Years of Stagnation (1969–1985) Cultural Policy the Cultural

CHAPTER TEN YEARS OF STAGNATION (1969–1985) Cultural Policy The cultural Thaw that began after Stalin’s death did not give way to a summer. The campaign of harassment against the Nobel prize-winner Boris Pasternak and his novel Doktor Zhivago in the late 1950s showed that the Party had no intention of relaxing its ideological monopoly, and the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 meant a serious setback for all hopes of liberalisation. Two trials in the mid-60s imposed further boundaries on the freedom of writers. The future Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky was sentenced to internal exile for ‘parasitism’, while Andrey Sinyavsky and Yury Daniėl, who had dared to publish uncensored works in Western Europe under pseudonyms, received seven and five years hard labour, respectively, for ‘anti-Soviet behaviour’. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, hailed as a great bearer of truth on his debut in 1961, found himself five years later deprived of the opportunity to conduct his examination of Stalin- ism in public. The year 1970 saw the fall of the last bastion of the Thaw, the magazine New World (Novy mir), when its editor-in-chief Aleksandr Tvardovsky was forced to resign. In the field of children’s literature, events were not quite so spectac- ular. The magazine Youth did suffer a setback in 1969, when a number of prominent figures from the Thaw years were purged from its edito- rial team, but, on the other hand, Youth could by then no longer be seen as a forum for youth literature. Nor did the wave of emigration in the 1970s and 1980s have the same devastating effect on children’s literature as it had on adult writing; Anatoly Kuznetsov, Anatoly Gladilin and Vasily Aksyonov had already given up writing for young people before they decided to leave the Soviet Union. Children’s literature did suffer a loss when Rakhil Baumvol moved to Israel in 1971. After the forced emigration, her name and her books were purged from the libraries and pages of Soviet literature. Vladimir Maramzin (born 1934), arrested in 1974 and offered the possibility to leave the country a year later, and Yuz Aleshkovsky (born 1929), who emigrated in 1979, also had a number of children’s books behind them. years of stagnation (1969–1985) 535 Still, the changes in the Soviet cultural climate could not fail also to leave their mark on children’s and juvenile literature. Voices were raised for a return to the principles of socialist realism, as when in 1969 the critic Vladimir Nikolaev asked for strongwilled, combative and idealistic heroes, inspired by civic awareness, instead of all the apolitical dream- ers and weak outsiders that threatened to take over children’s literature.1 But even if there was no turning back to the aesthetics and ideological commitment of the Stalin years, much of the optimism and vitality of the Thaw years was gradually lost. The stagnation manifested itself alarmingly in the increasing age of the writing corps: as the 1970s and 1980s passed, the youngest writers of any significance were still those born around 1940, who had made their debut in the 1960s. For new writers it became harder to break in, as publishers preferred to rely on established, trustworthy names. The writers’ congresses lost all semblance of a forum for debate, as the main task was to maintain the consensus. An indication of the prevailing mood was the constantly repeated praise for a speech made by the new Party Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, in 1968. Brezhnev had addressed an All- Union teachers’ congress in a speech that set out what the Party expected from writers: Artistic creation requires a variety of styles, devices and genres. We decry any attempt to reduce artists’ individual characteristics to uniformity. The Party and the people want only one thing: for works of art to reflect the truth of life, manifest the greatness of the Soviet people’s heroic feats, educate all people in the spirit of Communism’s high ideals, and help them realise those ideals. Of course, this does not rule out any depiction of difficulties, negative phenomena or even mistakes, but an artistic rendering of the pro- found processes of life with all its contradictions, and the conflict between new and old, is not the same as a one-sided display of the dark side alone, which our opponents hold up as the height of ‘free’ artistic creation.2 The claim that the Communist Party was the benevolent protector of literature passed without critical comment, despite forty years of experience of how this protection worked in practice. The basic dichotomy of socialist realism was also unresolved: on the one hand, a call for the truthful depiction of reality; on the other, a normative definition of what this true 1 Vladimir Nikolaev, “. I master, i grazhdanin,” in Detskaia literatura 1969: Stat’i i issledovaniia (M., 1969), 89–91. 2 L.I. Brezhnev, “Rech’ na Vsesoiuznom s’’ezde uchitelei,” Leninskim kursom: Rechi i stat’i. Vol. 2 (M., 1970), 234..

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