... In Zubok's telling, it is a sad story, almost a tragedy. Yet I
sometimes found it hard to repress the thought that Zhivago's children
not only enjoyed a nice life compared to the rest of the Soviet
population but also had a lot of fun along the way. All those moments of
boundless hope and tears of happiness! And even after the iron entered
their souls after 1968, the joys of foreign travel were available as a
recompense for lost idealism, all the sweeter because so long denied.
One of the characteristics of Zhivago's children that Zubok fails to
stress was their remarkable capacity for what Bourdieu called
'misrecognition', making them not only blind to their privileged
position in society but also able to construe it in terms of virtue and
moral leadership.
 
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n17/fitz03_.html

   * LRB
    * 10 September 2009
Cultivating Their Dachas
Sheila Fitzpatrick

    * Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia by Vladislav
Zubok

History has its moments of euphoria when people embrace in the streets
out of sheer love for their neighbours, police horses are garlanded with
flowers, and everyone understands that the old lies and repression are
gone for ever. I'm not sure that these moments occur in Britain.
Certainly they didn't in the Australia where I grew up in the 1950s, and
as a result I'm always bemused when I hear them spoken about: do such
things really happen in the world beyond? I'll never know because I
always missed the moment. Khrushchev's Thaw was over by the time I got
to the Soviet Union, leaving only the post-euphoria hangover. I could
have been in Paris in the summer of 1968 but stayed in Oxford instead,
writing my thesis. Then I went to America, but it was already the early
1970s, and people were turning 30 and taking the flowers out of their
hair.

Vladislav Zubok had a similar problem. Coming to maturity in the Soviet
Union in the late 1960s, he was in time for the collapse and
disillusionment that followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968 but not for the heady excitement that had preceded it, when
reform-minded Soviet intellectuals looked forward to a Moscow Spring to
match the Prague one. That cohort of Soviet intellectuals - 'Zhivago's
children', as he calls them - were his parents' generation, not his; and
this book, which he describes as 'not just a scholarly project', is his
affectionate, often nostalgic tribute to them. It helps to know this -
though the information is hidden in the acknowledgments at the very end
of the book - because it not only explains who he is actually talking
about but also accounts for an otherwise puzzling instability of tone
between empathy and detachment.

The milieu of Zubok's parents was the Soviet intelligentsia, not its
celebrity wing but even so the intelligentsia of Moscow and Leningrad
rather than the provinces: 'television engineers . . . employees in the
military-industrial complex . . . musicians, artists . . . art
historians'. These were people who had been students in the immediate
postwar period, had hoped for much from the Thaw and de-Stalinisation in
the 1950s, believed in socialism with a human face in the 1960s, read
the reform-minded journal Novy Mir, had a passionate respect for high
culture, and listened to the songs of the balladeers Bulat Okudzhava and
Vladimir Vysotsky on their tape recorders. It's not a cohort defined by
age because the postwar students included World War Two veterans born in
the 1920s as well as school-leavers born in the 1930s. Nor is it a
social group whose exact location and definition a sociologist could
map. The subject of Zubok's book is a group of people with a shared
worldview, shared assumptions and experience, a group more or less
synonymous for practical purposes with the Soviet intelligentsia of
Moscow and Leningrad in the 1950s and 1960s.

The remarkable thing about this group as Zubok presents it is that its
members were socialists and Soviet patriots who were at the same time
spirited, romantic, optimistic, inclined to non-standard thinking and
confident about the future and the possibility of change within a Soviet
context. Readers used to a division of the Soviet intelligentsia into
'party hacks', who mouthed Soviet slogans but didn't believe in them,
and 'dissidents', the heroic challengers of the system who rejected
socialism and Soviet values, may find the combination surprising. But
both the socialist commitment and the belief in reform were crucial to
the collective identity of Zubok's people. When they lost the first and
were disappointed in the second after 1968, the whole imagined community
collapsed.

'Zhivago's children', Zubok's coinage, is something of a misnomer for a
group of optimistic reform-minded socialists who were proud of their
country and considered themselves children of the Revolution. Neither
Pasternak nor Zhivago was a socialist, an optimist or a Soviet patriot.
What they shared with Zubok's group was a devotion to high culture and
consciousness of descent from the Russian intelligentsia of the 19th
century.

In the novel, Dr Zhivago is emblematic of the old Russian
intelligentsia; in the imagination of many Soviet intellectuals of the
1950s and 1960s, Pasternak himself served this function. Along with
Akhmatova, Nadezhda Mandelshtam and the medievalist Dmitry Likhachev,
Pasternak was a survivor of the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia who,
after a period of eclipse and disgrace, was rediscovered by a younger
generation in the mid-1950s. Some lucky or well-connected young
intellectuals were able to visit these figures semi-surreptitiously at
their dachas, listen to their poems and stories of the past, and get a
whiff of a vanished world of high culture and aristocratic manners. But
those who, like Josef Brodsky, took this spiritual reconnection deeply
to heart were exactly those who were unlikely to retain socialist
beliefs or Soviet patriotism, thus marginalising themselves in the group
whose story Zubok wants to tell.

It would have made more sense for Zubok to have called his group
'Lenin's children', or perhaps, in deference to the first Bolshevik
Commissar of Enlightenment, Lunacharsky's. For it wasn't from Pasternak
and Akhmatova that Zubok's people picked up those values of the
pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia that are particularly relevant to his
story - namely, optimism, revolutionary idealism and political
engagement. As Zubok acknowledges, their Soviet schooling propagated
'ideals of self-cultivation and self-improvement, and the pervasive cult
of high culture . . . once intrinsic to the ethos of the Russian
intelligentsia'; as a result, it produced young people 'with
intellectual curiosity, artistic yearnings and a passion for high
culture' who 'identified not only with the Soviet collectivity but also
with humanist individualism'. Zubok calls this result 'unintended',
presumably because he wants to distance himself from any suspicion of
Soviet nostalgia. In fact, it's one of the paradoxes of Soviet history
that it was exactly the result that cultural leaders like Lunacharsky
and Gorky, Stalin's chief theorist of culture, intended, however
bizarrely those intentions may have coexisted with the terrorist
practices of the Stalin period.

Whether they were Zhivago's children or Lunacharsky's, this idealistic
group had an extraordinary capacity for repeated 'moments of madness',
when the bright future for which they had longed seemed just round the
corner. Over the quarter-century from the end of the Second World War to
1968 through which Zubok follows them, tears of happiness were shed on
numerous occasions when it 'seemed that we would start breathing freely
with one more push', that the time had finally arrived when 'people
would begin to speak and think freely, and not a single scoundrel would
be able to indict them for anti-Soviet speeches.' But tears of
disappointment were equally frequent, when 'hopes . . . lay shattered,'
when there were 'no more illusions and dreams of a better future'. These
moments were each time attended by shock that the 'philistines', so
recently routed, were once again in the ascendant.

Such idealism and naivety are often attributed to the Khrushchev period,
when de-Stalinisation and the Thaw fired the enthusiasm of the young,
when Sputnik and Gagarin's space flight made Soviet citizens proud of
the country's scientific achievements, and Khrushchev promised that
Communism would be achieved within 20 years. But Zubok departs from the
standard story in dating the beginning of the time of hope to the late
Stalin period, specifically the immediate postwar years in the
universities of Moscow and Leningrad, when veterans mingled with
students straight from school in an atmosphere of optimism and energy
generated by their survival of a terrible war and pride in the Soviet
victory. 'We not only thought, we firmly knew, that our country was the
vanguard force of mankind,' in the words of one of them. Among the
cohort, thirsting after knowledge and high culture, were poets like
David Samoilov and Boris Slutsky, future 'enlightened bureaucrats' like
Anatoly Cherniaev, and a young Communist with a bright future, Mikhail
Gorbachev, and his future wife, Raisa, both students at Moscow State
University in the first half of the 1950s.

Most accounts of the late Stalin period foreground the
'anti-cosmopolitan' campaign (both xenophobic and anti-semitic) and the
disciplining of the cultural intelligentsia known, after its point man,
the Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, as the zhdanovshchina, but these
events are peripheral to Zubok's story, since they seem to have left
Zhivago's children - including the many Jews among them - strangely
untouched. Zubok even notes that the zhdanovshchina had the positive
side effect of giving the young 'a great appetite for forbidden cultural
and intellectual fruits'. At a time when any sort of meeting in public
remained constricted, young people of the postwar cohort developed the
habit of gathering informally in private apartments to talk and listen
to music and readings of unpublished work. Since dozens of people often
attended, this was possible only because some of the students were from
elite, politically connected families with large, luxurious apartments.

Stalin's death in 1953 brings us into the more familiar territory of the
Thaw, the rollercoaster years of hopes and disappointments for the
intelligentsia. Highlights of the period included Khrushchev's Secret
Speech on Stalin's crimes at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, the Moscow
Youth Festival in 1957 and the publication of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, or, before that, Vladimir
Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone (1956) and Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Babii
Yar (1961). There were setbacks, too, including the scandal over the
publication of Dr Zhivago in Italy in 1957 and the attacks on Pasternak
that followed. But in general the atmosphere among the intelligentsia
continued to be buoyant and Zhivago's children remained socialists and
Soviet patriots, 'reborn Leninists' who felt that the 20th Party
Congress had given 'new life to the Communist experiment, by cleansing
it of Stalinist anti-semitism and chauvinism'. Novy Mir, which is
estimated to have reached between three and five million readers each
month, though its subscription list was restricted by the Central
Committee to 1.2 million, published a series of controversial novels and
stories while also extending its discussion of history and current
affairs, all in the name of socialism as well as sincerity and truth.
The newspaper Izvestia, edited from 1959 by Alexei Adzhubei,
Khrushchev's son-in-law, who was 35 when he got the job, pioneered a new
style of 'honest' and lively journalism.

The story of the Thaw often ends in 1964, the year of Khrushchev's fall
from power, or even earlier, but Zubok's perspective is broader. He is
interested not just in the poets and novelists among Zhivago's children,
or those eagerly read by them, but also in the natural and social
scientists in the cohort and in the 'enlightened bureaucrats' who, back
in the postwar years, had been their fellow students. It's unusual for a
historian of Soviet culture to use this term (introduced into Russian
history by the late Bruce Lincoln to describe the ministerial officials
who in the 1840s, despite the conservatism of Tsar Nicholas I, managed
to draft most of the great reforms implemented in the 1860s by his
successor, Alexander II). Not only that, Zubok's practice is also at
odds with the Russian intelligentsia's long tradition of categorically
excluding 'bureaucrats' - that is, anyone holding an official state or
Party office - from its ranks. But as scholarship on the postwar period
develops, it is becoming increasingly clear that bureaucrats were no
less likely than poets to be reform-minded (and a lot more likely to get
their reforms implemented).

The early Brezhnev period was a highpoint of the kind of reform in which
experts - economists, sociologists, demographers, cyberneticists - from
Soviet 'think-tanks' collaborated with officials in the Central
Committee and the ministries. The (unsuccessful) 1965 economic reform
sponsored by Kosygin is a case in point, but there was such a buzz of
activity across the social sciences that one sociologist later called it
the zenith of 'the officially recognised role of the intellectuals' in
Soviet society and policy-making. In the mid-1960s Zhivago's children -
including these reform-minded social scientists - were still
collectivists, despising the ethos of capitalism in the West as well as
the 'materialism' of much of the Soviet elite: they aspired to a purer
as well as a more scientific socialism. Even the newly emerging
'dissidents' (human rights activists who had no access to the Soviet
corridors of power) still shared these assumptions: as Zubok points out,
the rights they advocated didn't include the rights of private property.

Yet the collapse of these hopes was just round the corner. It came with
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, which put an end
to the liberalisation of the Prague Spring and was the beginning of 'the
long decline of Zhivago's children and the death throes of their
dreams'. For Zubok, socialist idealism was the group's sine qua non:
without it, 'in the absence of that dream, the very idea of an
intelligentsia in Russia began to seem like the figment of a naive
imagination.' Intellectuals in Moscow and Leningrad had welcomed the
idea of socialism with a human face and hoped it would travel from
Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union. Extensive personal and intellectual
contacts between East European and Russian reform-minded intellectuals
made the invasion particularly bitter, yet as at every other moment of
disappointment over the preceding ten years, the intellectuals caved in,
with only a minority even signing letters of protest. They yielded to
'the brutal force of the authoritarian state', in Zubok's formulation;
but his account shows how little actual force was needed to bring
Zhivago's children into line. For all his sympathy with the group, Zubok
has to admit that they 'rarely lived up to the ethos and ideals of the
old Russian intelligentsia', regularly falling back into the bad habits
of 'conformism, cowardice, mutual denunciations, cynicism and
hypocrisy'.

Given the regularity of the euphoria/ disappointment cycle, Zhivago's
children might reasonably have hoped that 1968 would turn out to be just
a stop along the way rather than the terminus. It turned out otherwise,
however; and the main factors Zubok pinpoints in one of the most
interesting chapters of his book were the rise of a Western-oriented
dissident movement, the growth of Russian national sentiment within the
educated elite, and, above all, the Jewish emigration of the 1970s.

The dissidents were the small minority of Zhivago's children who kept up
their criticism of regime policies after 1968, but from the position of
outsiders rather than, as before, quasi-insiders. Socialism quickly
disappeared from their platform. Finding themselves shunned by the
majority of the intelligentsia, they made little effort to win its
support, let alone that of the broader population, and addressed their
message almost entirely to the West. The close association with
Moscow-based foreign correspondents that ensued was interpreted by the
KGB, as well as by many ordinary Russians, as treachery and
collaboration with the Cold War enemy. In terms of Russian public
opinion, it didn't help that many of the dissidents were Jewish, often
very critical of the Russian national character (such comments as
'slavery is in the Russian genes' were often heard in dissident
circles), or that the rights of non-Russian national groups mistreated
by the Soviet (or Russian-imperialist) regime were one of their
favourite political causes.

The counter-development of the 1970s, the growth of Russian nationalism,
enjoyed considerable support at all levels of Soviet society up to the
Politburo. Nationalism came in various forms, from a fascination among
writers with the old Russian village to an anti-semitism fuelled by the
possibility of Jewish emigration that opened up in the early 1970s,
resulting in the departure of 200,000 Jews, including many members of
the intelligentsia, in the course of the decade. From the Western point
of view (expressed most vehemently in the US), the Jews were a
persecuted people in the Soviet Union who should be rescued from their
misery. In Soviet popular opinion, they were a privileged group (Zubok
runs through the indices of Jewish over-representation in elite
occupations) who were now being given yet another privilege for which
nobody else was eligible: the right to emigrate. The emigrants
themselves often cited fear of pogroms as their reason for leaving, but
Zubok is sceptical: he thinks they were mainly worried about the
educational and professional prospects of their children in the Soviet
Union, as well as being disappointed with the prospects of socialist
reform: 'Soviet Russia had seemed like the "Promised Land" to their
grandparents and parents during the 1920s,' but now it 'had become a
ruined utopia for them and their children. Why tolerate an uncertain
future in which they and their children might be scapegoated for Soviet
misrule by the growing number of Russian anti-semitic nationalists?'

With the end of the socialist dream, in Zubok's presentation, most of
Zhivago's children simply gave up being interested in politics, deciding
to cultivate their dacha gardens and enjoy their opportunities for
foreign travel. In the place of socialism, new interests developed:
Russian Orthodoxy and Zionism (sometimes pursued simultaneously by
assimilated Jews); Zen Buddhism. People focused more on their private
lives, drawing a sharper line between the public and private spheres.
They became more materialistic and developed a new vocabulary of
cynicism. The age of enthusiasm was over.

There was, however, an unexpected postscript: the Gorbachev era of
socialist reform at the end of the 1980s. In Zubok's definition, Mikhail
and Raisa Gorbachev remained Zhivago's children, their socialist
idealism untouched because of their two decades on ice in the provinces.
When they returned to Moscow in 1978 on Mikhail's appointment to the
Politburo, they re-established their old connections with social
scientists and 'enlightened bureaucrats'. Critics and supporters alike
saw parallels between Gorbachev's glasnost and the Prague Spring 20
years earlier. But perestroika came too late, in Zubok's view: the
civic-minded intelligentsia Gorbachev had counted on as a mainstay was
no longer there to be mobilised in support of socialist reform.

In assessing the significance of Zhivago's Children as an interpretation
of Soviet cultural history, it is important to bear in mind that the
cohort of Zhivago's children is Zubok's construction, and clearly
reflects the particular experiences of his parents and their friends. He
has generalised these experiences to cover the whole Russian
intelligentsia (however that slippery term is defined), but other
trajectories and experiences were undoubtedly possible. The late Stalin
period was a time of hope for some, but not for those who fell victim to
the anti-semitism of the period. The early Brezhnev period may have been
exciting for well-connected reform-minded sociologists and economists,
but it was miserable for Tvardovsky's Novy Mir. Many more such instances
could be listed, though the point of an analysis like Zubok's is not
that the experiences he describes are fully representative but that that
they are grounded in individual experience and, most important,
illuminate broader questions. If we accept that Zubok meets these
criteria, what are the areas he most illuminates?

The first surprise is that for at least a quarter of a century the
Soviet regime had an asset that is generally overlooked: a supportive
and patriotic intelligentsia, a cultural elite enthusiastically
committed to socialism. In other words, the Soviet regime appeared to
have solved one of the major challenges that confronted it after the
October Revolution: how to co-opt the intelligentsia as a partner, to
make it a subordinate but supportive participant. Of course, the problem
was not solved for ever, but even the 25 years Zubok claims the solution
lasted is a pretty impressive achievement. Indeed, there would be an
argument both for back-dating it to the mid-1930s (this is just an empty
space in Zubok's analysis, presumably because his parents had not yet
arrived on the scene) and post-dating it into the 1980s, making the
duration of the partnership closer to half a century.

How could this have happened? Zubok does not address this question,
presumably because it is a given for him - a matter of simple
observation - that his parents' generation were socialist idealists and
patriots. But there is surely a clue in his emphasis on the Jewishness
of many of Zhivago's children, the importance of which becomes visible
when the cohort disintegrates in the wake of the Jewish emigration of
the 1970s. This Jewish theme, building on and expanding the insights of
Yuri Slezkine's The Jewish Century, is the second major area his account
illuminates.[*] Many Jewish Communist intellectuals were just one
generation out of the Pale: theirs was one of the two great upward
mobility stories associated with the Revolution. No wonder Jews of this
generation tended to be socialists and Soviet patriots.

The other great upward mobility story - unmentioned by Zubok - was that
of workers and peasants (mainly Russian and Ukrainian by nationality)
who, partly as a result of Soviet affirmative action policies in higher
education in the 1920s and 1930s, made it into the elite and became
first-generation administrators and professionals: Khrushchev and
Brezhnev were both products of this process, as basically was the
peasant's son Gorbachev, though he was too young to have been a formal
beneficiary of affirmative action. These two sets of arrivistes, Jews
and lower-class Russians, were the core of the new Soviet
intelligentsia, and, unlike the old Russian intelligentsia, they thought
of the Soviet regime as 'ours' rather than 'theirs'. In addition to
their socialist commitments, both groups had a great respect for high
culture and a desire to acquire it: they were Zhivago's children in this
sense, accepting as they did the surviving members of the old
intelligentsia as their teachers.

The third main achievement of Zubok's analysis is its abolition of the
hard and fast dividing line - beloved of many Russian intellectuals,
especially in post-Soviet retrospect - between 'intelligentsia' and
'bureaucrats', since Zhivago's children are both, and Gorbachev is one
of them, which means that we finally have a back story for perestroika
that makes sense. In the usual telling, Russian history has a long line
of 'Tsar reformers', starting with Peter the Great and ending with
Gorbachev, who got it into their heads that Russia ought to be changed
and made the nobles go along with the idea. The reforming impulse is
seen as Westernising, alien. But Gorbachev was a Westerniser only to a
limited extent, even if, as Mrs Thatcher noted, Westerners could do
business with him. His real context was socialist reform, as understood
by Soviet and East European intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s, the
time of his political and intellectual formation.

In the end those same intellectuals failed him, and Zubok has some harsh
words to say about their impracticality, lack of vision, disloyalty, and
the 'elitist and overweening' attitudes that led them to claim 'supreme
authority over public morality and political matters' during
perestroika. The intelligentsia turned out to be venal, seduced by
(often illusory) prospects of individual betterment under
post-socialism. They failed to appreciate the value of state support for
culture and science and overestimated their own value on a free market.
One of the big miscalculations of the intellectual elites at the end of
the Soviet period was that a move towards capitalism would bring new and
even better support, that 'the West out of gratitude would provide a new
Marshall Plan for them.' It was a moral miscalculation, in Zubok's view,
as well as an economic and financial one: they should have stayed true
to the old Russian intelligentsia's commitment to 'serving the people'.
(This last phrase is unexpected: Zhivago's children, in Zubok's account,
may have been socialists, but they were also firmly embedded in a
privileged elite that seems to have had as little to do with 'the
people' as possible.) In any case, Zubok's conclusion is that they got
their comeuppance: when they abandoned Gorbachev and perestroika, they
'sawed off the bough on which they were all sitting'; the end of
socialism in the Soviet Union turned out also to mark the 'death of the
Russian intelligentsia'.

In Zubok's telling, it is a sad story, almost a tragedy. Yet I sometimes
found it hard to repress the thought that Zhivago's children not only
enjoyed a nice life compared to the rest of the Soviet population but
also had a lot of fun along the way. All those moments of boundless hope
and tears of happiness! And even after the iron entered their souls
after 1968, the joys of foreign travel were available as a recompense
for lost idealism, all the sweeter because so long denied. One of the
characteristics of Zhivago's children that Zubok fails to stress was
their remarkable capacity for what Bourdieu called 'misrecognition',
making them not only blind to their privileged position in society but
also able to construe it in terms of virtue and moral leadership. Not
least among the advantages Zhivago's children possessed was the ability
to have their cake and eat it too.

* Reviewed by Sheila Fitzpatrick in the LRB of 17 March 2005.

Sheila Fitzpatrick teaches at the University of Chicago. Her memoir of
an Australian childhood, My Father's Daughter, will be published next
year.