomol to the Party.’79 The newspaper called for ‘a resolute rebuff to be given to the student movement, and naturally, such a rebuff was given. Some activists (for example Sheynis and Krylov, who later became well-known Soviet political scientists) were expelled from their institutes and universities, while others were arrested. ‘These arrests’, writes Zhores Medvedev, ‘are not well known, because the rehabilitation of millions of victims of the Stalin terror was under way at the same time. When millions were being released, the hundreds of new arrests could easily pass unnoticed.’80
The suppression of the political groups did not eradicate the opposition, but gave it a new cultural form. Thenceforth the illegal organs of the cultural opposition were ‘the Ryleyev Club’ and other such youth centres, which ceased to be political organizations. The club published a journal, Russkoye Slovo, and along with this one of its leaders, Kushev, published Tetradi Sotsial-Demokratii. But this activity was of secondary importance. The most important role was played by the famous ‘Mayak’. Bukovsky recalls:
