Dissidents among Dissidents by Ilya Budraitskis

Author:Ilya Budraitskis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

MAYAKOVSKY READINGS

In the summer of 1958 in Moscow an important event took place in Moscow which had a huge impact on the subsequent history of the dissident movement. Hundreds of young people gathered at a meeting dedicated to the inauguration of a monument to Vladimir Mayakovsky. On 28 July, after speeches by Party functionaries and high-profile figures of Soviet literature (Nikolai Tikhonov, Alexei Surkov and Alexander Tvardovsky), amateur poets from the public begin to read their own verse.

As Vladimir Bukovsky recalled:

Everyone enjoyed such an unexpected, unplanned turn of events, and we agreed to meet up regularly … people began to gather nearly every evening – mainly students … sometimes there arose debates about art, about literature … something like London’s Hyde Park had appeared.25

The regular participants of the gatherings at the Mayakovsky statue would go on to become well-known figures in the dissident community: Vladimir Bukovsky, Yuri Galanskov, Ilya Bokshtein, Gabriel Superfin, and many others. Habitués of the readings also included Vladimir Osipov and Anatoly Ivanov. It was on Mayakovsky Square where they made the acquaintance of another Anatoly Ivanov (often distinguished from the first by his pseudonym Rakhmetov).26 The group began to hold regular meetings in the latter’s apartment in the western Moscow neighbourhood of Rabochiy Poselok (Workers’ Settlement), and a political circle formed around these gatherings.

The general mood of the meetings on Mayakovsky Square cannot really be described as a radically oppositional one. Rather, these were youth who were striving for creative fulfilment, a break with the moral legacy of Stalinism – a mood in keeping with the spirit of the Thaw. ‘Our whole generation was anti-Stalinist,’ recalled Igor Volgin, one of the first enthusiasts of the Mayakovsky Readings, or Mayak as they became familiarly known.27 ‘No one thought that a restoration of Stalinism was possible, but no one linked their future with any struggle against Soviet power … We noticed the flaws in the system but did not consider the illness to be a fatal one. Our cause was to speed up the healing process, to act … from the inside, for after all we were a part of this organism’. Even the rather loyal and not over-politicized activity (but still, an activity that was not controlled) would soon provoke a rather wary reaction from the authorities towards the meetings at the Mayakovsky statue. Already by early 1959, after a series of ‘prophylactic talks’ with the most active participants, the readings would cease, only to resume almost a year and a half later. Nonetheless, in the first period of Mayak, the views of Ivanov, Osipov and their circle were marginal and quite uncharacteristic of the great majority of those who took part in the readings.

‘We did not like Marxism but at the same time we did not want to enter into the fold of bourgeois ideology,’ Osipov recalled. ‘We searched for a “third way” – for the people, for the working class, for social justice but without Marxism and Communism.’ Meanwhile, Anatoly Ivanov was writing his (unfinished) work ‘The Workers’ Opposition and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’.

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