An Iron Curtain Opens on the Arts

About 10 years ago, a Westerner compared the cultural policy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union with the forced feeding of a child who is allowed to eat only carefully strained, unspicy and monotonous food.

Today such a comparison would be unfair. While some aspects of our culture may still seem monotonous enough, it is impossible not to see changes for the better; the obvious decay of the 1970s is being replaced by an equally obvious revival.

A year ago one could notice only the first signs; during last summer and fall, cultural life became more intense, and now, during the first months of 1987, important events occur almost every day.

New novels and stories. Interesting--and critical--articles in newspapers and magazines. New movies and plays as well as artistic exhibitions. Soviet people today spend twice as much time in front of the television set as they did two years ago. They are standing in line for hours at ticket windows of legitimate theaters and movie houses. Even pensioners hurry to the newsstands at 7 each morning to buy newspapers and magazines--Moscow News, Moscow Young Communist, Ogonyek, Sobesednik, Znamya, Novy Mir--which have suddenly become extremely popular. Pravda, Izvestia, People’s Friendship and many other publications, once not so popular, now sell quickly.

There are several important reasons for this rise in the field of culture. While the Communist Party did not give up its control over culture, control is becoming less rigid and less dogmatic than it was. The party’s new task was to win over to its side the intelligentsia, an influential element of Soviet society--a producer as well as the most interested consumer of creative works.

At the same time, the party hoped to stir interest among all people, especially youth, and expand the possibilities for culture during leisure time. For many millions of people, intellectual nourishment is no less valued than other consumer goods. With the assistance of national and party leaders, it is turning out to be much easier to solve many problems concerning culture than to reorganize the country’s big and cumbersome economic system.

Last summer it was decided to limit the power of censors and expand the possibilities and rights of the chief editors of magazines, newspapers and publishing houses. At the same time, the staffs of many publishers were radically changed. A noticeable expansion of democracy in the life of creative workers’ unions has occurred.

In a short period of time, this led to the overthrow of the leadership of the Cinematographers’ Union, to major changes in the leadership of the Writers’ Union and to the creation of a new active organization--the Union of Theatrical Workers. Many conservative people who for years ran the show in literature, film-making, painting and sculpture found themselves moved aside. Their influence has not disappeared but is very much decreased.

The cultural renaissance of the 1960s was stimulated by the decisions of the 20th and 22nd Communist Party Congress to condemn the cult of Josef Stalin and Stalin’s terror. But the later policy of rehabilitating Stalin--more and more insistently led by Leonid I. Brezhnev--put an end to this renaissance. It could not continue during the epoch of “servility and toadyism,” of connivance and corruption and a new cult of “great general,” “great theoretician”--even “great writer” and “art connoisseur” in the form of Brezhnev.

Only condemnation of this depraved policy under Brezhnev could open the way to the publication of anti-Stalin literature created 20 years ago, such as the novel by Alexander Beck, “The New Appointment,” or the last poem of Alexander Tvardosky, “By the Right of Memory.” Both Tvardosky and Beck died at the beginning of the 1970s. “A Russian writer must live long,” 76-year-old Anatoly Rybakov recently said to me; his outstanding novel, “Children of the Arbat,” is now being published in serial form by the magazine People’s Friendship and promises to become the most important event of Soviet literature in the 1980s.

The “younger” 69-year-old writer, Vladimir Dudintsev, managed to live long enough to see the publication of his anti-Stalin novel, “White Clothing” (or “White Robes”). Much of today’s discussions center on “Buffalo,” the novel by 68-year-old Daniel Granin. And “really young” 50-year-old director Alexei German waited years to see his film, “Trial on the Road/Checkpoints,” appear on movie screens. It was recently named the best film of 1986, although it had long been forbidden to be shown. The film by Tengiz Abuladze, “Repentance,” will surely be named the best film of 1987. This movie passionately condemns totalitarianism and tyranny; it has been seen by about 3 million people in the Moscow area alone during the last six weeks.

Cultural change comes with the abolition of many (even though far from all) taboos that existed both for the press and the arts. Society, even recently, was presented to the Soviet reader and film-goer only in terms of successes and achievements. Yet vices and defects, without being reflected in the press or the arts, only increased.

Today, our press and literature quite decisively deal with problems of corruption and abuse of power on high levels--they treat drug abuse and prostitution, the low quality of medical assistance and education. We are learning the details of serious accidents in transportation, on the sea and in factories. Yet in the first days after the Chernobyl accident in April, 1986, the world could learn neither the real scope of the catastrophe nor the reasons why it occurred. In part, taboos have been removed even from such difficult themes as Afghanistan.

The real values of culture, fortunately, are quite long-lived. Today’s revival also includes such a typical Soviet occurrence as the rehabilitation of cultural figures who are deceased. The greatest poet of the 20th Century, Boris Pasternak, has been rehabilitated; he had been expelled from the writers’ union in 1958 after a noisy and shameful campaign. Not only are Pasternak poems being prepared for publication, but even his Nobel Prize-winning novel, “Dr. Zhivago,” will be printed in the Soviet Union. The poems and songs of Vladimir Vysotsky, plus a film about his life, will become available. Hardly tolerated by officials while he was alive, Vysotsky--seven years after his death--is becoming an object of national pride and hero-worship. One of the finest poems by Anna Akhmatova, “Requiem,” is being prepared for publication. Many poems, unknown until now, by Olga Bergolts and Boris Slutsky are finally being posthumously published. Russian culture celebrates the “return” of Nikolai Gumilev, the major poet of the early years of this century; he was an officer and nobleman, arrested in 1921 by the Petrograd Cheka (secret police) and shot for having allegedly been part of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy.

As long ago as the 1950s and ‘60s our culture began to appreciate and benefit from outstanding representatives who died after they emigrated. Fyodor Chaliapin, the great singer and actor, posthumously “returned to motherland” along with Ivan Bunin, the first Russian author to win the Nobel Prize for literature. This “restoration” process continued during the 1970s but never so quickly as in the last half-year. Some publications have started to print the works of Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov, who in the United States is considered, not without reason, to be an outstanding American writer. Stories by Yevgeny Zamyatin, who died in 1937 in Paris, have at last been published. Znamya, a weekly magazine, published poems by the great Georgy Ivanov. Literaturnaya Gazeta recently ran a favorable review of a book of memoirs, published in Paris, by Irina Odoyevatseva; “On the Banks of the Seine” is a book about those writers mentioned above, plus other famous Russian artists who died after emigrating.

Today’s change is being accelerated by the infusion of works from Western culture which for many years were ignored in our country, much to the loss of our people. After a delay of 25 years, Soviet audiences will soon see outstanding motion pictures by Federico Fellini, “8 1/2,” and Michelangelo Antonioni, “Red Desert.” Some theaters are already performing “It Happened in Vichy,” a 1965 play by the major American dramatist Arthur Miller.

In the town of Vitebsk a museum is being built to honor of one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century, Marc Chagall, who was born in Vitebsk but emigrated to France in 1922. In the Soviet Encyclopedia, Chagall is described as a French painter and graphic artist. Yet in a speech at the recent Moscow forum, poet Andrei Voznesensky demanded a return of recognition for “the art of the great Chagall to the country where he was born and where it has been absurdly forbidden.” Failures of Soviet art, sculpture and architecture prompt an agonizing revaluation and rejection of one-sided interpretations of “socialist realism” as the standard for all our culture.

A recent exhibition by young artists, embracing all directions and styles, was a big success in Moscow. No longer are exhibitions by “unofficial artists” broken up with the help of bulldozers. Even creating a Moscow museum for modern art is being discussed so that work by unknown artists can be exhibited along with such masters as Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich and Pavel Filonov, whose pictures have been gathering dust in storerooms.

Still, change meets resistance and each step forward requires a struggle. Battles were fought over the rehabilitation of Pasternak, the showing of “Repentance” and the publication of the novel “Children of the Arbat.” From the corners of the apparat, the struggle now emerges on the pages of the press, which can only be welcome. Only now, in fact, is real literary and artistic criticism being restored to life in our country. The potential of Soviet culture is immense, even though it was weakened by Stalin terror and Brezhnev policy, which helped advance not real talent but militant mediocrity. Cultural change, however, has just begun and its opponents are far from accepting defeat.