August 26, 1997  
This Date's Issues: 1148 •1150  •

Johnson's Russia List
#1150
26 August 1997
djohnson@cdi.org

***********

>From Washingtonpost.com
Chapter One Section
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/russianin
telligentsia.htm

The Russian Intelligentsia 
By Andrei Sinyavsky
Translated by Lynn Visson 
1997
Columbia University Press


Chapter One: The Intelligentsia and the People 

I was recently invited to participate in a conference in Italy on the
problems of Russia today: perestroika, post-perestroika, democracy,
totalitarianism, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, the Russian intelligentsia, and the
roots of all this. When I began thinking about the past ten years, I
suddenly realized that these had been the bitterest years of my life, for
nothing is more bitter than unfulfilled hopes and lost illusions. 

Before perestroika, I had a wonderful life. The Soviet regime seemed
unshakable. It was possible to clash with it and to end up in prison, as
had happened to me. It was possible to thumb one's nose at it behind its
back, as many intellectuals did. It was possible to adapt to it--and even
to love it. In a purely abstract sense, I understood that at some point it
would collapse, perhaps in a hundred or two hundred years, but I did not
think I would live to see that. There was no hope of that, nor could there
have been any such hope. Instead, there was stability. 

In the nineteenth century, the intelligentsia was very cautious in its
attitude toward power. Traditionally, an intellectual who flattered the
czar or groveled before him automatically ceased to be an intellectual. It
is with good reason that Pushkin wrote "No, I am not a flatterer of the
czar." The intellectual's attitude must be very sensitive. He must not
succumb to temptation, and he should not become part of power; rather, he
should observe power from the outside. 

There are many definitions of the intelligentsia. For example, a
definition ascribed to the writer Boborykin states that an intellectual is
a person who, first, has been expelled from university, and, second, who
loves the people. But in the nineteenth century many people said that an
intelligent, even if he was absolutely wrong in his thinking, was a
critically thinking personality. Why do we say that the intelligentsia had
a difficult time under Stalin? Not only because people were sent to prison
and shot but also because the intelligentsia was disappearing as critically
thinking individuals. If a person repeats all the obvious truisms of his
leaders and his czars, how can you call him a critically thinking being? 

Concepts regarding the Soviet intelligentsia were rather simple and clear.
I, too, paid my dues to these concepts which, in short, stated that after
the Revolution the intelligentsia was viciously attacked by the "victorious
class," the Bolshevik Party, for its instability and inconsistency. An
enormous list of sins was ascribed to it: individualism, humanism,
flabbiness, excessive compromise, and failure to join the party. The major
sin, of course, was freedom of thought, for while sympathizing with the
Revolution, the intelligentsia wanted to think and reflect independently,
not merely repeat the party's instructions. 

An attempt to reeducate people's thinking lay behind all the vicious
attacks on the intelligentsia. The "victorious class" had to free itself
from that universal human morality, which it contemptuously labeled
abstract humanism, and from any doubts regarding the infallibility of party
policy. The spirit of intellectual, moral, and spiritual inquiry, those
questions that live in each human soul--and not only in those of
intellectuals--became a threat to the new society. This spirit was
incarnated in the image of the unstable intellectual, whom Soviet
literature attacked from the outset. In fact, Soviet literature attacked
humanity and itself, as well as the remains of those intellectual elements
that are an integral part of literary creative work. Soviet literature
intimidated its readers--and itself--with the bogeyman of treachery. Show
pity toward an enemy, and you're a traitor. Stand aside from the class
struggle, and you're a traitor. Start championing the right not to join the
party, or the independence of the individual, and you're a traitor. 

The intelligentsia could not long resist such attacks. All interesting and
useful work, all access to science, art, publishing, and education were in
the hands of the state. The choice was either death or adapting to the
demands of authority. Adaptation was chosen for the most sincere of
reasons--a wish to serve the people. At the same time, this led to the
decline of the Russian intelligentsia. 

Ideas about the people were more complex and varied. One notion favored by
some emigres and dissidents postulated that since Russia was an occupied
country whose people hated the Bolsheviks, once the Communist party was
eliminated, the people would immediately become democratic. Another theory
was that of the God-bearing people: once the Communist party is destroyed
the people will return to their Russian Orthodox roots. Others theorized
that the whole problem was one of self-government, that every cook must be
able to learn how to run the state, but without the Communists. The
overwhelming concern of the intellectuals who produced these ideas seemed
to be the welfare of the people. 

Suddenly perestroika appeared! Its beginning was so amazing that it was
impossible not to believe in it. When the first perestroika issues of
Moskovskie novosti (Moscow News) appeared in Paris, the emigre newspapers
wrote that these were fake issues deliberately published for people in
foreign countries in order to pull the wool over the eyes of the West.
Soviet friends told us that the day Moscow News came out they would go to
the newspaper kiosk at six in the morning to get a copy before the paper
sold out. 

Each day brought the intelligentsia a new piece of freedom: first
free-thinking articles, then the publication of previously banned books,
then Sakharov's return from exile, and even the release of political
prisoners. 

Gorbachev showered the intelligentsia with gifts, and at first it paid him
back with gratitude. People joked that Gorbachev had simply read his fill
of samizdat and was fulfilling the dream of Soviet dissidents by becoming
the first dissident in his own Politburo. He was both the first Bolshevik
reformer and the destroyer of the system. 

I shall not deal here with the services that Gorbachev rendered mankind,
for everyone is aware of them. He has already earned his gold or silver
monument. Nor do I wish to discuss his mistakes, which were natural, since
he was blazing a new trail. I am concerned with another question: why,
after the August putsch of 1991 and the shift of power to Yeltsin's hands,
did the intelligentsia abandon Gorbachev and go over to the new leader
heart and soul? What was this--ordinary human ingratitude? The charm of
power? Mass hypnosis? 

The intelligentsia exulted, and the warnings of individual skeptics were
drowned out by enthusiastic cries. For the first time in many years the
intelligentsia had gotten a taste of power. The relationship between the
intelligentsia and the authorities seemed to follow Mayakovsky's formula:
"My militia is protecting me": my power, our power, our union with Yeltsin. 

When the first serious test of intellectual integrity and independence of
thought came, that is, the implementation of the Gaidar market reforms,
which marked the start of a drastic split in the social stratification of
the country and led to a situation in which more than 30 percent of the
population now lives below the poverty level, the intelligentsia closed its
eyes. This reminded me of the beginning of the 1930s when the
intelligentsia closed its eyes to the horrendous famines and disasters in
the villages and maintained its silence. 

I hold this against the intelligentsia and against myself. I had thought
too much about the sufferings of the intelligentsia caused by official
oppression and almost forgot how the intelligentsia had sold out. I
realized that all of this had already happened in the past, that the
intelligentsia had then believed that it held power, that it had in fact
come close to the corridors of power, and that comrade Stalin himself had
gone to have tea with the great writer Maxim Gorky. 

The year was 1936. Arrests were in full swing. It looked as though the
intelligentsia could get down to its major task of reflection and analysis.
But that was not the case. Enthusiasm can be blinding. This is how the
Russian intellectual Kornei Chukovsky described in his diary a meeting with
Stalin: 

Yesterday at the congress I was sitting in the sixth or seventh row. I
turned around and saw Boris Pasternak. I went up to him and took him to the
front rows, Suddenly Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Andreev, Zhdanov, and Stalin
entered. You should see what happened in the hall! And Stalin stood there,
slightly tired, pensive, and majestic. You could feel how incredibly used
he was to being in power, you could feel strength and at the same time
there was something feminine, something gentle about him. I turned around.
All of them had gentle, inspired, and laughing faces; those faces were in
love. To see him, just to see him, made us all so happy. Each gesture of
his was reverently watched. I had never thought I was capable of such
feelings. Pasternak kept whispering to me enthusiastically about him. We
went home together, intoxicated by our joy. 

What strange words and feelings for an intellectual: to be intoxicated with
joy on seeing power with your own eyes. Incidentally, a certain
intellectual of my generation (who had learned foreign languages as a child
and knew the works of Goethe, Rilke, Pasternak, and Tsvetaeva inside out)
told us with delight that at a meeting with the intelligentsia Boris
Nikolaevich [Yeltsin] himself had come up to him and clinked glasses with
him. He didn't clink glasses with just anyone, the narrator hastened to
add, in order to stress how exclusive he was. And this was a former
dissident and camp inmate. 

I have always loved old newspapers, really old ones. For the newspapers
that deceived us during the Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev eras just a
few years later were transformed into a unique source of information. An
aging newspaper packs practically the same punch as cognac. 

A few years ago, while working on an anthology of materials about 1937
compiled from old newspapers, we noted with sadness that all our writers
had disgraced themselves. Literally every one. Irate articles and articles
with artistic twists, by Olesha, Platonov, Zoshchenko, Iashvili, Babel,
Tynianov, and so forth, called for the destruction of the vermin, the
enemies of the people. The letters signed collectively and published next
to these articles also included Zoshchenko, Paustovsky, Antokolsky, and
Pasternak among the slew of signatories. 

Listen to what they wrote. I have chosen names we hold dear, not those of
the official bosses of literature. 

Andrei Platonov: "Socialism and evil are incompatible. Today the cruelest
form of evil is Trotskyism. This seeping virus of fascism tried to
penetrate into the very heart of the Soviet people, to strike them dead at
one blow." 

Yuri Tynianov: "They are alien to the entire country, rejected by all who
breathe its air, work on its land, sing its songs, and read its poetry." 

Isaac Babel: "The language of the court transcripts is irrefutable and
precise. The unparalleled righteousness of our government is more obvious
now than ever, and our devotion to it is righteous and eternal." 

Vladimir Lugovskoi: "The bloody dogs of the policy of restoration came
crawling on their bellies after their leader Trotsky, that trader in human
blood and honor who has no homeland, that 

malicious degenerate and prostitute of fascism." 

Samuil Marshak: "They wanted to kill the helmsmen and take over the helm,
to steer the country and all mankind toward a catastrophe such as has never
been seen on this earth." 

Nikolai Tikhonov: "They had short slogans: Kill! Lie! Be vile! Sell out!
Pretend!" 

Viktor Shklovsky: "These people are the incarnation of vileness. Their
down payment to the fascists is the blood shed by workers injured in
railroad accidents. They sell to the enemy the air our people breathe in
the mines." 

Note the style: "Look at them: puny, bald, wearing specs--henchmen of
Trotsky." Or: "Slimy people who give you the creeps." 

"This is stunning material, but very frightening," said Yefim Etkind, my
partner in many emigre undertakings, as he was sorting through these
newspaper clippings. A few minutes later, when he found a horrendous
article written by an older man who had long been his friend, he added:
"This stuff shouldn't be published." Nevertheless, we left in the material
by his friend Fyodor Levin, who was a well-known literary critic, and
writings by Marshak and Vsevolod Ivanov. We spared only one intellectual;
for we removed the Jewish poet Perets Markish and his gory verses from that
collection. We felt sorry for his son, Simon Markish, a friend from
university days who is now a professor at the University of Geneva. 

With the victory of Yeltsin, the "democrat" from Sverdlovsk, history has
repeated itself. Once again the flower of the Russian intelligentsia went
over to the authorities, supporting Gaidar's looting and Yeltsin's firing
on the white House, chanting: "Right on, Boria! Give it to them, Boria, go
to it, Boria! Crush our enemies!"The marvelous Russian actress, Nonna
Mordiukova, practically shed tears at one meeting with Yeltsin: "You're
getting so tired, dear Boris Nikolaevich! Come see us and take a break." 

No one thinks of what our children and grandchildren will say or whether
they will be ashamed of us. Our times are interesting because they are so
ironically congruent with our unhappy past. 

But the final disagreement between me and the Russian intelligentsia was
over the firing on the White House in Moscow in October 1993, which was
supported by a great part of the intelligentsia--and by its most
outstanding members. It was unbearably painful and shameful to see, at the
bottom of those "collective letters," the signatures of cultural
figures--Sergei Averintsev, Bella Akhmadulina, Bulat Okudzhava, Marietta
Chudakova--who on numerous occasions had written letters demanding that the
adored president take harsh repressive measures against his political
opponents and even indicated who should be sent to prison, which groups
should be disbanded, which newspapers and TV programs should be banned. 

What does the flower of our culture want from Yeltsin? What are these
people writing to him? 

The Communist and national-demagogic ringleaders are continuing openly and
publicly to make threats on television.... They are counting on their
ability to assert their impunity and their importance through bloodshed in
the streets. They are hoping either to provoke a response showing the
weakness of the administration (which has happened), or to produce "heroic"
victims in their own right. They are looking for a Soviet Horst Wessel. 

What should the president do? 

All the political provocateurs who are trying to provoke rebels and
hooligans, and who do not have immunity as deputies, such as Zyuganov,
should be detained for their role in the May Day riots, and their
organizations should be disbanded. The hooligan-deputies such as Anpilov
and others should be deprived of their immunity. If President Yeltsin and
the executive and judicial authorities do not react harshly and quickly
they will bear the political responsibility for the situation. 

The president heeded this call and gave the intellectuals the tanks and the
shelling of the White House. But the intelligentsia did not quiet down. Two
days after the firing they wrote a new letter: 

What is there to say? Enough talk. Time to learn to act. These dumb
bastards respect only force. Isn't it time to show that force to our young,
but--as we (to our surprise) have been joyfully convinced--rather strong
democracy? This time we need to make clear demands of the government and
the president to do what they should have done a long time ago, but didn't.
All Communist and nationalist parties, fronts, and associations must be
disbanded and banned by presidential decree. Publications such as Den,
Pravda, Sovetskaya Rossiya, Literaturnaya Rossiya, and others must be
closed pending judicial investigations. History once again has provided us
with an opportunity to take a big step toward democracy and civilization.
Let us not let this opportunity slip, as has so often happened in the past!
Appeals to the president from the intellectuals continued throughout 1993,
both before and after the firing on the white House. Among the names of
people whom I cherish, there suddenly appeared one that was nearly sacred,
that of Academician Likhachev. But those shots were fired at the people ... 

This became a sticking point in my disagreements with some dear friends.
One of my opponents' arguments was that if Yeltsin had not fired on the
White House the Communists and fascists would have come to power, and a
civil war would have broken out in Russia. 

A group of my friends gathered at the house of an Izvestia journalist to
prove to me, whom they saw as an old man abroad who was not keeping abreast
of Russian reality, that their view was right. They showed me
videocassettes of the crowds surrounding the White House, the people
carrying red flags at the May Day demonstrations, and some other crowds. A
very close friend of ours, a poet, teacher, wife of a priest, a sweet,
kind, and religious woman lamented: "Just look at those horrible faces!" It
was written on her face that shooting those horrible faces would be no sin.
Those excited and aging people could hardly be described as beautiful. 

I somehow managed to find the words to describe what was going on: Here I
was, a guest of the contemporary intelligentsia, and the people were on the
television screen. I started to understand that the intelligentsia, which
in the past had lived with the people and shared its misfortunes to such an
extent that the very term intellectual, which arose in the nineteenth
century, unequivocally implied a love for the people, was today afraid of
those same people. 

Why? Why in the past did the intelligentsia pity the people, sympathize
with them, declare "I dedicated my lyre to the people," but now tremble?
What happened? 

We have heard over and over that one reason for such panic is the fear of
pogroms produced by the primordial anti-Semitism of the Russian people.
It's true that popular disaffection was sometimes expressed in anti-Semitic
movements. From my point of view, Russian anti-Semitism represents a kind
of alienation of evil. It is a popular, mythic, almost fairy-tale notion
that the people cannot be bad. Our people are good. They are our people.
But some outsiders have wormed their way into the government, and they are
to blame for everything. In the past I often had to argue about this with
men in the camps, and pointed to the fact that the government, the KGB, and
the courts were almost entirely made up of Russians. The major argument of
my uneducated opponents was, Is a Russian capable of such injustice? These
are clearly the ploys of outsiders or foreigners, because at heart we are
all kind and good. 

Yet I, who have fought anti-Semitism throughout my entire life, felt
strangely reassured. And it was Zhirinovsky who reassured me. If such a
large percentage of the Russian people could vote for him (and we should
not forget that in 1993 he got some 23 percent of the vote), for a man who
looks so obviously Jewish, that means that my great people is not so
terribly anti-Semitic. 

Today this myth has changed. Anti-Americanism has grown. This has been
caused by the glaring abundance of foreign goods, which only rich people
can afford, and by the fact that Moscow is now blanketed by foreign
advertising, signs, and names that irritate me, even though I have been
living in France for a long time and have no negative feelings whatever
toward America. But it is irritating that Moscow sports an enormous neon
sign advertising The Very Best American Tobacco, that this tobacco is
unaffordable, and that your income is barely enough for a lousy domestic
Belomor. It looks like foreign occupation. Cities are studded with signs
such as Casino or Casanova Night Club (Great Intimate Atmosphere); a
restaurant called At the Banker's; The Lolita Venereal Disease Clinic; The
Flamingo Bar; and the Gallant grocery store. Just try to imagine such signs
not in Moscow--which has anything and everything--but in the small, ancient
town of Pereslavl-Zalessky, which has the Eden dry cleaners, but no
sidewalks. Against the background of dirt and poverty foreign words sound
like a nasty parody of Western lifestyles. 

I think that today there is excessive freedom of language. There are all
kinds of filthy language, as well as an incredible corruption of the
language with foreign words. I have difficulty fully understanding some
things that are direct borrowings from English. That also irritates the
people. They don't understand what a spiker [a parliamentary speaker] is.
They don't understand all those new words. They really hate that, and then
they again think that America is the reason for all our misfortunes. I
remember that back in the Stalin years, America was blamed for everything.
So there are reasons for concern about what is happening to the language. 

Russian shops and kiosks are inundated with foreign goods, and this parody
of capitalism looks extremely vulgar and brazen. That capitalism, which is
bringing a great many problems in its wake, is also associated with
America. Moscow has become an alien city to Muscovites. Many houses on the
main streets have been bought or rented by foreigners, and the local
population has been evicted to the outskirts. The dollar is the most common
currency and a symbol of wealth. A dollarization of consciousness is taking
place, and is encountering a logical--and negative--popular reaction.
Slogans such as Down with the Bourgeois! or Death to the Bourgeois! are
more and more often scrawled on walls. These words fall on fertile Russian
revolutionary soil. It was not hard to guess that the Communists would win
the Duma elections. 

In October 1995 we went to a large Communist meeting in Moscow. All two
thousand tickets had been sold (and tickets cost ten thousand rubles, which
is no small price). I talked to a middle-aged engineer. His father had died
at the front during the war, but his mother, an ordinary worker who was
left with two children, had managed to give them a higher education. And
now, under the democrats, is he going to be able to educate his sons?
Though he is not a Communist, he naturally sympathizes with them. 

In December 1995 the Communists won the Duma elections. How does Boris
Zolotukhin, a deputy who is a democrat, a well-known dissident and champion
of human rights, react to that, and how does he explain the defeat of
democracy? "The democrats were unable to explain to the people why the
Gaidar reforms did not result in a real improvement in the lives of most
people." 

No matter how much you explain to the people why they are badly off,
poverty will not be any more pleasant. It is understandable that people are
asking the democrats, i.e., the intellectuals Yegor Gaidar and Boris
Zolotukhin, Why did you allow the people to reach this state of poverty?
They answered their own question by voting for the Communists. 

Zolotukhin also shifts the blame from the intelligentsia to the people: 

It is characteristic of Russia that the majority of people were reconciled
to the fact that the guaranteed salary was wretched and that guaranteed
medicine was awful. People who are not used to living in conditions of
freedom are now feeling nostalgic for what they have lost. These
middle-aged people cannot adapt to the new conditions. Even those who are
ready to exist on a miserable salary and to stand on lines are not ready
for an independent life and are not ready to stand up for themselves. They
backed the Communist party. 

In other words: the people are bad, the people are to blame for everything.
And is half-baked Minister Gaidar in fact good? And it does not occur to
Zolotukhin, as a jurist and a lawyer, that you cannot first rob a man,
reduce him to tatters, and then turn him out naked on the street, telling
him: "Now go survive on your own." 

I recall with longing the far-off past, before the Revolution, when the
Russian intelligentsia occupied the rather broad space separating the
people from the authorities: when it was critical of the authorities and
could not be otherwise; when a natural component of the intelligentsia was
the so-called critically thinking personality, as the intellectuals were
called in the nineteenth century; when it was considered monstrous for an
intellectual to grovel before the authorities ("I'm glad to serve, but
fawning makes me sick," said Chatsky, one of the first Russian
intellectuals); when the intelligentsia empathized with the people and felt
guilty because of its relatively privileged place in society. 

The intellectual of today seems to be saying that the people are nostalgic
for slavery and poverty. In fact, the people are nostalgic for the past,
when they lived better than they do now. 

The meaning of life has also been lost, and this has had a somber impact
on Russian consciousness. What did Soviet power give the man on the street?
Freedom, land, and wealth? Nothing of the sort. All it gave was a sense of
righteousness and an awareness that we lived in a properly run and logical
world. We have now fallen from that logical Soviet cosmos into chaos and
have no idea what we can believe in. The meaning of the lives of several
generations has been lost. It looks as though they lived and suffered in
vain. After all, it is hard to believe in the dawn of capitalism,
particularly such a wild and terrible capitalism, which smacks of criminal
lawlessness. 

Humanity often asks questions about the meaning of life and the purpose of
existence, and Russians are perhaps particularly inclined to do so. In 1904
Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that "the Russian yearning for the meaning of life
is the major theme of our literature, and this is the real point of our
intelligentsia's existence." 

This is not only the distinguishing feature of the intelligentsia: it is
also the treasured core of individual Russians and of the Russian people
described in our literature throughout the nineteenth century. All of a
sudden the interests of the intelligentsia and the people seem to have gone
their separate ways, and they have stopped understanding each other. 

Six months before the Duma elections of May 1995, the newspaper Obshchaya
gazeta published a very interesting dialogue between the newspaper's
editor, Yegor Yakovlev, and the Russian ambassador to Paris, Academician
Yuri Ryzhov. Yakovlev speaks of the catastrophic situation in the country:
"The Parliament has been disbanded, the President is endowed by the new
constitution with unlimited power, feedback between the authorities and
society has been cut off once and for all." Ryzhov consoles him: The editor
is 10 percent hopeful and 90 percent despairing. For the ambassador, since
he is an official and a bureaucrat, the ratio is 50-50, and that is why he
is optimistic. Yakovlev is on the brink of despair: "The entire
Weltanschauung of the Russian people today is reduced to the question of
how to make do and survive." The ambassador does not object but merely
makes a small correction: "You're right in saying that the masses are
trying to survive. But survival is not a new ideology and not a new
mythology. It is a natural, and to a great extent physiological, reaction.
Things will be easier for the next generation." "Nevertheless, answer me,"
Yakovlev replied. "If in April 1985 you'd told people what awaited them in
April 1995, and called on them to follow you, would they have supported
you? If you'd told them that they would be afraid to go out of the house in
the evening?" "You don't remember how afraid they were in the past?" Ryzhov
asked in reply. "Not afraid of going out of the house, but of the footsteps
outside the door! They'd say to me that it's better to be scared to go out
in the street than to be constantly waiting for them to come and get us." 

Here Ryzhov is distorting the situation. Yegor Yakovlev is asking him
about the beginning of perestroika, about 1985, when no one was afraid of
steps outside the door because the time of unjustified repressions was long
gone. The dissidents had never stayed up listening for the sound of steps
at night, for they understood what they were getting into. Ryzhov, however,
was speaking of the time of Stalinist repressions. 

Even then, people were not terribly afraid of steps outside the door. For
the most part, it was either the educated strata of society or the party
bosses who were afraid. The people were sometimes happy when the bosses
were sent to jail. In the camp, one clever man tried to prove to me that
under Stalin things were better, because then the bosses were afraid to
repress the people and their behavior was more restrained. He thought that
all the bosses should be shot every ten years, the same way wolves in the
forest are periodically shot to keep their numbers down. 

Vassily Aksyonov, whose father and mother were former party bosses who
rotted in the camps for many years, was indignant over the results of the
most recent Duma elections. In the newspaper Moskovskie novosti he wrote: 

The people have voted. What can you do about that? What is striking is the
cynicism of these "people" who have voted. So it turns out that all the
unmasking of Communist crimes during the years of glasnost and freedom, all
of those countless bullets to the backs of heads, were things about which
they didn't give a damn? 

Aksyonov puts the word people in contemptuous quotation marks. Academician
Ryzhov is also displeased with the masses (that is, with the people). When
the prior elections to the Duma did not agree with what he had predicted,
Yuri Kariakin, a specialist on Dostoevsky (that is, on the people),
exclaimed in utter despair, "Russia! You've lost your mind!" 

The words Konstantin Balmont addressed to himself after the October
Revolution, when the people supported the Bolsheviks, are relevant here: 

You were wrong about everything: your beloved people Are not the people
you dreamed they were. 

The recent elections to the Duma were best summarized by the economist
Nikolai Shmelev: 

The elections have clearly demonstrated that the Russian population
refuses to think of itself as mute cattle. Thank God it expressed its
conviction through the ballot box, and not with grenades and automatic
rifles. 

Obshchaya gazeta, January 25, 1996 

All that remains for me is to make a futile appeal to the intelligentsia
by citing the verses of Aleksandr Blok, written eighty years ago: 

Open your eyes, and open them faster to the unfathomable horror of life,
before everything in your motherland is swept away by a great thunderstorm. 

On October 3, 1994, the anniversary of Black October, my wife and I went
to the stadium at Krasnaya Presnya in Moscow. A brass band was playing
funeral marches. Some people were demonstrating; others had brought
flowers. The Black Hundreds, who always know who is to blame, were bawling
away. An imposing old lady stared blankly at me and said: "Well, I wasn't
expecting to see you here. I thought the intelligentsia had completely lost
its conscience." 

I think that the intelligentsia was divided. Many members of the
intelligentsia welcomed the firing on the White House. I think that
intellectuals who were better off--not necessarily rich, but who were
confident of their situation--welcomed it. The poorer intelligentsia, the
teachers and ordinary people, naturally took the side of the people. The
old woman who spoke to me looked like an intellectual, and she'd come to
the memorial meeting on that sad anniversary of the firing on the White House 

Then we went to a demonstration at the Moscow Soviet where that lovely
girl Novodvorskaya proposed that everybody drink champagne to the health of
Boris Nikolaevich, little Yegor Gaidar, and the glorious tank crews that
had done such a beautiful job of firing on the White House. 

Today the intelligentsia is starting to see the light. While the
intelligentsia did not cause a lot of trouble over the firing on the White
House, in the war with Chechnya, thank God, Yeltsin has not gotten support.
The intelligentsia's opposition to Yeltsin has broadened. I am glad that
Sergei Kovalev has returned to the dissident movement, and I hope he will
feel more comfortable in this role than in Yeltsin's service. Every cloud
has a silver lining. Otherwise our Sergei Adamovich would be serving as a
human rights adviser to Mr. Cannibal. The intelligentsia, however, has not
yet understood that the war in Chechnya is a direct continuation of the
firing on the White House. Until my favorite group in society understands
its guilt, good will not triumph. 

I keep returning to the subject of the firing on the White House. After
all, what's the Supreme Soviet to me? Do I think that Rutskoi and
Khasbulatov are such bright people? I really don't care about them. The
Supreme Soviet is bad and the Parliament is lousy. But just because your
Parliament isn't good enough is no reason to fire cannons at it. Can you
imagine the American president firing cannons at Congress just because some
people are arguing with him? That's what I find so painful. Russia has had
enough cannon fire. I'm against cannon fire in general. There's been enough
use of force in freeing the country from czarism. When democracy sheds
blood as its first step--I say that cannot be done. No. Period. 

Copyright © 1997 Columbia University Press 

********

St. Petersburg Times
March 17-23, 1997
Russia Still Too Intolerant To Value Sinyavsky's Genius 
By Catherine Nepomnyashchy and Richard Borden
Catharine Nepomnyashchy, the author of "Abram Tertz and the Poetics of
Crime," is associate professor of Russian Literature at Barnard College,
Columbia University. Richard Borden, who has taught at Columbia and Harvard
universities, resides in Paris. 

AMID the official eulogies and the recitals of personal drama that
inevitably surround the deaths of dissident Soviet writers, what is often
forgotten is precisely what makes a writer a writer: his artistic
achievement. This has probably never been so true or so ironic or so sad as
in the case of Andrei Sinyavsky, alias Abram Tertz, who was buried Feb. 28
in the suburban Parisian town of Fontenay aux Roses, where he had lived for
over two decades. 

The irony lies in the fact that no recent Russian writer has more
passionately defended the right of art to be art. More important, Sinyavsky
was not merely one of the most significant historical, political and
cultural figures of the post-Stalin era. 

The notorious Tertz-Daniel trial of 1966, in which Sinyavsky defied with
unprecedented courage the Soviet monolith in defense of artistic freedom,
is justly remembered as the origin of the dissident human rights movement
in the Soviet Union. Yet Sinyavsky was always uncomfortable with being
called a dissident in the strictly political sense.

"Dissidence," he once wrote, "turns out to be simply a synonym for art"
because all true art is much more than sensational political revelation.
True art, for Sinyavsky, challenges accepted notions at the level of
language itself, undermining hackneyed formulas and received ideas.
Sinyavsky's "disagreement" with the Soviet regime was indeed, as he
claimed, stylistic because he believed only shockingly unexpected turns of
phrase, whimsically brilliant metaphors, and sometimes even scabrous
irreverence could liberate both writers and readers from the tyranny of
mindless political slogans and slavish devotion to conventional ways of
thinking.

Thus the essence of Sinyavsky's art was not embodied in the respectable
professor of the Sorbonne Andrei Donatovich Sinyavsky, the meticulous
scholar and gentleman who wrote a number of critical studies on Russian
poetry, but in his disreputable alter ego Abram Tertz, swashbuckling,
knife-wielding, common literary criminal. The Tertz pseudonym deliberately
conjures up both lawlessness and Jewishness, metaphors for the writer as
outsider and pariah.

Yet for all the apparent divergence between the writer's two personas,
between mild-mannered, law-abiding Sinyavsky and reckless outlaw Tertz,
both have for over 30 years been subjected to virulent and concerted
attacks the like of which have been directed toward no other Russian writer
in our time. 

In later years, Sinyavsky's blunt, idiosyncratic views on politics
especially his deep distrust of conservative Russian nationalists, his
outrage at President Boris Yeltsin's bombing of the White House in 1993,
and his principled refusal to support the Yeltsin democrats in last year's
elections - brought him much abuse. Even more disturbing, perhaps, has been
the indignation fired by Tertz's particular genius for pushing readers'
culture-sensitive buttons. Most memorable of these was his paean to
Russia's great national poet, "Strolls with Pushkin," in which he drew
attention to Pushkin's comic genius. 

Perhaps only in a society that has lost both its sense of irony and its
appreciation of metaphor could one of the most eloquent and insightful
tributes to Pushkin ever conceived, "Strolls with Pushkin," a sparkling
celebration of the freedom of linguistic play - which improbably and
ironically was composed in a labor camp - and one of the great literary
essays of our time, be read as a desecration of a national monument.

At his trial, against the background of the Cold War's polarized world,
Sinyavsky pleaded for the right to be neither "for" nor "against," but
simply "different." It is precisely his "stylistic" courage in remaining
true to his "difference" over the years, that allowed Sinyavsky to preserve
and pass along to us the fruits of his extraordinary gift. 

Historically a great literary nation, Russia is bound to recover from its
decades of cultural devolution, and even to accept and appreciate writers
with whom it is not always in agreement. And then Andrei Sinyavsky will
assume his rightful place in the pantheon of Russian letters. 

*********