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The Soviet Mind
Isaiah Berlin, The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism, (edited by Henry Hardy), Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2004, £20, hardback, ISBN 0-8157-0904-8.
Isaiah Berlin is still portrayed by his admirers as a sort of scholarly saint. Appalled by the communist thugs whose lies poured out from his native Russia, Berlin was quite incapable (or so the argument goes) of distorting or suppressing the truth in the service of a political cause. While deeply liberal in his instincts (and indeed more authentically 'pluralistic' than the Enlightenment thinkers whose example he wished to keep alive) he never allowed himself to become a hired gun in the Cold War - the only thing that ever mattered to him was the disinterested pursuit of the truth. It is hardly surprising that this tendentious caricature should have come under heavy fire from the left. In recent years a number of marxist and marxisant thinkers, notably Terry Eagleton in a scathing article in his recent collection Figures of Dissent (2003), have identified a series of contradictions in Berlin's work which clearly arise from a species of political hypocrisy. Berlin might have had a 'lifelong horror of violence' (the phrase is Henry Hardy's) but he never objected to US violence in the Middle East and Asia. His benign attitude towards the managers and politicians who keep the capitalist system running was hardly consistent with his loathing of communist apparatchiks. And, so far as we can tell, his suspicion of utopianism did not extend to the pie-in-the-sky maxims which underscore market ideology.[1] One of the most interesting things about The Soviet Mind, a fascinating collection of Berlin's writings on the culture of the USSR, is that it provides further evidence of precisely this talent for subordinating scholarly virtue to the demands of politics.
The core of the book is three lengthy papers on the Soviet government's attempt to shape Russian culture along 'Leninist-Stalinist' lines, each of them inspired by Berlin's brief period as an official at the British Embassy in Moscow in 1945. 'The Arts in Russia under Stalin' was one of two memoranda which Berlin submitted to the Foreign Office after returning to Britain, while 'The Artificial Dialectic' and 'Soviet Russian Culture' were published in Foreign Affairs in 1951 and 1957 respectively. There is a yawning tension between the empirical and the theoretical aspects of these writings. On the one hand, in spite of describing Soviet culture as straightforwardly totalitarian, Berlin makes it clear that the Russian government was never able to achieve complete control over literature and the arts. He accepts that the 1920s saw an extraordinary flowering of the avant-garde, not least in the work of the 'anti-liberal' modernists who formed the Left Front of Art (LEF) in 1925, and he recognises that the Soviet authorities did much to encourage it - there is no attempt to sneer at the fusion of political militancy and formal experimentation in the work of such men as Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Mayakovsky. There is also a surprisingly balanced account of the shift towards a more authoritarian cultural policy in the 1930s. While rightly condemning the government's attempt to suppress modernism and impose an aesthetic of 'Socialist Realism' on all Soviet artists, Berlin also acknowledges that many writers were protected from the worst excesses of the new policy for at least three years after its introduction in 1934. This was in part because of the continued influence of Maxim Gorky, whose passion for literature outweighed (or at least balanced out) his loyalty to the bolshevik cause. The terrible pogrom against writers and artists which began in 1937 and consigned the likes of Mandelstam, Blok and Pilnyak to the Gulag (this assumes that they had not been shot before they got there) only really lasted for two years. What is truly surprising about Berlin's survey of the 'Ezhov terror' is his emphasis on how quickly the thaw set in. Once the USSR had been dragged into the war, Berlin argues, the Soviet government was taken completely by surprise by the demand for non-political literature which arose among ordinary soldiers. This led to a situation in which the work of Russia's most 'subjective' writers, many of whom had been murdered in the course of the previous couple of years, was suddenly allowed to circulate without restrictions. Books and manuscripts by Blok, Bely and Tsvetaeva seem to have been passed around in the trenches as eagerly as cigarettes. The new climate also enabled anti-bolshevik survivors such as Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova to emerge from hiding and hold astonishingly successful public readings, usually in front of mass audiences who could recite their poetry more fluently than they could themselves.
If Berlin had assessed his own data without prejudice, he would surely have concluded that the history of Soviet culture revealed the limits of totalitarianism - time and again, in the unlikeliest circumstances, things had happened which prevented the Soviet government from having everything its own way. Yet such a conclusion was clearly unacceptable to him. He therefore found it necessary to devise a theory which portrayed the limited freedoms of Soviet culture as a sort of Machiavellian hoax, the means by which Stalin and his entourage could reinforce their power while seeming to undermine it. At any rate, this seems to have been the motivation behind the theory of stalinist governance which Berlin outlined in his two articles in Foreign Affairs. According to Berlin, Stalin was aware that there are two things which tend to threaten the stability of revolutionary governments. The first is the sectarian anger which occurs when people start to believe that revolutionary objectives are being downgraded, and which invariably results (as in the Jacobin period in France) in the sort of frenzied purges which traumatise the entire society. The second, usually the product of the enormous gap between the revolution's objectives and its short-term achievements, is a mood of de-politicising cynicism which leads to alliances with (or at least tolerance of) all sorts of non-revolutionary forces. Berlin's argument is that Stalin tried to guard against these dangers by producing purges and thaws under controlled conditions. Employing an 'artificial dialectic' which reflected his extreme sensitivity to the moods of his fellow countrymen, Stalin's first tactic was to plunge the USSR into a series of containable purges — that is, he ensured that his attacks on 'anti-Soviet' forces were always launched before the frustrations which underscored them became too explosive. He then sought to defuse the atmosphere of terror by introducing a period of guarded liberalisation in which a rapprochement with non-communist forces was again seen as acceptable. Thaw followed purge and purge followed thaw in a consciously planned sequence. Since it was never possible to relax government control in the spheres of economics or politics, liberalisation only occurred in areas of Soviet life which Stalin regarded as relatively unimportant — notably literature, philosophy or art. The limited cultural freedoms of the Stalin period were not therefore the result of circumstances which the government had failed to control. They were actually the product (or so Berlin argues) of a brilliant strategy to manage public opinion in the interests of the elite.
This portrait of Stalin as a sort of virtuoso choreographer of the national mood is deeply unconvincing. There is evidence against it not merely in Berlin's broad surveys of cultural policy (especially the one in 'The Arts in Russia under Stalin') but also in the superb essays devoted to Mandelstam, Akhmatova and Pasternak. As much as Berlin portrays these writers as the victims of stalinist intrigue, he cannot help but illuminate the ways in which their freedom of manoeuvre (such as it was) often depended on things which exceeded government control — the willingness of foreign writers to make intercessions on their behalf, the readiness of contacts to smuggle their manuscripts out of Russia, the fact that people like Berlin himself were willing to take personal risks by visiting them in their homes. Although there is evidence of Berlin's genius on every page of The Soviet Mind, this is not a book that will enhance his reputation for intellectual integrity. In the field of Soviet studies (if nowhere else) the impression he gives is of being rather too willing to mortgage his intellect to the demands of the Cold War. His theory of stalinism is a relic from the age of anti-communist apologetics, not a living contribution to the understanding of dictatorship. None of which means that Berlin's admirers have anything to worry about. If Henry Hardy's characteristically reverent Introduction is anything to go by, we have long since passed the point at which the master's ideas are exposed to rational criticism.
