The Scared Generation

Glas New Russian Writing #9

by Natasha Perova, Boris Yampolsky

Every society has had periods of totalitarianism and terror in one form or another. Russia is not exceptional in this respect. Whether the Russian brand of totalitarianism was worse or better than, say, the Inquisition in Spain, the slave trade in America, Nazism in Germany, or today's Islamic fundamentalism is hard to say. It would be interesting to attempt a comparative analysis.

Slavery, or serfdom, was abolished in Russia only in 1862, but Alexander II's decreed could not abolish the mentality of servility overnight. Meek submissiveness of the bulk of the population on one hand, and authoritarian cruelty of the bureaucracy on the other, were to remain a feature of Russian society for a long time afterwards. The third factor in the social equation was the Russian intelligentsia, the bearers of culture in Russia who generated the country's intellectual and artistic values. This independent minded group caused the authorities particular concern and even fear as a constant source of dissidence both before and after the 1917 revolutions.

In the initial decades of Soviet rule the working class and peasantry were forcibly driven into labour camps under various pretexts, because the dislocated country needed slave labour to realize its ambitious construction projects. The freedom loving intelligentsia was imprisoned in camps and lunatic asylums, so as to intimidate and exterminate them by apparently legal methods. Gradually the whole nation divided into civilian informers and alarmed citizens, trying hard to be law-abiding but still ending up in the labour camps accused of treason, espionage, cosmopolitanism, and a host of other imaginary crimes. They rarely survived to the end of their sentences in the arctic temperatures of Siberia and the Polar regions. Who can estimate how many political scientists, writers and artists of genius were lost to mankind in those inhuman conditions of the Soviet prison camps?

It is no wonder that those decades of totalitarian rule affected people's minds so deeply that, even after several years of democracy, people in their sixties and seventies are afraid to discuss politics over the telephone for fear it might be bugged. The 1960's, a time of positive changes in the West, saw the first political "thaw" in Russia, following revelations about the Stalinist regime by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956. The generation of intellectuals who reached their prime in the 1960's, and who retained a sincere belief in "socialism with a human face", is known in Russia as the "shestidesyatniks", or sixties generation. Some of them fought for human rights and suffered repression in their turn, while others lay low, only daring to discuss politics or read samizdat poetry in a very narrow circle of friends (those famous gatherings in the kitchen, which was considered less likely to be bugged).

The sixties generation are still very active in politics and public life today, and they are the target of hostility from both the right and the left of the political spectrum. The sharpest criticism comes from the younger generation who, happily, have never experienced the kind of pressure their elders were subjected to, and who have also never been thoroughly indoctrinated.

Westerners often ask why we put up with bureaucratic oppression, food shortages and queues, violations of human rights, and so on even now. Why don't we protest? The two works we offer you in this issue of Glas convey the atmosphere of invisible oppression and all-pervading fear in which the sixties generation grew up. Boris Yampolsky's "The Old Arbat" set in Moscow in the 1950's, with flashbacks of the 1930's and 1940's; and Vasil Bykov's "Manhunt" is set in the country in the 1930's. In both stories innocent people are persecuted in a way which precludes effective resistance.

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Erich C · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Manhunt - 3 stars

Khevedor Rovba, as part of "dekulakization" and collectivization, had been exiled for owning a threshing machine and renting it to neighbors: "exploitation and unearned income." He has returned secretly to his home village with disastrous results. Bykau exposes how the laziest and most corrupt have risen to positions of power, how pride and dignity has disappeared with ownership, and how even family ties lose their meaning.

The Old Arbat - 5 stars

The unnamed narrator, a resident of Moscow since his return from the war, realizes that he is being followed by secret police. Yampolsky vividly describes the psychological effects of living in a time of denunciations, purges, and ubiquitous surveillance:

Life moved on from one meeting to the next, from one campaign to the next, and each new campaign was more total, merciless and grotesque than all the rest put together. And all the time the atmosphere of guilt was being intensified, collective guilt and the guilt of each separate individual, which could never be redeemed in any way. One had continually to feel guilty, guilty, guilty and meekly accept all punishments, all criticisms and all sentences.

Gradually this feeling of constant, inexhaustible, frenzied guilt and the fear of shadowy powers-that-be became your alter-ego, your second nature and character.

The novel is not only a story of oppressive fear but of the resulting alienation and meaninglessness of existence and the normalizing of terror:

Yet although it seemed as if the world was coming to an end [...] life was going on as usual.

Someone was living it up at a party, perhaps the first he had ever been to in his life; someone had stayed on at the office alone and was bent over a sheet of paper, composing an anonymous denunciation; someone was watching Maeterlink's The Blackbird for the first time; someone was having his arrest warrant written out; someone else was having her hair permed and waved; in the heat of bakeries, bread was being baked for the following morning; at an abattoir outside the city, a herd of mud-caked, exhausted, obtuse cattle, unfed before slaughter, was lowing; someone was speaking first words of love to someone else: ardent, devoted, heartfelt, faltering words for a lifetime and until the end of time; in little churches services were being held by the dim light of a wax candle; by the light of blazing chandeliers meetings to mark some jubilee were proceeding with a ceremonial gravitas that smothered all living truth; and someone was walking devastated out of cemetery gates; three-man tribunals were working impersonally and methodically, enclosed by the silence of fortress walls; and somewhere out in the woods on the outskirts of Moscow an old poet who would be hounded in years to come wandered along wintry paths, murmuring poetry with every last breath he could command.

[Irina · Rating 5 out of 5]

the Manhunt was the most disturbing novel I have ever read