APPEALS FOR AN END TO THE SOVIET CENSORSHIP
By George Saunders
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet writer whose novel about Stalin's prison camps created a sensation in 1962, has again rocked the Soviet literary and political worlds. What he did was to circulate several hundred copies of a sharply worded open letter to the delegates of the Fourth Congress of Soviet Writers, held in late May.
The letter called on the congress to demand an end to literary censorship and to commit the writers' organization to defend members against persecution by the regime. It also gave details of a campaign of harassment directed against Solzhenitsyn himself by the secret police and certain official circles. The harassment is apparently in retribution for his prison camp book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and several antibureaucratic short works he has published since 1962.
"My work has been smothered, gagged and slandered," charges Solzhenitsyn, referring to this official campaign.
Many prominent Soviet writers have endorsed the open letter, according to news reports. Among them were said to be the poet Yevtushenko, the young novelist Vasily Aksenov, the elderly fighter against the bureaucrats Konstantin Paustovsky, and the novelist Veniamin Kaverin. All these men, like Solzhenitsyn, represent the current in Soviet public life which wishes to probe deeper into the causes of Stalinism and to root out its vestiges still remaining.
Yevtushenko and Aksenov, for example, are on the editorial board of the youth magazine Yunost, which just published a defiant poem by Alexander Tvardovsky. Tvardovsky is editor of Novy Mir, the other leading organ of the anti- Stalinists.
Recent attacks on Novy Mir had seemed to augur hard days for this tendency, but these latest events show that it is continuing to fight back. [See "The Battle Around 'Novy Mir,'" in World Outlook April 7, p. 376.]
The Fourth Writers Congress, in fact, was prepared in a spirit of confornity with official slogans of patriotic reaffirmation. Unlike the last such congress in 1959, its sessions had a cut-anddried, stage-managed quality. Any shadings of differences were to be drowned in the chorus hailing the "glorious achievements" of Soviet literature in the half century since the revolution.
Solzhenitsyn's letter, and the support given it by more "rebellious" elements, effectively pricked this overinflated balloon. It told the truth about literature under "socialist realisn."
The author of Ivan Denisovich, who is incidentally one of the few Soviet writers to grapple with the real problems of Soviet society,* begins his open letter with a blunt accusation: "Censorship under the obscuring label of Glavlit [Main Administration for Literary Affairs and Publishing], not provided for by the Constitution and therefore illegal and nowhere publicly labeled as such, is imposing a yoke on our literature and gives people who are unversed in literature arbitrary control over writers."
Putting his finger on a striking instance of uneven and combined development -- of a feudal institution persisting in a workers' state -- he observes: "Censorship, a survival of the Middle Ages, manages in Methusaleh-like fashion to drag out its existence almost to the twentyfirst century."
Because of the censorship, he charges, Soviet writers are unable "to explain in their own way the social problems or the historical experience that has been so deeply felt in our country."
"Works that might have expressed the thoughts matured among the people, that might have had a timely and salutary influence on the realm of the spirit or on the development of a social conscience are prohibited or distorted by censorship on the basis of considerations that are, from the point of view of the people at large, petty, egotistic, and short-sighted." That is a fitting description of the bureaucratic outlook that sent Sinyavsky and Daniel to jail.
Censorship causes great artistic and social losses, asserts this former in-
*Besides Ivan Denisovich, an almost scientific dissection of the social forces operating in the prison camp, with the parasites and the exploited both impelled by extreme scarcity, a microcosm of Stalin's Russia, Solzhenitsyn has also grappled with the problem of how bureaucracy kills labor initiative and promotes alienation and rebellion in the youth. See For the rood of the Cause. Praeger: New York, 1 .
mate of Stalin's camps. He mentions writers in the 1920's "who called attention at a very early stage to the beginnings of the cult and the particular traits of Stalin's character; however, they were destroyed and silenced instead of being listened to."
Of course, not only writers warned; the Left Oppositionists fought and fell victim to the tendency that culminated in the Great Purges. If Solzhenitsyn's principles were now to prevail, open social criticism of the rulers and their policies would reappear. And that would not remain purely "literary" for long.
That is precisely why the bureaucracy so stubbornly resists any pressure to abandon censorship, why its relaxations of literary controls from time to time are so stingy and short-lived. It fears the criticism and exposure of its own role that an unfettered literature would bring.
But Solzhenitsyn makes a reasoned plea for the advantages literary freedom would bring, and a damaging comment on the present state of official literature. "Literature that is not the air of its contemporary society, that dares not pass on to society its pains and fears, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a facade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as waste paper instead of being read."
This recalls Che Guevara's warning on "socialist realism" in his article Socialism and Man: "Iet us not attempt, from the pontifical throne of realism-atany-cost, to condemn all the art forms which have evolved since the first half of the nineteenth century, for we would then fall into the Proudhonian mistake of returning to the past, of putting a straitjacket on the artistic expression of the man who is being born and is in the process of making himself."
Solzhenitsyn points to the decline in influence and prestige of Russian literature. It has lost the "leading role" it had in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and even "the brilliance of experimentation" it had in the 1920's.
But, he argues, this need not be the case. "To the entire world the literary life of our country now appears as something infinitely poorer, flatter, and lower than it actually is, than it would appear if it were not restricted, hemmed in.
"The losers are both our country, in world public opinion, and world literature itself." We would add that the cause of world socialism also suffers. As Che also said in the article mentioned, "A common argument from the mouths of capitalist spokesmen, in the ideological struggle against socialism, is that socialism,- or the period of building socialism into which we have entered, is characterized by the subordination of the individual to the state.
They cite state domination and stifling of cultural affairs in the workers' states as an alleged proof of this, and the Stalinist experience seems to confirm it on the surface. Of course, Cuba has demonstrated that this need not be so. And the effort of the best intellectuals in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and also in the Asian workers' states, is beginning to help refute this lie.
The existence of quite a rich and varied "underground" literature in the Soviet Union (circulated from person to person in manuscript form) is now well known. This is what Solzhenitsyn means when he says Soviet literary activity appears duller than it really is.
The works of Sinyavsky and Daniel were examples of this rich reservoir, and their fate represents the bureaucracy's attitude toward this phenomenon. But Solzhenitsyn's own Ivan Denisovich, as well as Yevtushenko's Stalin's Heirs, and many other unimprisoned writers' works were "underground" works at one time, circulating widely in manuscript long before being approved for publication.
The author of Ivan Denisovich has plenty of grounds for it when he says: "If the world had access to all the uninhibited fruits of our literature, if it were enriched by our own spiritual experience, the whole artistic evolution of the world would move along in a different way, acquiring a new stability and attaining even a new artistic threshold."
There is every reason to expect that in a society where the competitive madness and class control of capitalism has been abolished, a great flowering of creative cultural forces would take place. An inkling of what Soviet society could do along this line, once the yoke was off, can be gained from the often surprising literary developments during the ups and downs of de-Stalinization.
Toward this worthy end, Solzhenitsyn urged the congress to adopt a resolution that would demand "abolition of all censorship, overt or hidden, of all fictional writing and release publishing houses from the obligation of obtaining authorization for the publication of every printed page.”
The second part of the open letter,
which called on the Writers Union to defend members from persecution, reviewed its sorry past record in this regard. Writers publicly slandered and abused had no chance to defend themselves and were not aided by the organization.
Worse still, "The leadership of the union cowardly abandoned to their distress those for whom persecution ended in exile, camps, and death....We learned after the Twentieth Congress of the party that there were more than 600 writers whom the union had obediently handed over to their fate in prisons and camps."
Solzhenitsyn adds a veiled call for the ouster from the organization's leadership of all those sharing complicity for the persecution of writers under Stalin: "There is no historical necessity for the newly elected leadership of the union to share with preceding leaderships responsibility for the past."
Concluding this part, the open letter calls for "guarantees for the defense of union members who are subjected to slander and unjust persecution so that past illegalities will not be repeated."
Such a resolution would apply directly to Solzhenitsyn's own case, which the third part of the letter describes. A whole series of harassments directed against him by the secret police and "people holding official positions" are outlined.
For example, Solzhenitsyn charges that the manuscript of one of his novels was taken by the secret police and "has been 'published' in an unnatural '‘'closed' edition for reading by a selected unidenified circle." It is available to literary officials but not for discussion by other writers.
The secret police also seized his archives, including works not intended for publication. "Now tendentious excerpts from these files have also been covertly 'published' and are being circulated within the same circles. The play ‘Feast of the Victors' which I wrote from memory in the camp, where I figured under four serial numbers (at a time when, condemned to die by starvation, we were forgotten by society and no one outside the camps came out against repressions), this play, now left far behind, is being ascribed to me as my very latest work."
While he dates overt police acts against him from 1965, he states that since 1964 a campaign of slander has been aimed at him. (It was early in that year that he failed to receive the Lenin Prize for Ivan Denisovich, having been nominated by Novy Mir. Received favorably by all sections at first, even praised in World Marxist Review, the novel, by late 1963 and early 1964 had become the object of a subtle campaign of disparagement. Since 1964 it is a fact that Solzhenitsyn has been rarely published in the Soviet Union. )
Far from being any kind of procapitalist restorationist, the author of the open letter was an artillery commander against Hitler's forces and was decorated for his service. Beginning in 1945, he spent 11 years in the prison camps because of a private letter in which he criticized Stalin's conduct of the war.
Now, Solzhenitsyn says, his years in prison camps are being used slanderously. "It is being said that I served time as a criminal, or surrendered to the enemy (I was never a prisoner of war), that I 'betrayed' my country, ‘served the Germans.'"
This slander is being spread, he asserts, "in secret instructions and meetings by people holding official positions." Solzhenitsyn's charge rings true. At the Twenty-third Congress several official party delegates denounced Solzhenitsyn and his works from the country's highest rostrum. The open letter refers to this too:
"I tried vainly to stop the slander by appealing to the board of the Writers Union of the Russian Republic and to the press. The board did not even react and not a single paper printed my reply to the Slanderers. On the contrary, slander against me from rostrums has intensified and become more vicious within the last year, making use of distorted material from my confiscated files, and I have no way of replying."
He then recounts a number of cases of works that he cannot get published or whose publication has been indefinitely delayed. He has even been prevented from reading his works in public: "In November 1966, nine out of eleven scheduled meetings were canceled at the last moment."
With irony he observes: "Even the simple act of giving a manuscript away for ‘reading and copying' has now become a criminal act, and even the ancient scribes of Russia were allowed to do that." This is an apparent reference to the strengthening last summer of the law against "anti- Soviet" agitation and propaganda, the law under which Sinyavsky and Daniel were jailed. The same law now prohibits strikes and demonstrations as well.
In appealing to the Fourth Writers Congress to defend him, he points out that the issue affects not only him. It is a matter "not without importance for the literary future of several delegates."
It is also a matter of importance for all forces in the Soviet Union seeking
to revive the workers democracy of Lenin's day; for it is precisely the writers that express the grievances of the masses over bureaucratic practices who are being "smothered, gagged, and slandered" by the "selected unidentified circles."
Solzhenitsyn closes his letter with a declaration of rare courage. "I am, of course, confident that I will fulfill my duty as a writer under all circumstances, from the grave even more successfully and more unchallenged than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to the truth, and to advance its cause, I am prepared to accept even death. But, maybe, many lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer's pen during his lifetime. At no time has this ennobled our history."
The tone of the intellectuals' resistance has been growing sharper, more desperate. A mood similar to that of Sol~ zhenitsyn's letter was expressed in the letter by Lidiya Chukovskaya protesting Sholokhov's speech at the Twenty-third Congress. [See World Outlook, December 9, 1966.
Solzhenitsyn's open letter marks a new intensity in the intellectuals' opposition to their bureaucratic overlords. There is no record of writers expressing such intransigence in Stalin's heyday. And even during the "thaw," even at the high point of ferment in 1956, such an open and clearly stated demand (for an end to censorship and solidarity against the regime) did not appear.
The explanation lies not just in the subsiding of the policy of terror and purges. Above all, it must be that the intellectuals feel a popular sympathy for their demands -- at least potential, if not actual. This gives them the feeling of legitimacy in spite of the official stand
of the party.
Will there be a new break, a new
relaxing of controls? Or will the Solzhen-
itsyns be increasingly gagged? A trend
toward "re-Stalinization" has been in evi-
dence, though hesitant and encountering
resistance, since Khrushchev's ouster.
The international situation, with
the series of setbacks of the colonial
revolution, especially the Vietnam escala-
tion since early 1965, has given the bu-
reaucracy pretexts to tighten the screws.
Significantly it was after the summer of
1965 that a series of steps against the
anti-Stalinist intellectuals began: the
arrest and trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel;
the Twenty-third Congress with its partial
moves to rehabilitate Stalin; the military-
patriotic campaign; and, most recently, the
moves against Novy Mir.
Curiously, Solzhenitsyn's first
work, Ivan Denisovich, marked a peak and
at the same time a turning point in de-
Stalinization. In reaction to the flood-
gates it opened came the campaign against
"abstract art," quickly extended against
all antibureaucratic modes of expression.
At the time, Khrushchev complained that
magazines and publishing houses were
"flooded with manuscripts about the life
of people in exile, in prisons, and in
camps."
The campaign against rebel intel-
lectuals never really abated. Rather, with
various pauses, it gradually intensified
in subsequent years. The point has now
been reached where a new work by Solzhenit-
syn -- the open letter -- seems to mark a
low point in the fortunes of the anti-
Stalinists (though an advance in conscious-
ness and bitterness of tone). Whether this
work, too, will prove to be a turning
point remains to be seen.