Shaping of a Reformer (I)

You said to Stephen Cohen in an interview that the real conflict in doing reform lays deeper, in how difficult it is to part with the past. Was it this kind of past that you were thinking of in that comment? That there were things in the past that had to be saved and that couldn't totally be rejected when you undertake reform?

I can even say with greater certainly that the greatest tragedy of our reform movement is that it is very hard for us to separate ourselves from our umbilical cord of our old psychology. That system that we had, it permeated not just every cell in one's body but it permeated the whole notion of man. We have been used to thinking that the regime and one's life are two inseparable things, that one cannot be without the other. In villages we had normal life. We had normal human relations and so on. So for me, that came to an end when the war [World War II] started. I understand all the mistakes made during the war and the indifference to human life that was displayed there. But nevertheless, with all the warts and all, this was the war against fascism.

You were injured in that war and almost didn't survive.

Yes, I was wounded in four places and the shrapnel from those four bullets, one of them I am still carrying in my leg and another is still lodged in my lungs.

As a reformer, you were known as a protector of intellectuals -- their caretaker, the person who tried to make possible what they could offer the system. Was that shaped by your background?

I don't want to just say that I was the only one who did it. I would just say that times were changing very fast and that forced us to change our attitude to what surrounded us. I must say that I was perplexed, even before the reforms, I couldn't understand why certain poets, Sergei Esenin, for example, had to be read under the blanket and why certain subjects could not be discussed. I never could understand that. But for me the real school of reform was, of course, the 20th Party Congress in 1956. I was present there. I heard Khruschev's secret speech.

Where he denounced Stalin.

Yes. It overwhelmed me. It was an overwhelming impression created by the 20th Party Congress. And the same for the entire society. Until the 20th Party Congress, Stalin was our idol, our guard, our greatest everything -- I'm running out of superlatives in Russian and foreign languages to describe Stalin. And then suddenly the 20th Party Congress. Many people believed all those superlatives and they believe them to this day. When we heard from the man who was the head of the country that Stalin was a murderer, he was a murderer of many people, that he murdered many innocent people, it did such things to my head. There was everything there. There was disbelief, there was belief, and there was the tension between the two. It was incredible turmoil.

And you were an intellectual. What was it like for the common person to hear? It must have seeped down into the society.

Of course I am not a man from Moscow and that's an important factor. I was appointed an instructor in the Central Committee of the Communist Party -- it's a low level position -- three days after Stalin's death. From the point of view of Moscow, I was just a provincial bumpkin and I am still that. And what we call the problem of the intelligentsia, the problem of creative arts, that was really a Moscow problem, it wasn't a provinces problem. Thanks to my friends, after 1956 I began to familiarize myself with those problems and that, so to speak, family. Probably it was a great help to me that I really loved reading and read a lot. It was easy for me to make friends with writers because I had already read their books. And because all the writers usually love their books being praised, that eased our acquaintance.

Next Page: Shaping of a Reformer (II)