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From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.1, Winter 1962, pp.19-21.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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What is the significance of the conflicting political tendencies reported developing among Soviet youth? |
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“Comrades! — Yevgeny Evtushenko |
THE developments at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU are evidence of a deepgoing dissatisfaction of the Soviet people with the bureaucracy that rules them. Because of their special position in Soviet society, the university students are the most vocal of all layers of the population in their criticisms of the regime. They give ideological and literary expression to the discontent of broader sections of the people, especially the workers. It seems perhaps paradoxical, at first glance, that such opposition should come from students, who are in large part the sons and daughters of the ruling elite. (Khrushchev himself has admitted that only one third of the students in institutions of higher education are the children of workers and peasants.) Precisely because they are the children of the elite, however – because they are needed by the regime to replenish its personnel – the regime has to be a bit more tolerant of them than it is with the rest of the population. It is even possible in certain periods of limited “liberalization” for students to act in a limited way in opposition to the regime – to hold meetings, organize protests, circulate leaflets – with relative impunity.
It is well known that the removal of Stalin’s mummified corpse from the Lenin-Stalin mausoleum followed upon petitions and demonstrations of students at the University of Moscow. When a group of Peace Wafers recently reached Moscow, students at the university demanded of the authorities that the marchers be given extended time to present their views. Perhaps the most dramatic of such incidents (and we must remember that in all likelihood only a small fraction of these incidents ever filters through into the press) is that involving Yevgeny (Eugene) Evtushenko, which occurred shortly before the Congress.
On September 19 this fall, a poem by Yevgeny Evtushenko was published in Literaturnaya Gazeta, organ of the Soviet Writers Union. The poem, Babi Yar, an impassioned indictment of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, was bitterly denounced for its “negativism” In Moscow, October 9, an estimated 5,000 students, were celebrating their annual Poetry Day in front of the statue of Mayakovsky, revolutionary poet of the Twenties. Evtushenko, who has been a very popular figure among Russian youth for several years (collections of his poems are sold out soon after publication) was not included on the program. Students spotted Evtushenko in the crowd and started chanting, “We want Evtushenko! We want Evtushenko!” At last the chairman had to acquiesce to this demand, saying, “Evtushenko is not with us on the platform, but I understand he is in the square. Let him come up!” The young poet recited two poems, one of which was called, You Can Consider Me a Communist. It assailed “the lackeys who pursue not Communist but personal power” and ended, “I will remain firm to the end and never become a licker of nailed boots.” This brought prolonged applause and bravos from the thousands of listeners. According to Joseph Barry in the New York Post,
“When Evtushenko descended the wooden platform, the students pressed around him to continue their praise and there was an impromptu demonstration that completely blocked, for the long moment, traffic, such as it is, on Gorki Street.”
STUDENT opposition to the bureaucracy encompasses a variety of views. One of the best sources of information on these currents is David Burg, a Russian student, now living in England, who was at the University of Moscow during the “thaw” of 1956-57. He lists four tendencies: the neo-Bolsheviks, the “liberal socialists,” the pro-capitalists, and the nihilists. The latter are not to be regarded as serious people, since they favor the destruction of the existing order but have nothing, and wish to have nothing, to propose in its stead. The pro-capitalists are impatient with the theoretical approach of the neo-Bolsheviks and the “liberal socialists.” They think in simple terms: whatever they dislike in their environment they attribute to evils inherent in the system of planned economy; whatever they wish for that they do not have, they believe that capitalism, “private property,” a “free economy,” will be able to provide. According to Burg this attitude is found more on the fringes of the student population – the engineering and technical schools and the like. Theirs is not a practical political program but an idle daydream.
The neo-Bolsheviks were described in Junge Gemeinschaft, a German socialist youth paper, as follows:
“The oppositions! youth consider themselves Marxists, but they feel that the present Soviet social order does not correspond to Marxist ideals. They seek a genuine Marxism and have therefore turned to the pre-Soviet period and to the Twenties. Just as the political and social opposition of the English Puritans against Absolutism in the 16th century was founded on quotations from the Bible, so today the oposition of the Soviet youth against the regime is reinforced by quotations from the classics of Marxism-Leninism. They consider the purges of 1937 as an annihilation of the true leaders of the Revolution by Stalin’s bureaucratic clique – as a kind of Thermidor. They see October, whose true history is not particularly well known, as their ideal and demand a return to the original ideals of that revolution which they believe they recognize in several of the works of Lenin of the year 1917 (includinq State and Revolution). These youth speak of the bureaucratic degeneration of the regime, of the emergence of a ruling and exploiting bureaucracy, whose interests the Dictatorship supports against the people. The young people, who hold the above ideas, incline toward the tradition and radical methods of the old revolutionary parties and seek possibilities for active struggle ... attempts to distribute leaflets come out of the circles of such ‘neo-Bolsheviks.’” – translated from Junge Gemeinschaft, November, 1957.
The neo-Bolsheviks call for: The retention of state-owned industry and agriculture and a centrally planned economy; workers control of industry; political power in the hands of democratically elected, representative Soviets; the end of police repression and persecution of dissenters; internal democracy within the Communist Party on the basis of a Leninist program. The poet Evtushenko is apparently one of their spokesmen; his words quoted at the beginning of this article reflect the main slogan of the neo-Bolsheviks: “Back to Lenin.”
The “liberal socialists” believe also that the original ideals of the Revolution have been perverted. The basic difference is that the liberal socialists do not think a return to October is either possible or desirable. Neither, of course, do they claim to be for the restoration of capitalism. Like the neo-Bolsheviks, they are for workers control of industry and farmers control of agriculture through cooperatives; however in lieu of state ownership of industry they favor the actual ownership of individual factories by the workers in them. They are for the transfer of political power to Soviets “or other representative institutions” and are for a multi-party system. (David Burg, Soviet University Students, Daedalus, Summer, 1960, p.536.)
The liberal socialists are reformists. Individual political freedom is their ultimate goal, not the means to build an equalitarian communist society. They seek, not the reshaping of society as a whole, but concern themselves solely with improving life for the individual. They generally think that Revolutions (especially if any violence is involved) are merely a source of human suffering, and consequently advocate gradual reform on all occasions except as a last, final, ultimate resort. This reformist outlook is reflected in their writings, which are full of personal soul-searching. They conceive of themselves as analysts of Soviet society, as spectators. They do not think in terms of what needs to be done and what forces are going to be able to do it. (While information concerning the relative numerical strength of oppositional tendencies is not available to us, it is interesting to note that both Burg and Junge Gemeinschaft give the neo-Bolsheviks credit for most of the leaflets that are distributed.) The liberal socialists are prey to illusions about the West, illusions which are concomitant with an apparent inability to see the Soviet working class as the potentially mighty force that can topple the bureaucracy.
Without more precise information on the programs of the neo-Bolsheviks and the liberal socialists, it is not possible to examine them as critically as one would like. Enough information is available, however, to make it clear that the liberal socialists are an expression within Soviet society of social democracy; and that in most important essentials the program of the neo-Bolsheviks is a Trotskyist one, though this group developed with no contact whatsoever with the old Left Opposition (which had been physically exterminated by Stalin and his henchmen, including Khrushchev), in complete isolation from the Trotskyist movement abroad, and despite near-successful attempts to banish the very memory of Trotsky from the consciousness of the Soviet people forever. This is not so surprising as it seems. Those who read Lenin’s State and Revolution and then look around them at the USSR find that it just doesn’t jibe. Unfortunately for the Kremlin bureaucracy, which still must rely on Marx and Lenin for its ideological justification, a serious study of Lenin’s writings and a conscious application of Leninism to contemporary Russia logically leads to Trotskyist conclusions, whether or not one has read a single word of Trotsky.
WHAT are the historical origins of the neo-Bolsheviks? They did not spring up out of a vacuum. They have a more or less continuous existence which can be traced at least to 1948. [1] In that year a dozen Moscow University students drew up a manifesto which aimed:
“To wage a struggle against the system of government which rests on the bureaucracy and the army and which can be eliminated only by a political revolution.
“To install full democracy in the shape of a Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Government, the first stage toward the classless society.”
The manifesto called for a government of Soviets with all elected officials subject to immediate recall. The students further believed that the transition to communism could be achieved only by the workers of all countries; and they condemned the Stalinist annexations after the war as being contrary to the Leninist principle of national self-determination.
This communist resistance group called itself, appropriately enough, Istinni Trud Lenina (Lenin’s True Works). Within a few months the ITL had gained hundreds of members and extended its organization to the universities of Leningrad, Kiev, and Odessa. It was organized in small circles of three or four, each circle with a specific function: writing leaflets, mimeographing them (a task involving almost un-surmountable obstacles), and distributing them. For two years the ITL functioned in this way, and just as it was having some success establishing contacts with workers in the large city factories, hundreds of members were arrested, all in one night, and condemned to 25 years at hard labor.
In the prison camps the young Leninists made contacts and developed their program through intense debates with succeeding waves of subsequent arrivals from the universities. All this is quite remniscent of the clandestine revolutionary groups which formed the nucleus of the Bolshevik Party. It was these young Leninists who were in the leadership of the great strikes in the Vorkuta prison camps in 1953, the largest open rebellion against the bureaucracy which has yet occurred within the USSR.
This tendency emerged once more during the “thaw” of 1956-57. In this period, following the 20th Congress and the Hungarian Revolution, an ideological ferment occurred among Soviet intellectuals, and especially among students, of which we have only glimpses, and whose depth and intensity can only be guessed at. During this time literary works which implied criticism of the regime were allowed to be published – Evtushenko’s poetry, the novels of Du-dintsev and Ehrenburg, etc. In meetings and conversations, however, the criticism became more and more open and sharp, and flowed from the field of art and literature into politics. While previously one expressed dissenting views only to one’s closest friends, now people began to find small circles of oppositionists which had been isolated from one another. There was an intense interest in the history of the Revolution, of the party, of the purges in the Thirties, of names and events which were finally beginning to force their way into the open despite attempts to erase them from history. David Burg describes this phenomenon:
“One heard names like Bukharin and Trotsky that had been unmentionable before. I remember going to the apartment of a good friend and seeing a picture of Trotsky on the wall. I thought I was going mad. He said, ‘Well, I’ve been hiding this picture long enough. Now I want to flaunt it, at least for a while,’ “ (The Voice of a Dissenter, interview with Burg in Harper’s, May 1961, p.127.)
In September 1957, Cedric Belfrage wrote in the National Guardian that Moscow University students had put up on a wall-newspaper board “a group manifesto against distortion of Soviet history, including the role of Trotsky. This was removed and put back again, and finally the expulsion of five students connected with it was announced.
A protest against this, which even the university Komsomol leader signed, was successful.” University students protested also against the suppression of information on the Hungarian events, and put up on the wall newspaper an account of the events gleaned from a BBC broadcast.
A group of graduate students and research workers in the history department of the University of Moscow were arrested during the summer of 1957 and sentenced to three to eight years in prison – a comparatively light sentence – for distributing leaflets to workers in the neighborhood, attacking the party dictatorship generally and Khrushchev in particular and calling for the establishment of Soviet democracy and a return to the “Leninist line.” During the “thaw” there was a certain amount of over-optimism which must have been dispelled during the crackdown of Khrushchev in 1958-59, in which the publishing policy was tightened up again, numerous attacks in the press were launched against the dissident students, and several of their leaders were imprisoned or expelled from the Komsomol (membership in which is an unwritten requirement for all administrative and professional positions. A former inmate of Soviet forced labor camps reported that in 1957-58 the “corrective labor colonies” received a sizable influx of young intellectuals from the large cities.) At a meeting of the Writers Union during the “thaw,” Evtushenko said:
“We are not going to let those who would return to old times have their way. We’ll rap their knuckles.”
Evtushenko was one of the most outspoken leaders in the writer’s revolt of 1956 and has never recanted. He was expelled from the Komsomol and only his tremendous popularity saved him from a harsher fate.
Thus as we have seen, the neo-Bolsheviks are striving toward what we feel is the correct program to achieve a genuine socialist society in the USSR. But do the neo-Bolsheviks have the capacity to carry out this program? From information available to us, it appears that at least they are moving in the right direction.
They are aware that the political revolution – the removal of every trace of bureaucratic deformation from Soviet society – is not going to happen automatically. Khrushchev and his colleagues are not going to relinquish their power and privileges voluntarily. It will require conscious organization to overthrow the bureaucracy, which for decades has exercised totalitarian control over the Soviet people, has deprived them of control over their own affairs, has denied and scorned the very freedom and equality in whose name it rules. Such a task requires that the most powerful, the most cohesive class in Russia, the working class, act under the leadership of a Leninist party. The most encouraging thing about the neo-
Bolsheviks is that they are working to create such a party, and that they are consciously attempting to influence and establish roots among the industrial workers. They are trying, in short, to overcome their greatest weakness: for their base now is almost completely among the intellectuals. As such they pose little threat to the bureaucracy. But every time that they have been discovered making attempts to reach out to the workers, that is when the arrests and deportations have occurred; for Khrushchev knows that when the Russian workers feel their strength, he and all that goes with him are done for. The neo-Bolsheviks are in addition creating, at this moment, the very cadres out of which the new party will be built. Since at least 1948 the neo-Bolsheviks have gone through a more or less continuous process of developing a program, gathering cadres, and developing a seasoned leadership. With all their vitriolic attacks, with all their expulsions, with all the material rewards they have at their disposal, with all their prisons, neither Stalin nor Khrushchev have succeeded in vanquishing the young Leninists. No amount of bureaucratic suppression can prevent them, in the long run, from gaining a foothold in the working class and building the Leninist party which can finally return the Revolution of 1917 to its rightful heirs.
1. Information on the Leninist youth from 1948-53 is based on a series of articles in The Militant in 1955, My Life in Stalin’s Prison Camps, in particular the article, Rise of the Anti-Stalinist Youth Opposition in the Feb. 21, 1955 issue. The author, Brigitte Gerland, joined the CP in East Germany, was imprisoned in the Soviet Union for eight years, and was released in 1953.
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