Of Firs, Flies & Fears

Thaw was in the Moscow air last week, melting the first thin layers of snow after the long months of winter. But to the 500 writers, musicians, painters and poets gathered in the Kremlin's Sverdlov Hall last week, the changing season outside only underscored Nikita Khrushchev's words of warning shouted from the platform. Khrushchev's decree to Russia's intellectuals: new ideas in Russia must remain in the deep freeze--indefinitely.

"One hears," cried Nikita in his 2 1/2hour blast, "that the time has come for laissez faire, that the reins of government have been loosened . . . that everybody can do as he pleases.'' No! thundered Khrushchev. "The party implacably comes forward against any ideological vacillation. There will never be any absolute political freedom, not even under complete Communism."

Take Your Choice. To Russia's ruler, it had become all too clear that the recent flood of artistic expression--poetry readings before mass audiences, exhibits of modern paintings, jazz imported from abroad, books and articles about the Stalin terror--were becoming dangerous carriers of alien Western ideas, shaking the foundations of Communist society. Destalinization, touched off by Nikita Khrushchev himself at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, had gone too far.

Nikita spared no group in the restless audience. Writer Ilya Ehrenburg, 72, drew scorn for the title of his 1954 novel, The Thaw, which, said Nikita, suggests political "impermanence and instability." As for Ehrenburg's memoirs, which have been running in the literary journal Novy Mir, Khrushchev remarked caustically, "one notices that he depicts everything in grim tones." Khrushchev warned the veteran Ehrenburg against "slipping into an anti-Communist position."

Then Khrushchev turned on Young Poet Evgeny Evtushenko: "He shows vacillations, instability of views ... I would like to advise Comrade Evtushenko and other men of letters that they should not seek cheap sensationalism." Everyone was aware, Nikita announced, that Evtushenko recently told a Paris audience that his poem, Babi Yar (which drew fire from the Kremlin), had been "criticized by dogmatists." Such behind-the-back remarks in foreign countries will not do, hinted the Premier: "If the enemies of our cause begin to praise you for works convenient to their purpose, then the people will justly criticize you. So choose what suits you best." .

Love for Trees. Khrushchev described with horror a recent jazz concert he attended ("One would have liked to hide, but there was no place to hide"), expressed deep distaste at such new dance crazes as the twist ("Simply obscenities, some sort of frenzy, the devil knows what"), and turned on the painters and sculptors with undisguised fury. Some, he roared, seek inspiration in "rubbish heaps and stinking latrines," or "present people in an intentionally ugly aspect." Such a man was Ernest Neizvestny, a sculptor who has recently won wide acclaim in Moscow's art world with his provocative works. But to Khrushchev, his work was just a "nauseating concoction. It is a good thing we do not have many such artists," he said.

Just what were Nikita's tastes? For a moment, his imagination took flight, as the audience listened nervously: "Recently I was watching the sun rise on a forest covered in hoarfrost. I said to those with me: 'Look at those fir trees, at their attire, at those snowflakes glistening in the rays of the sun. How wonderfully beautiful that is!' Yet the modernists and abstractionists want to paint these fir trees with their roots in the air, and they said this is new, progressive art."

Time to Shut Up. Running through his speech was the clear suggestion that Khrushchev felt his own roots were in danger. Too many of the intellectuals were devoting their work to exposure of the excesses of terror in the Stalin era--which was striking pretty close to home, since Khrushchev had been Stalin's henchman throughout that period. "The question is sometimes asked," Nikita admitted, "did the leading people of the party know about the arrests at the time? Yes, they knew. But did they know that completely innocent people were being arrested? No, they did not know." Anyone familiar with Nikita's 1956 destalinization speech to the 20th Party Congress knew this to be a lie, for he had openly discussed Stalin's murderous political purges of the 1930s.

Now, he said, was the time to shut up about the dark chapters of history. "All attention is being one-sidedly concentrated on lawlessness and the abuse of power. Here one needs moderation. If all writers began to write only on this topic, what sort of literature would there be? Who would dash for it? Flies, enormous fat flies. Every sort of bourgeois scum from abroad will crawl toward it."

When Khrushchev's speech was over, the stunned audience left the hall wearing the old, familiar stony stares of Stalin's day. It would be hard to force them all into public recantations; in fact, a surprising number stayed silent. But sure enough, some caved in quickly to the cultural purge. Within 48 hours, the Moscow Writers Union had ousted its liberal chairman, Poet Stepan Shchipachov, and replaced him with a regime trusty. And as for hapless Ernest Neizvestny, the sculptor denounced personally by Nikita, he soon showed up in Pravda with an obedient statement, hailing the "Marxist-Leninist world outlook" and promising to "work more, better, more ideologically, more expressively."

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