The Shadow Ideology

The makings of a “shadow ideology” were present already in Marxism, which promised everyone the right to fulfill themselves as human beings, to contribute to society according to ability and receive according to needs.

The “secret speech” radically changed the context within which such matters could be discussed. Soviet policies had by now begun to create their own antibodies. To sustain military rivalry with the United States and to generate technological progress, the USSR needed world-class scientists. They in their turn needed the freedom to think and debate with one another and to maintain contacts with their colleagues abroad. Yet in the paranoid and intellectually claustrophic milieu created by the party, free speech and “cosmopolitanism” were taboo. That is why the most outspoken protagonist of intellectual freedom and constitutional politics came from, of all places, the heart of the Soviet nuclear weapons establishment. Andrei Sakharov was initially a wholehearted supporter of the Soviet H-bomb, which he thought necessary to deter the United States. His “road to Damascus” came when Khrushchev, against his advice, decided to resume atmospheric testing in 1961, de­spite warnings that it would increase the radiation threat to human life. “A terrible crime was about to be committed, and I could do nothing to prevent it....................................... That was

probably the most terrible lesson of my life: you can't sit on two chairs at once. I de­cided to devote myself to ending biologically harmful tests.”^[2754]

This campaign brought him up against the leaders' determination to preserve Soviet great power status at all costs, and his areas of disagreement with them broadened.

The cultural world also brought forth an elite encouraged and supported by the party. Here again the official doctrine, socialist realism, contained contradictory elements. It was intended, for example, to generate easily understood novels and dramas, which would demonstrate how ordinary toilers were winning the class struggle and building socialism. But some of its keywords could be construed in diverse ways. “Realist” could slip sideways into depicting honestly the sufferings of ordinary toilers under Soviet rule. Narodny (popular, demotic) could imply deploying the colloquial usages and fragmented worldviews of ordinary toilers rather than the stilted language and streamlined scholastic outlook of Writers Union officials.^[2755]

Aleksandr Tvardovsky, editor of the Writers Union journal Novy Mir, was de­voted to the party's ideas (indeed he was a member of its Central Committee), but interpreted them to imply that a literary journal should endeavor to set down honestly the history and contemporary life of the Soviet peoples. In pursuit of this aim, in 1962 he published A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a short novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn which described frankly the life of an inmate in Stalin's labor camps. This was only the most outspoken of a series of novels and short stories throwing light on the Soviet past as experienced by peasants, workers, and soldiers.

Under the imperfect but not wholly fictitious protection of “socialist legality,” a stunted civic activism became possible. It first made itself felt among writers. In 1966 Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel were tried on a charge of spreading “anti­Soviet propaganda” in satirical works they had smuggled out to publish abroad. The prosecutor quoted passages from them with crass literalness, as if fictional characters always expressed the sentiments of authors. This blatant infringement of the professional autonomy of the writer outraged even establishment figures, and 63 members of the Writers Union signed a protest letter to the Supreme Soviet. The letter was circulated in samizdat, as was a transcript of the trial. The compilers of the transcript were then arrested, prompting further samizdat protests, which then reached a wider audience through broadcasts on Russian-language radio stations from the West.^[2757]

In this way a semi-underground public opinion took shape, borrowing elements of the Soviet constitution as their watchwords. In December 1965 pas­sersby on Moscow's Pushkin Square were treated to the surreal spectacle of Soviet police arresting demonstrators with placards proclaiming “Observe the Soviet Constitution!” From 1968 a samizdat journal, baldly entitled Chronicle of Current Events, recorded, without editorial comment, episodes in which the Soviet authorities had infringed their own laws or violated civil rights enshrined in the Constitution. Its masthead quoted Article 19 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which guaranteed free speech, thus proclaiming that Soviet citizens were subject to international law as well as to their own.

In this way an interstitial network disseminated the shadow ideology of civil rights, the rule of law, and adherence to the international community. Andrei Sakharov, whose 1968 booklet had enunciated those very principles, became their standard-bearer in practice as well as in theory. He would appear outside courtrooms where human rights activists were being tried, and he would write critical analyses of the charges against them, which he would circulate to Western journalists.^[2759]