The Two Red Flags by Childs David;Childs David;

Author:Childs, David;Childs, David; [DAVID CHILDS]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134694150
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2011-08-01T05:00:00+00:00

Solzhenitsyn: ‘A true helper of the Party’

One thing that would trouble Brezhnev far more than Khrushchev was opposition from ‘dissidents’. These were loyal Communists who sought democratisation of the CPSU and greater intellectual freedom. They regarded these as part and parcel of Socialism and necessary to solve the increasing problems of a technological age. There were ‘liberals’ who went farther and demanded a multi-party state. Some just fought for free trade unions, others for civil rights. There were members of the surviving religious communities who demanded religious freedom and there were nationalists who wanted greater freedom for their states or complete independence. Increasingly dissidents throughout the Soviet bloc cited the Helsinki Final Act to demand their rights. This was the agreement concluded at Helsinki in 1975 by the heads of thirty-five states including the Soviet Union and the United States. It set out certain agreed principles of sovereignty, self-determination and recognition of existing frontiers. It also covered economic and technological co-operation, security, disarmament and human rights.

Solzhenitsyn’s book about the labour camps was published in 1962. It was a sensation. Many wrongly believed it was the start of a new age in the Soviet Union. Its author was praised in the Soviet paper Izvestia as a ‘true helper of the Party in a sacred and vital cause—the struggle against the personality cult and its consequences’.2 This was in 1962 at the time of the twenty-second Congress of the CPSU, when Khrushchev was seeking popularity by showing his anti-Stalin credentials. By March 1963 Khrushchev himself was tightening up the control of the arts, demanding that artists and writers abide ‘unswervingly’ by the party line.3 Once Khrushchev was deposed, the situation of writers rapidly deteriorated. Solzhenitsyn was guaranteed a certain immunity because he had become an overnight celebrity abroad. In 1969 he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union following his book Cancer Ward. By January 1974 he was expelled from the Soviet Union, his own country and the land of his birth. He was welcomed in Brandt’s Germany. In a way, he was lucky. In the most brutal blow4 struck by Brezhnev against literature, the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuri Daniel were sentenced to hard labour just before the twenty-third Congress of the CPSU held in March/April 1966. They had allowed their work to be published abroad and were accused of anti-Soviet propaganda. It looked as if the Soviet Union was returning to the winter of Stalin but at the congress Stalin was passed over in silence. Nevertheless Brezhnev took on the title of general secretary used by Stalin. Throughout the Soviet bloc life got harder for intellectuals. In the Soviet Union the KGB, the reorganised (1954) Soviet internal security and foreign intelligence agency, worked overtime again.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.