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Soviet Dissenters: Who Were They And What Were Their Thoughts?

Imtiaz Akhtar
Image for representational purpose only

Imtiaz Akhtar

On 31st December, 1991, that is exactly 30 years ago, the greatest tragedy of twentieth century had taken place. The day saw the demise of an experiment, a way of living, of being and dying that had shown both in theory and practice that an alternative to predatory capitalism or if you prefer the term coined by Gilbert Mercier disaster capitalism was possible. The purpose of this article is not to lament on the past but rather to analyze a part of our collective history that remains least explored even amongst those who claim allegiance to Socialist and Marxist philosophies.

The Soviet Union is perhaps one of the few nation-states that had its detractors when it was not even in existence. In the pre-Soviet era in the ninetieth century there were host of thinkers who were openly hostile to any idea of a Socialist system that practiced a separation between state and church. The fountainhead of the group was without doubt Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1888). Russophiles are well aware of the broad biographical sketch of his life and his works. Born to a middle-class family, the young Dostoyevsky had quit his job as an engineer so that he could devote his life to writing. Dostoyevsky began his career with the publication of a novel called The Poor Folks (1846). The novel attracted attention of the intelligentsia of the Russian society. The literary godfather of the era Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1846) not only publicly praised the novel but went on to call Dostoyevsky a literary heir of the great writer Nikolay Gogol. Dostoyevsky’s reputation as a writer was thus sealed. The Poor Folks is a novel known for social commentary interspersed with acidic humor – a peculiar trademark style invented by Dostoyevsky. Having just published his debut novel Dostoyevsky in the same year he went on to publish another hyper-realist novel called The Double. On 23rd April, 1849[i], a liberal lawyer and a translator attached with the Ministry of Foreign Affiars had invited a group of intellectuals for a literary meet. His name was Mikhail Vasil’evich Petrashevsky (1821-1866). Dostoyevsky hardly had any inkling that attending this meeting would turn out to be such a costly affair. In the rather innocent meeting a letter authored by Gogol and addressed to Belinsky dated 15 July, 1847 was read aloud. The letter merely boasts of the fact that “Only in literature in spite of the Tatar censorship, there is still some life and forward movement.” The event did not go down well with the Tsar Nicholas I (Reign: 1825-1855) who then ruled Russia with an iron fist. It was said about Tsar Nicholas I that he did not like intelligent subjects, he liked loyal ones. He called the meeting a conspiracy of ideas and immediately arrested all the members of the group since then known in the annals of history as the Petrashevsky affair. Illustrated History of the USSR, Progress Publishers, 1984, notes that, “Meetings of the society, which were held on Fridays, were attended by Dostoyevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin (1820-1889) and other writers. After the revolutionary events that rocked many European countries in 1848, some of the members of the Petrashevsky circle decided to form a secret organization to prepare for an uprising against Tsarism. However, the Petrashevsky circle was infiltrated by the police. Twenty one members (including Dostoyevsky) were arrested. On the orders of the Tsar the arrested radicals were sentenced to be shot for corrupting people’s minds.” Dostoyevsky along with others radicals were arrested on the same day and were kept in the St. Peters and Paul Fortress where he was supposed to be shot dead by a firing squad. Most of us know that Dostoyevsky was made to stand in a row of three before he was released at the last minute. The whole affair was a mock-execution as Tsar Nicholas I was not interested in killing him. It was not before 1854 that Dostoyevsky was released. But by then Dostoyevsky already had a change of heart. Prison is indeed a strange institution. One who visits it even once never ceases to carry one inside his soul. By the time Dostoyevsky came out of the prison he had given up his belief in materialism and socialism as preached by Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-1889). He was without doubt the most radical and original Russian philosopher of the whole of nineteenth century. From here onwards, Dostoyevsky not only became an anti-westernizing Slavophil, a nativist, but he did not hesitate to declare his newly fond love for the autocracy and the Church. Much like Schiller he sought to revive all the medieval institutions such as landlordism, Tsarism and hegemony of the Greek Orthodox Church. Chernyshevsky had not only authored brilliant philosophical essays on subjects like religion, race, relationship of art to reality and character of human knowledge – an essay that can put to shame all those post-modernists who champion relativity of knowledge. Apart from these essays he also wrote a polemical novel known to us in English as What is to be done? (1863) This novel was written while he was incarcerated in the St. Peters and Paul Fortress. I wish I had the luxury of words and time so that I could throw some light on this novel. The novel gives expression to the twin philosophical themes of socialism and feminism. The novel What is to be done? is narrated from the point of view of its female protagonist Vera Pavlovna. Now, Vera is a typical character that you find in the nineteenth century Russian literature. She is young. She is talented. She is a dreamer. And she is also a realist. She is in short a rare combination of a Don Quixote (the dreamer) and a Sancho Panza (the doer). But Vera’s sole problem is that she has a cunning mother who wants to get her married to a rich prince. It hardly matters to her mother if the prince is someone whose structure of soul does not correspond to that of her daughter’s soul. So Vera does what is unthinkable in Russian society. She practices a set of forbidden acts namely: she falls in love with a young doctor who is poor and then she marries him. She divorces him and marries his friend and then she runs a sewing shop where the surplus (profits) is shared in equal proportions with her co-workers. Not satisfied with this she encourages the workers to devote time to acquire culture. Vera also dreams that she lives in a glass palace where all members share the fruits of earth in equal measure. These dream sequences form the core of the novel authored by Chernyshevsky. So you can see how this quid pro quo works: dreams pave way for reality and you later fight to realize your dreams. In 1864, that is just a year after the appearance of this novel, Dostoyevsky wrote a polemical novel called Notes from the Underground. Now, this is something that is possible only in Russia that you counter a novel with another one. In this case Dostoyevsky counters a novel with a progressive bent with a reactionary one. The novel Notes from the Underground is a novel that mocks Chernyshevsky’s What is to be done?

I do not want to dwell for too long on Dostoyevsky but the philosophical themes that Dostoyevsky developed in his subsequent novels all bear the hallmarks that one finds in his Notes from the Underground. Broadly speaking, Dostoyevsky had developed a set of stylistic and thematic unity that runs throughout all his novels that he wrote after he came out of the prison. Be it the Notes from House of the Dead (1862), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), and his final novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880) where he expresses his summa theologica in a most comprehensive way. I apologize for the sketchy manner in which I am proceeding but I have no other option. I am well aware of the fact that I am writing for a set of internet based readers whose patience is not very long, at least when we measure it by the Russian standards.

 I would now like to enunciate the set of philosophical themes around which Dostoyevsky organized his novels. If we do not understand these thematic unities then as a reader one would fail to grasp the overall meaning of Dostoyevsky’s literary works. Let me then enlist them one by one:

Once the revolution occurred in Russia in 1917 the peasants and the workers led by the Bolsheviks seized power, the Union gave birth to its own set of detractors both within and without the Soviet. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) a novel set up in a dystopia is probably the first major novel to critique a collectivist society after the birth of the Soviet. Soon thereafter works authored by Ayn Rand, a Russian who migrated to United States of America and wrote in English published a series of novels that depicts how collectivism is antithetical to the ‘true human nature’. She wrote We the Living (1936) in which she depicts the war torn Russia. The whole focus of the novel is in convincing people that collectivism leads to queues. She develops this image quite successfully. Socialism brings war and forces people to stand in queues so that they can buy basic amenities like vodka and match-boxes. Although capitalism creates big and empty malls with no buyers as no one has any money is a fact that never struck her. In 1938 she wrote another novel Anthem which is set up in a utopian world where a nameless couple at last discovers a building that they can own and live. This gives them the joys that one derives from owning a piece of private property. She also wrote two thick and pretty dense novels known as The Fountainhead (1943) and The Atlas Shrugged (1957) where she develops her theme of hyper individualism. She preached that old Nietzschean theory that tells us that history of human society is the history of supermen. The list of novels that were authored with the specific agenda of ‘exposing’ the horrors of an egalitarian system is indeed long. For those interested I’d recommend Marc Slonim’s survey entitled Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems (1917-1977). One can even include Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell. These two novels were widely used by the western press to demoralize socialists. The later novel 1984 as Marc Slonim writes correctly was inspired directly by Zemyatin’s novel We.

The writer who was directly influenced by Dostoyevsky was Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008). A mathematician by training Solzhenitsyn was initially a member of the Red Army before he became the ideologue of the white army (pro-Tsarist). He also participated in the Second World War (1939-45). He was arrested and deported to the Gulag for his acts of insubordination. Solzhenitsyn was sentenced to suffer eight years in the camp but like most of the prisoner he was released after four years. Once he was released from the Gulag the state rehabilitated him. He was given a job and he even married a girl who was member of the Komsomol (The Youth Communist Organization). In 1962, the state subsidized publishing house Novy Mir (New World) a popular literary magazine edited by Andrei Tsarkovsky – a Communist poet of proletarian origin published One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Novy Mir published 80,000 copies and Solzhenitsyn himself accumulated substantial amount of money from the state subsidized publishing house. This novel also made its illegal appearance in several European countries. The novel depicts life of a convict of a Gulag. The protagonist Ivan Denisovich is a peasant who is also a soldier. He is falsely accused of deserting his front and as a result is send to the Gulag. It is authored in a realistic style reminiscent of Tolstoy and Chekov. Solzhenitsyn later published The Cancer ward (1968). It is an unusually lengthy novel that he wrote in two parts. On the surface of the novel it would appear that it deals with the life story of several patients who are lodged in the cancer ward. But on a careful perusal of the novel, it would be clear that this novel actually critiques the soviet. And it does so powerfully. The core message of the novel can be discern from this line where a character says, “A man dies from tumor so how can a country survive with growths like labour camps and exiles?” (pp. 604) Solzhenitsyn and his group whose work I will discuss later wrote with one specific agenda. If Communist authors took up pen to defend poor and oppressed these dissenters did exactly the same. They too took up pen but they defended not the poor but the individual who was targeted by the state and society for wanting to dismantle a system that took care of what Nietzsche sarcastically called ‘the last man.’

The core of Solzhenitsyn’s beliefs can be found in his memoir called The Oak and The Calf: Sketches of Literary Life In The Soviet Union (Translated by Harry Willets) (1975). In this rather lengthy text Solzhenitsyn developed his philosophical thesis. It is a very lengthy text that runs into 538 pages. It is here that he develops his philosophical principles. This can be summed up in few words: we need Christ, we need the Market and we need a multi-party bourgeoisie democracy.    

In 1974, there appeared an important text known to us in English as From under the Rubble, YMCA (Young Men Christian Association), Paris. In Russiait was published in Samizdat (which in Russian means self-publication). The book basically is a collection of socio-political essays authored by a dozen writer including Solzhenitsyn. These essays appeared in Paris which by then had become the hot bed of anti-communism. The core principles that were enunciated by the detractors could be summed up in these following propositions:

The discerning readers would now recognize that these principles would give rise to a new kind of Right wing authoritarianism. In factual world the kind of philosophical recipe that these writers were giving birth to would lead straight to Vladimir Putin. A survey of the works of detractors would reveal that Putin was born before he was born. These principles as we know tragically prevailed. And when this happened almost ten percent of the whole of soviet society got wiped up in a matter of decade a fact that has been argued with substantial evidence by Naomi Klein in her essay on the dissolution of Soviet Union known as Russia: Bonfires of a Young Democracy. As we recall these events, we must ensure that those who now claim to be the rulers of the world, do don’t reclaim the right to rule over us ever again.

Imtiaz Akhtar is a lawyer who lives in Kolkata. He also holds a M.Phil in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University. He is also the author of Kafka Sutra (2017) which is a collection of ten short stories and was published by NJP Press, Texas, USA.

[i] All dates are in the old style i.e. Julian calendar. Until 1918 Russia used Julian calendar and not the Gregory calendar. In ninetieth century Julian calendar was 12 days behind the Gregorian calendar and in twentieth century it was 13 days behind

[ii] A character from Dostoyevsky’s novel The Devils that was initially named The Atheist in the draft says the following, “An atheist cannot be a Russian. An atheist at once ceases to be a Russian.” pp. 255, Translated by David Magarshak.

[iii] Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s second wife Anna Dostoyevskaya wrote in her Reminiscences, His Nameless Love: Portraits of Russian Writers, Progress Publishers, 1974, that, “He admitted to me later that he had been favorably surprised by my appropriately decorous manner. In society he was used to meeting nihilist women whose behavior shocked him. So he was gratified to encounter in me the very opposite of the then predominant type of independent young woman,” (Translated by Katherine Judelson).   

[iv] A character from Dostoyevsky’s The Devils says, “All slaves are equal in slavery. In extreme cases slander and murder, but, above all equality.”  Translated by David Magarshak.  (pp. 418)

[v] This argument had also been developed in a text known as Sex in the the USSR: The first Authoritative Study of Sex in the Soviet Union by Mikhalil Stern and August Stern, Edited and Translated from the French by Mark Howson and Cary Ryan, Times Book, 1979, pp. 52-63.

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