Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (108 page)

The 1960s had begun with a significant increase in tension in the Cold War. The later years of the decade saw yet another round of events that reflected the very different attitudes to freedom, equality, and justice in Communist countries.

On 10 November 1965 a young literary critic in Shanghai, named Yao Wenyuan, writing in
Literary Current,
attacked a play,
Hai Jui Dismissed from Office,
which had been written four years before by Wu Han, deputy mayor of
Beijing. The play was about an honest Ming dynasty official who took exception to the emperor’s land policy and was punished simply for being so forthright. Though it was set many years in the past, Mao Zedong took the play as an attack on himself and used it as an excuse to introduce change on a massive scale. What became known as the Cultural Revolution had two aspects: it was a major political move by Mao, but it also had an important, devastating impact on the artists, intellectuals, and academics of China, who suffered extraordinary deprivations of freedom of thought and action.

Mao’s own wife, Jiang Qing, was appointed ‘cultural adviser’ to the army, and it was this move that proved decisive. Surrounding herself with young activists, she first took on what she called the ‘scholar-tyrants’ who used ‘abstruse language’ to silence the class struggle. Worse, she said that the universities kept themselves free of this dialectic by emphasising the ‘fallacy that everyone is “equal before the truth.” ‘
⁸¹
Although she had difficulty at first (the
People’s Daily
refused to publish her early pronouncements), by the end of May 1966 Jiang had enlisted the aid of a new phenomenon – ‘Hung Wei Ping,’ the Red Guards. These were essentially high school and university students, and their main aim was to attack the ‘spectacle wearers,’ as teachers and other academics were called. They took to the streets in gangs, marching first on Tsinghua University and then on others, attacking the university authorities.
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Later, street violence broke out, the Red Guards seizing anyone whose hair or clothes they didn’t like. Shops and restaurants were ordered to change their displays or menus that betrayed any Western bias. Neon signs were destroyed, and huge street bonfires were held, burning ‘forbidden goods’ such as jazz records, works of art, and dresses. Coffee bars, theatres, and circuses were closed down, weddings forbidden, even holding hands and kite flying. One female star of the Peking opera recounted how she went into exile in the countryside, where she would go to a remote area of the forest every day to exercise her voice where no one else would hear; she also buried her costumes and makeup until after the Cultural Revolution was over. Paul Johnson’s depressing account of the disaster continues: ‘Libraries were closed, books burned.’ In one well-known instance – the Peking Research Institute of Non-Ferrous Metals – only four scientists had the courage to use the library during the entire period.
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Jiang Qing wallowed in her role, addressing countless mass rallies where she denounced, in turn, ‘jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, striptease, impressionism, fauvism,’ and every other ‘ism’ of modern art, plus capitalism itself, which she said destroyed art. She was against specialisation.
⁸⁴
By the second half of 1966 virtually every important cultural institution in China was under army control. On 12 December that year many ‘public enemies,’ who included playwrights, actors, film and theatre directors, poets, and composers, were marched to the Workers’ Stadium before 10,000 people, each with a wooden placard around his or her neck. Later Jiang took over TV and radio stations and confiscated equipment, scripts, scores, and film, reediting the latter and reissuing them in revised versions. She ordered composers to write works that were then played to ‘the masses’ and changed afterward according to what the masses wanted. In the ballet she banned ‘orchid fingers’ and upturned palms, demanding instead that
the dancers used clenched fists and violent movements to confirm their ‘hatred of the landlord class.’
⁸⁵
The attacks on the universities and artists bred violence, and in the universities private armies were set up. Among the better known were the ‘East Is Red’ commune at the Peking Geological Institute; the ‘Sky Faction’ of the Aeronautical Institute was another.
⁸⁶
In many scientific institutions professors were sent out into the countryside to make greater practical use of their findings, with peasants. At the Genetics Institute in Peking (there had been no genetics institute in China before 1949), the theories of Lysenko hung on even later than in Russia, thanks in part to the Red Guards. Perhaps the most extraordinary notion bred by the Cultural Revolution was that traffic lights should be changed. The Red Guards were worried that red, the revolutionary colour, should be for change, for forward progress – in other words for ‘Go’ rather than ‘Stop.’ Zhou Enlai killed the idea with a joke about red being better seen in fog, and therefore the safest colour. But the Cultural Revolution was no joke.
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Before it ended, as many as 400,000 had been killed. The effect on China’s traditional culture was devastating, and in this respect strongly reminiscent of Stalin’s inquisition.

Not that the intellectual inquisition in Russia had died out with Stalin. It wasn’t as widespread as in the 1930s, but it was no less vicious.
⁸⁸
The first details about the dark side of Russian psychiatric hospitals had been released to the West in 1965, with the publication of Valery Tarsis’s
Ward
7, after which a number of psychiatrists in Europe and North America made it their business to investigate Soviet practices. But it was the forced hospitalisation of Zhores Medvedev on 29 May 1970 at Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital, just south of Moscow, that drew the attention of the world to what was being done in the name of psychiatry.

A Question of Madness,
which was written by Zhores Medvedev and his brother, Roy, a professional historian, reads like a Kafka novel. Early on in 1970, the manuscript of a book that Zhores had written was seized by the KGB in the course of a raid on the flat of a friend. Zhores was not especially worried when he found out that the KGB had seized the book – which was unfinished and not at all secret – but he did begin to grow anxious when he was asked to attend Kaluga Psychiatric Hospital to discuss the behavior of his son, who was then giving the Medvedevs some cause for concern, going through an ‘awkward’ or ‘hippie’ phase. As soon as he arrived at the hospital, Zhores was locked in the waiting room. When, through a window, he saw his son leave, Zhores realised that he was the chief object of concern to the authorities. On that occasion he picked the lock and escaped, but a week later he received a visit at home by three policemen and two doctors.
⁸⁹
From their conversations, it became clear that Medvedev had caused offence with a book he had written, originally called
Biology and the Cult of Personality
but later changed to
The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko,
in which he had exposed the shameful history of Soviet genetics. This book had appeared in the West in 1969, published by Columbia University Press, while Lysenko was still alive (he died in 1976). Zhores was forcibly removed to Kaluga, where both the hospital psychiatrists and a commission sent out by the central authorities tried to make
out that he was an incipient schizophrenic, about to become a danger to himself and others.
⁹⁰
The authorities had, however, reckoned without Zhores’s relatives and friends. For a start, his brother Roy was an identical twin. Schizophrenia is known to be (partly) inherited, and so, strictly speaking, if Zhores showed signs of the illness, so too should Roy. This clearly wasn’t true. Many academicians complained to the authorities that they had known Zhores for many years, and he had never shown any abnormal symptoms. Peter Kapitsa, Andrei Sakharov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn all rallied to Zhores’s support, and as a result the matter received wide publicity in the West.
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But it was still nearly three weeks before he was released, and during that time, as the account the Medvedevs jointly wrote shows, the netherworld of psychiatry was exposed. Various psychiatrists claimed that Zhores showed ‘heightened nervousness,’ ‘deviation from the norm,’ was ‘ill-adapted to the environment,’ suffered a ‘hypochondriac delusional condition,’ and had ‘an exaggerated opinion of himself.’ When questioned by family relatives, these psychiatrists claimed that only experienced doctors could detect the ‘early stages’ of mental illness.
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Other psychiatrists were brought in as part of a ‘special commission’ to consider the case, including Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky, Professor Daniel Lunts, and Dr Georgy Morozov, head of the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, which would be revealed as the worst of the Soviet psychiatric institutions involved in psychiatric-political terror. Despite this, Zhores’s friends succeeded in forcing his release on 17 June and having him reinstated to the Lenin Agricultural Academy as a senior research fellow, to work on amino acids. In this instance there was a happy ending, but later research showed that between 1965 and 1975 there were 210 ‘fully authenticated’ cases of psychiatric terror and fourteen institutions devoted to the incarceration of alleged psychiatric cases who were in fact political prisoners.
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Chilling as they were, the special psychiatric hospitals in Russia only dealt with, at most, hundreds of people. In comparison, the world revealed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn concerned perhaps 66 million people and, together with the Holocaust against the Jews, must rank as the greatest horror story of human history.

The Gulag Archipelago
is a massive, three-volume work, completed in 1969 but not published in English until 1974, 1975, and 1976. Solzhenitsyn’s previous books, particularly
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
(1962) and
Cancer Ward
(1968) had made him well known in the West.
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Born an orphan in the Caucasus in December 1918 (his father had died in a shooting accident six months before), in an area where there was a lot of White Russian resistance to the Bolsheviks, Solzhenitsyn grew up in the early 1930s, as the Communist Party strengthened its grip on the country after Stalin’s Great Break.
⁹⁵
Despite poverty and hardship he shone at school, and then at university, in physics, math, and Marxism-Leninism.
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He had a ‘good’ war (he was promoted to captain and won four medals) but was arrested by secret agents in early 1945. His letters had been intercepted and read: among his ‘crimes’ was a letter referring to Stalin as ‘the man with the moustache,’ and photographs of Nicholas II and of
Trotsky were found among his belongings. Convicted as a ‘socially dangerous’ person, he was moved from prison to prison and then to Novy Ierusalim, New Jerusalem, a corrective labour camp, and to Marfino, a scientific
sharashka
that at least had a library. By 1955 he was living in a mud hut in Kol Terek; this was exile rather than imprisonment, and it was here that he contracted, and was successfully treated for, cancer. These experiences became his first masterpiece,
Cancer Ward,
not published in English until 1968.

He arrived back in Moscow in June 1956, after an absence of more than eleven years, aged not quite thirty-eight. Over the next few years, while he was teaching outside Moscow, he wrote a novel initially entitled
Sh-854
after the
sharashka
he had been in. It was very shocking. The story concerned the ordinary, everyday life in one camp over a twenty-four-hour period. The shock lay in the fact that the camp life – the conditions described – are regarded by the inhabitants as normal and permanent. The psychology of the camp, so different from the outside world, is taken for granted, as are the entirely arbitrary reasons why people arrived there. Solzhenitsyn sent the manuscript to friends at
Novy mir,
the literary magazine – and what happened then has been told many times.
⁹⁷
Everyone who read the manuscript was shocked and moved by it; everyone at the magazine wanted to see the book published – but what would Khrushchev say? In 1956 he had made an encouraging (but secret) speech at the Party Congress, hinting at greater liberalisation now that Stalin was dead. By coincidence, friends got the manuscript to the Soviet leader at a time when he was entertaining Robert Frost, the American poet. Khrushchev gave the go-ahead, and
Sh-854
was published in English in 1963, to world acclaim, as
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
.
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This marked a high spot in Solzhenitsyn’s life, and for a few years – a very few years – he was lionised in Russia. But then, in the mid-1960s, Khrushchev clamped down on the liberalisation he had himself started, and Solzhenitsyn lost the Lenin Prize he should have won because one member of the committee, the director of the Komsomol, alleged that he had surrendered to the Germans in the war and had been convicted of (an unspecified) criminal offence. Both allegations were untrue, but they showed the strength of feeling against Solzhenitsyn, and all that he stood for.

From 1965 he began to work on his history of the camps, which would become
The Gulag Archipelago.
Since his disillusion with Marxism he had returned to ‘some sort of Christian faith.’
⁹⁹
But Russia was changing again; Khrushchev had fallen from power, and in September 1965 the KGB raided the flat of some of Solzhenitsyn’s friends and seized all three copies of the manuscript of another book,
The First Circle.
This described four days in the life of a mathematician in a
sharashka
outside Moscow, and is clearly a self-portrait. Now began a very tense time: Solzhenitsyn went into hiding and found it difficult to have his writings published. Publication of
The First Circle
and
Cancer Ward
in the West brought him greater fame, but led to a more open conflict with the Soviet authorities. This conflict culminated in 1970, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but the authorities made it clear that, if he went to Sweden to collect the prize, he would not be allowed back.
¹⁰⁰
And so, by the time
The Gulag Archipelago
appeared, Solzhenitsyn’s life had taken on an epic dimension.