Literary Practice

The Polish ‘Thaw’ followed the same trajectory as the Soviet one, except that it moved faster, was more radical and its criticism of Stalinism was more public. However, the euphoria after the III Plenum of the Polish United Worker's Party (21– 24 January 1955), which strengthened the emerging reformist movement within the party, was quickly silenced by loud calls to stop ‘the dismantling of socialism’. Just a few months later the limits of liberalization became clear. When the chairman of the Polish Writers’ Union Jerzy Putrament spoke at the enlarged Plenum of the Executive Board of the Polish Writers’ Union on 10– 11 July 1955, he emphasized the danger of ‘bourgeois relapses’. He also warned that ‘there are still those in our midst who are trying to push for quite a particular understanding of the significance of the III Plenum for our cultural policy, using it as an excuse to plead for the possibility and necessity of reviving various principles which we have already outlived. We must state with full determination and unambiguously that those who are looking to find in the Third Plenum evidence of some “cultural NEP”, of some “cultural reprivatisation”, are wrong’.

Putrament had no doubts as to ‘the political agenda behind the campaign which is allegedly just a criticism of artistic defects’, or as to the fact that ‘this ideologically subversive activity [was] targeting those writers who are doing their best to break out of the bourgeois quasi- intellectual milieu, to become engaged in the active life of our country’. The ‘ideologically subversive activity’ was about false generalizations. As Stefan Żółkiewski said at the same event: ‘Now they don't stop at saying that socialist realist works are weak; they go further and try to prove that such works are bound to be weak. We've reached the stage of a general negation’. The attentive guards of the ideology saw manifestations of this ‘stage of general negation’ everywhere. For example, ‘a nihilistic assessment of the artistic heritage of the past decade is a manifestation of bourgeois ideology’. Accordingly, ‘the editorial boards of our journals have no right to serve like seismic detectors’. The purpose of any literary journal published by the PWU was to express the principles of party- mindedness, to fight against reactionary ideology.

Soviet cultural policy in Eastern Europe after World War II has been the topic of many articles, monographs and dissertations since the initial post- war years. The growth or decline of interest in the subject has often been determined by the political and social context of a specific moment, with the research focus shifting accordingly. The novelty of the theme and the extent of transformations in the European political and cultural sphere spurred the earliest studies, in which researchers focused on ‘the scope and scale of oppression and uniformity behind the “Iron Curtain,” as did later scholars working on the immediate postwar decade’. As new academic disciplines (behaviourism, the study of cultures at a distance) and research institutions emerged at the beginning of the Cold War, scholars’ concern with literature involved reading literary texts only insofar as experts were searching for reliable information on everyday life behind the Iron Curtain. The loosening of restrictions on travel around 1956 brought with it more direct contacts and thus more focused scholarly attention to cultural policies as possible harbingers of political changes, but the general paradigm of research remained in place, the assumption being that Soviet ideology governed Soviet institutions, and the institutions were then replicated in the new satellites so that they, in their turn, could replicate and propagate the new ideology.

The next wave of interest in the subject came with the collapse of the system and the opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s. Still, the basic Sovietological premise proved to be the basis of much of the later research, even if some of the interpretations sought to go against the hitherto unanimously accepted premise of external imposition and internal (more or less forced) compliance. As an author recently noted, ‘The principal interpretative themes of this [S] ovietization historiography have developed around two closely- related problems. The first can be summarized under the heading of uniformity versus diversity, the second under the title of outside imposition versus indigenous development’. The underlying premise behind this volume is that a new research paradigm is called for. What if it is not uniformity versus diversity, or imposition versus indigenous development, but both the one and the other? What if the four practices were equally indispensable for the functioning of the system – at least for as long as it kept functioning?

Hannah Arendt remarked that one of the paradoxes inherent in totalitarian states is that, on the one hand, their professed veneration of transformations induces in them a deep- seated fear of stability and permanence, but on the other hand, for these regimes to function, their institutions require a certain degree of predictability and continuity. The Soviet experience, reproduced in different versions multiple times beyond the borders of the country, is a testimony to the truth of this statement. At the same time, it also points to yet another aporia at the heart of the great political and cultural experiment. As the chapters in Part 1 of this volume show, the very idea of an ‘institution’ in the context of regimes- in- the- making was rather vague, encompassing entities as diverse as overregulated Soviet bureaucratic machines and (allegedly) informal groups of writers and intellectuals. The most minute changes on the local political scene or in Moscow, settlements of accounts and fractional interests of groups motivated by principles that were not necessarily immediately clear to anyone not directly involved in the process, whatever their intentions – all of these influenced the procedures that are traditionally associated with institutional governance. Affiliations with a certain school of thought or membership in an artists’ union, academic congresses debating on the precise definitions of key concepts such as ‘socialism’, ‘realism’ and ‘tradition’, debates on one's private experience as a writer in the new society and on the place of a particular figure in the artistic canon – all these had a bearing on the politics in the respective countries, at least as much as the decisions made at top Party meetings and political summits. Whether or not ‘socialism’ was taken as a synonym of ‘Soviet power’, whether or not ‘realism’ equalled ‘socialist realism’ and whether or not ‘national tradition’ was to be regarded as a natural precursor of proletarian writing, all of these issues had repercussions for institutional policy in the respective countries as well as in Moscow. The case studies discussed in Part 1 show why any clear- cut approach to an analysis of these events, regardless of whether it privileges a top- down or a bottom- up model, is inevitably limiting and misses important elements in the multi- storeyed edifice of Soviet cultural internationalism.