Shatz, Marshall. 1980. Soviet dissent in historical perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
"Open criticism of the past and demand for improvement in the present did not well up spontaneously from below as soon as the heavy hand of the dictator was removed; Soviet society in the preceding decades had been too thoroughly atomized and effectively cowed for that. Instead criticism filtered down from the very summit of the political structure, initiated by non other than the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, in his 'secret speech' of 1956." (Shatz, 95)
Motivations:
"It is certainly not inconceivable that he genuinely wished to provide the Soviet people with a greater degree of security in their daily lives in renouncing the use of mass terror. The pervasive gear and insecurity that Stalin had encouraged, and which appeared to building a to new climax on the eve of his death were repulsive in their barbarity." (Shatz, 96)
""STalin's methods of rule were not just inhumane; they threatened to paralyze the system itself by so terrorizing those responible for running it that they could no longer work effectively." (Shatz, 96)
"By claiming that from this point had Stalin gone astray without opening to questions the foundations of the Soviet system and the methods by which it had been constructed." (Shatz, 97)
"Conspicuously absent from his speech was any reference o the legal, political or institutional sources of STalinism, and the necessity of change in these areas. He dealt exclusively with the symptom of Stalinism- the arbitrary misuse of power-while carefully avoiding any mention of its underlying causes, the features of the Soviet system that gave Stalin his power and permitted him to misuse it." (Shatz, 99)
"More specifically, the central feature of the Soviet political ststem the Communist PArty's monopoly on power, never came into question in Khrushchev's speech. Instead Khrushchev sought to disassociate the Party with Stalin's atrocities while crediting it with all the positive accomplishments of the Stalin period." (Shatz, 99)
"By and large, unofficial criticisms of Stalinism accepted the limits Khrushchev had imposed on the subject. For the next ten years, until the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial of 1966, the voices of dissent evoked by Khrushchev's speech confined themselves largely to the moral plane, calling for a change in the character and atitudes of the people running the Soviet system while exempting the system itself from direct criticism of serious analysis." (Shatz, 100)
-lit played a significant role
"Not only did dissidents resort to literature to express their views but Khrushchev and his supporters were attempting to bend literature to their own purposes, utilizing it as an instrument of de-Stalinization while at the same time trying to ensure it did not cut more deeply than they wished." (Shatz, 100)
110: One day in the life- "highwater in the de-Stalinization" tide
"What Solzhenitsyn's novel implied by subtle omision rather than explicit stateme, but nonetheless unmistakabely-was that Stalinism was a mass phenomoneon. It was not simply the product of individual 'excesses' that claimed individual victims, but something that affected the whole of Soviet society." (Shatz, 111)
"To a Western observer, one of the most distinctive features of Soviet dissent as the preceding discussion demonstrates, is the prominence of literature as its form of expression. Under Khrushchev, the boldest ststements of unofficial criticism were embodied in novels, stories and poetry; greater freedom of artistic expression was of of the demands most frequently made of the authorities and one of the yardsticks used to measure the extent of de-Stalinization; and the rewards and punishments accorded to writers and editors showed which way the political wind was blowing at any given moment." (Shatz. 112)
historical precedent- lit bears a "heavy burden of social resposibility."
"Few Western political figures would pay much attention to anything from the pen of a poet, but in the Soviet Union literatures has always be a very serious matter, sometimes deadly serious. 'Why do you complain?' the great poet Osip Mandelstan, who died in one of Stalin's camps, would ask his long-suffering wife. 'Poetry is respected only in this country-people are killed for it. There's no other place where moer people are killed for it.'" (Shatz, 114)
Solzh letter to Congress
"Literature, or disciourse, are the most convenient and effective camouflague for ideas or complaints that cannot be stated directly. Hence the rise in imperial Russia, and prersistence in the Soviet Union, of a tradition of 'Aesopian language,' a language of hints and allusions which the writer or literary critic uses to evade censorship and which the initiated reader knows how to translate. In a society where a variety of channels are available for the expression of public opinion, literature takes its rightful place as one of the many ways of commenting on pulbic issues. But in a society where censorship prevails, literature inevitably comes to bear far more of the burden." (Shatz, 114)
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