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1960s East and West:

The Nature of the Shestidesiatniki and the New Left

Boris Kagarlitsky
Translated by William Nickell

Translators Introduction

The deep-seated antagonism of the cold war has oriented our histo-
riography of the twentieth century to the dramatic differences in policy and
culture in the USSR and the United States. But as we gain perspective on
the twentieth century, we can also identify intriguing similarities: the flapper
and NEP (New Economic Policy) cultures of the 1920s, the large public
works projects championed by Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt
in the 1930s, the roles of the two nations in World War II and their emer-
gence as superpowers in its aftermath, a period of relative prosperity and
progress in the 1950s, the unrest of the 1960s. In spite of their contradictory
political and economic platforms, the two countries aged in similar ways.
Beneath the tensions of the cold war there are clearly deeper cultural layers
in motion, vast changes in technology, economics, and culture that have
profound impact upon the surface of history but are less visible than the
political and cultural topography.

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Boris Kagarlitskys account of the dissident movements of the 1960s

offers a more plate tectonic view of this movement. The Soviet sixties
generation (the shestidesiatniki) passes through the terror and World War II
into the prosperous post-Stalin period of the thaw, an age of optimism
produced by victory in the war and auspicious internal reforms. The dissi-
dents of the 1960s are motivated by the appearance of limits to the freedom
of thought and opportunity offered by the thaw. On the American side, a
generation that has lived through the Depression and World War II con-
siders itself fortunate to be able to settle into nuclear family units in comfort-
able suburban homes. The baby boom likewise produces a generation of
dissidents when it is unable to extend this opportunity across social, racial,
and economic boundaries. The trajectory is the same in both cases, and in
both cases it produces a confrontation between those wanting to protect
prosperity and those wanting to realize it more fully and equitably.
The New Left and the Soviet shestidesiatniki both belong to the
second category. Their unawareness of one another, despite their com-
mon principles and objectives, points to the subterranean aspect of their
shared experience. They do not occupy common ground so much as they
experience similar shifts and dislocations, produced by the tectonic move-
ment of history. Kagarlitskys essay reveals both dimensions of this move-
mentprofound shifts that affect both hemispheres, East and West, and
the countermotions on the surface that render our more immediately rec-
ognizable history of the cold war as a time of dramatic confrontation and
difference.
William Nickell

The 1960s have a certain cult status. The decade became legend-
ary in its own time, as it were. For those living in the former Soviet bloc,
the substance of that period, of course, was somewhat different than for
people in the West. If 1968 in Western Europe was first and foremost the
barricades of Paris and student unrest, among Eastern Europeans we think
first of Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague. The war in Vietnam, affecting
both East and West, is for Europeans and Americans a part of their history,
while for citizens of the former USSR it is nothing more than a backdrop on
which their personal dramas turned. Nonetheless, there is much in com-
mon between West and Eastmuch more than is usually realized.
For several decades people had been preparing for war, fighting
wars, building new weapons, and threatening each other with the prospect

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of a new war. And now suddenly all of that was in the past. A new world was
arising where it was possible to simply enjoy life, love one another, listen
to music, and look around without a feeling of anxiety. It appeared that an
era of everyday prosperity was beginning. In the USSR, this was a time of
unconditional optimism. Indeed, the country, having won the most terrible
and heroic war, found in itself strength not only to withstand this aggression
and rebuild itself after unprecedented losses and destruction, but also to
liberate itself from totalitarianism. It is clear that after the death of Stalin the
Soviet Union did not become a democracy, and people at that time did not
even understand very well what democracy is. But totalitarianism ended
in 1953 together with the death of the leader and teacher. Official criti-
cism of the past opened the possibility of sufficiently open discussion of the
present and future. And did not the overturning of the cult of personality,
together with the victory in the war, serve as proof that the Soviet system
was viablethat it could develop, improve itself, correct its own mistakes,
and change?
The 1960s were, in their own way, a golden age, and not only for
Soviet society, which could finally exist without war, repression, and tur-
moil. For the Western world also this was a period of well-being. Life was
improving everywhere. Inexpensive automobiles, washing machines, refrig-
erators, and televisions (in which you could finally make out the picture)
all became symbols of the early 1960s. Millions of people discovered how
much the potential for a new and happy life remained unrealized, and hap-
piness ephemeral. And they rebelled against that which stood in the way of
happiness. In the final analysis, those years are remembered in history as
a time of barricades, rock music, the antiwar protest of the New Left, and
discussions of Marxist philosophy.
What happened during that time in the East? The Soviet Union had
their own 1960s: the final, brightest moments of the Khrushchev thaw; the
bold publications in the journal Novy Mir, which became a symbol of intel-
lectual freedom; the first samizdat manuscripts and the origin of the dis-
sident movement. For Russia, the shestidesiatnik (member of the sixties
generation) became just as much a cult figure as the New Left in the West.
And if we read the ideological declarations of our shestidesiatniki we dis-
cover a striking similarity with the ideas of the New Left. One and the other
stood up for socialism with a human face and appealed to Marxist tradi-
tion, attempting to clarify its fundamental humanist sense. Both rejected
Stalinism and its cult of organization, criticized bureaucracy, and demon-
strated the value of individual self-expression. If we compare, for instance,

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the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov with the American social philosopher
and psychologist Erich Fromm, the similar formulations and parallel train of
thought are apparent at first glance.
Does this mean that the shestidesiatniki were analogous to the New
Left movement? If that is true, then why didnt they feel this likeness? Why
didnt they notice the similarity? Why were the events in Paris and West
Berlin alien and incomprehensible to them? This seems all the more strik-
ing given the sharp interest in everything Western that captivated Soviet
society by whatever measure the iron curtain was opened. They read books,
watched films, and listened to records. The books of Jean-Paul Sartre were
passed from hand to hand. But somehow his political ideas did not reach
readers. Che Guevara became a cult figure for young people only in the
post-Soviet years, when his image came from the West, disseminated on
millions of posters and T-shirts. In the 1960s, only a few in the Eastern bloc
knew the real meaning of his struggle and the drama of his political search.
And lesser-known figures, like Western student leaders Daniel Cohn-Bendit
and Rudi Dutschke, were generally of no particular interest to anyone in
the East. A misunderstanding? Or did this lack of recognition have its own
logic, some deep meaning hidden beneath the surface of cultural images
and ideological declarations?
Alas, the Soviet 1960s, in their psychological foundations, rep-
resent something quite contrary to the sixties movement in the West. In
the latters criticism of the system was a specific taskthe subversion of
the establishment. They rejected it. They refused to live according to its
rules. They dreamed about revolution. By contrast, the shestidesiatniki did
not consider themselves enemies of the system. They were not trying to
overthrow anything. They could sing nostalgic songs about commissars
in dusty helmets as much as you please, but the revolution was romanti-
cized precisely as something belonging to the irretrievable past. The Soviet
intelligentsia constantly criticized leadership. But that same leadership was
supposed to become their main audience. They appealed to those in power
to look at themselves and feel ashamed. They didnt imagine themselves as
an alternative. They tried to prove their right to give advice and to formulate
workable orientations precisely for that system and for those leaders.
The New Left was a mass movement. Not only in terms of the num-
ber of participants but also in the sense that its participants were, or at least
considered themselves, subjects of a movement. The Soviet 1960s had a
wide social base in the form of a mass intelligentsia, reading Novy Mir,
copying recordings of the bold songs of Aleksandr Galich and the demon-

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stratively apolitical lyrics of Bulat Okudzhava. Nevertheless, the movement

was essentially elitist. The best minds spoke and the rest listened. The
struggle for free speech did not presuppose dialogue. The forward think-
ers were supposed to take the podium.
The Western movement was a youth movement. That does not at
all mean it was composed of only young people. The main gurus of the
1960sSartre, Herbert Marcuse, Frommwere far from young. They had
undoubted moral and intellectual authority, but their young audience did
not recognize this division. In order to teach the new generation, they were
supposed to collaborate with them, to answer their questions. They could
teach, but not lecture. It was precisely the younger generation that deter-
mined the style, spirit, and dynamic of the movement.
There were a lot of young people involved in the Soviet 1960s as
well. But it was not at all a youth movement in style. The typical figure
was a man of about thirty who had finished the university soon after the
war. The main moral authorities were those who had managed to fight in
the war. Experience at the front gave them weight. The young sympathiz-
ers looked at the older ones and accepted their way of thinking and style
of behavior. The shestidesiatniki had short haircuts and wore jackets; the
height of abandon was a loosely knotted tie and a cigarette in the corner of
the mouth. Jeans and miniskirts appeared in the Soviet Union only in the
1970s, becoming the fashion for the next generation that accepted the style
and musical passions, but not the ideology, of Western radicals. This was
already a generation of cynics who had broken no less with the sixties than
with the official ideology of the Communist Party.
They called themselves children of the Twentieth Congress. When
at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union the
new leader Nikita Khrushchev made his denunciatory criticism of Stalin, he
not only put an end to the cult of personality, replacing an old orthodoxy
with a new one. Without knowing it himself, he provoked critical reflection
about the recent past on a national level.
Of course, the personalities of many of the shestidesiatniki were
shaped long before the Twentieth Congress. In essence, we are talking
about not one but two generations at once, united by common values,
ideals, and aspirations, and by common political experience. The older
shestidesiatniki had been through the war. They typically returned from
the front as lieutenants or, perhaps, captains. They managed to survive, to
endure the trials of the war in the trenches, but had usually not served as
infantry soldiers. After their return from the war, they entered (or returned

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to) the universities. But life in peacetime was not at all what they expected.
The end of the 1940s brought a new wave of repression and the campaign
against the cosmopolitans. (This term usually referred only to intellectu-
als with Jewish last names.) By 1956, when Khrushchev came out with his
denunciatory report on Stalins cult of personality, the older shestidesiat-
niki were already mature people with rich life experiences. To a large extent,
the denunciation by the new party leader corresponded with their own
individual observations and evaluations, though these were perhaps not
directly formulated, fully thought out, or by any means openly expressed.
By contrast, the younger shestidesiatniki had not been through the
war. This was the first generation of Soviet people who, despite having
been touched by the war in their youth, had the possibility of living in peace.
Their views were formed under the influence of the ideas of the Twentieth
Congress and the experience of the older shestidesiatniki.
The New Left movement achieved its height in 1968 at the barri-
cades of Paris, and continued through the hot fall of 1969 in Italy. In West
Berlin it was absorbed into the everyday life of the squatters who occupied
the citys run-down neighborhoods. At the beginning of the 1970s its par-
ticipants still believed in impending revolution, looking for signs that were
no longer coming from the main European capitals, but instead from the
periphery and the semiperipheryPortugal, Angola, Chile. In 1972, the
cult books of Andre Gortz and Herbert Marcuse were still appearing. A
year later, the reversal in the war in Chile destroyed the hope for revolu-
tion in Latin America. Likewise, the hopes tied to the Portuguese revolu-
tion were lost. The period of storm and onslaught ended. There began, as
Dutschke put it, a long journey through the institutions. The New Left had
no alternative but to enter the old left-wing parties in order to change them
from within. The former revolutionaries became deputies, professors, and
functionaries.
Our shestidesiatniki intended to change the party from within from
the very beginning. They believed in socialism and in authentic Leninism,
which they contrasted to the cult of personality or, more precisely, the entire
complex of experiences of the thirties and forties that had received the
name Stalinism. The official ideologues did not like to talk about Stalinism,
preferring to limit themselves to criticism of the cult of personalityin
other words, connecting the problem to the personality of Stalin and the
behavior of his closest comrades in arms. The intellectuals of the sixties
went further. They looked for the deeper reasons why the 1917 revolution,
begun under the banner of freedom, led in the final analysis to totalitarian

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degeneracy. They never questioned, however, the ideals of socialism them-

selves. And it was not because, as more cynical representatives of the
next generation believed, the intelligentsia at that time did not want to or
was afraid to critique the ruling ideology, trying to stay within its framework
in spite of their critical fervor. No, the cause lay in a completely different
sphere: the ideology of socialism and the revolutionary and Marxist tradi-
tion were the bases for their dialogue and polemic with those in power, and
for their hope for a more free and just society. Yes, they grew up in the tradi-
tion of socialist thought, but it was because of this that they became critics
of this system, nonconformists, and dissidents.
It should be said that in their majority, the sixties generation did
not know Marx well. Mikhail Lifshitz, Evald Ilyenkov, and the younger Gri-
gorii Vodolazov were exceptions in this respect. The majority limited them-
selves to the works of Lenin that had entered the obligatory course of every
humanist (but not only) discipline. Nevertheless, this was enough to allow
them to see the tremendous gap between theory and practice in Soviet
society, between ideal and reality. This ideal, of original Leninist socialism,
needed to once again be upheld and confirmed in contradistinction to the
bureaucratic degradation of the systemto be restored to its former mean-
ing, rethought and made into the governing principle for the further devel-
opment of society. Their political project collapsed in a single day, when,
on Kremlin orders, Soviet tanks entered reformist Czechoslovakia. By the
evening of the next day, a large number of advocates of socialism with
a human face already knew quite well that democratic socialism was an
absurd utopia.
In general, the attempt to suppress an idea by arms says some-
thing of its strength. In sending forth their tanks in order to rectify ideology,
the Soviet leaders proved only that they had no better arguments. Pre-
cisely because of this, August 1968 was a tragedy for leftists throughout
the worldbut it was by no means a complete collapse. It was not socialist
ideas that were ruined but the illusions of the shestidesiatniki who believed
in humanitarian reform under the support of more conscientious leadership.
The defeat of the ideology of the 1960s, oddly, did not signify the failure of
the corresponding generation in real life. On the contrary, this generation
achieved its greatest success and glory precisely after the decisive defeat
of its own ideas. It was doomed, however, to lose its coherence.
The relationship of the shestidesiatniki to power was also duplici-
tous. They criticized and argued with it, demanding recognition, or some-
times just answers to their questions. Difficulties with censorship became

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a necessary episode in the biography of any self-respecting author, cine-

matographer, theater director, or literary critic. (This affected artists, phi-
losophers, and historians to a lesser extent, but it still affected them.) On
the other hand, the authority with which they argued was the same as that
which freed millions of people from the camps, exposed the cult of person-
ality, and allowed the campaign for freedom of thought in the journal Novy
Mir, with its millions of readers. Finally, many of the representatives of the
ruling bureaucracy had gone through the experience of the war together,
on the same fronts, with the critically minded intellectuals. There was a
growing mutual irritation, but not a complete break. There was no sense of
class conflict. Those in power needed to be shamed, persuaded, and con-
vinced. A mirror needed to be placed in front of them so that they could see
their own unsightly features and be horrified by them. It was a completely
utopian project from the point of view of what we know now, but completely
understandable and natural for that time.
After 1968, those who favored the correction of the system split
into two groups. Some, to a greater or lesser extent, became conformists.
They continued to climb the ladder of success, completing that same long
passage through the institutions, only without any political project or dis-
tinct ideologysimply by inertia. They were far from renouncing their per-
sonal past and even more so their present connections, remaining a more
or less united group. They were distinguished precisely by this comradely
cohesion in the complete absence of a common program. They had only
recently been revolting against the system, announcing at the same time
that they shared its fundamental principles. Now they stopped revolting,
contemptuously discarding the same principles.
Others who were bolder, or sometimes just more nave, became dis-
sidents. They broke with the system that they had at one time dreamed
of reforming, and thus also abandoned their positive program. Legalistic
principles replaced the ideology of social reform, providing at least a moral
basis for opposition to the government. It must be noted that Western leftists
constantly hoped to see something like themselves in this dissident move-
ment. It seemed to them that the dissidents of Eastern Europe should be
similar to those fighters for democracy who were being thrown into torture
chambers by the hundreds of thousands in the countries of Asia and Latin
America. The Western leftists anticipated encountering if not likeminded
people, then at least partners in a dialogue. But when the dissident move-
ment extended a hand toward them, they either did not notice or pushed it

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away in confusion. Nature does not sustain a vacuum, and the ideologically
neutral legalistic principles were gradually displaced by other ideas. Among
the Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia, dissidents and conformists alike
were marked by sympathy for Mrs. Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and espe-
cially for General Pinochet.
Perestroika disturbed the shestidesiatniki. The Soviet leadership in
the middle of the 1980s unexpectedly accomplished that which young intel-
lectuals had dreamed of twenty years before. Looking in the crooked mirror
of glasnost, the leadership was horrified at its own bared teeth and sum-
moned the democratic intelligentsia to help. And it was done. The sixties
generation was finally summoned to take power.
Dissidents soon returned from exile, camps, and even from abroad.
It is true that they were provided with primarily decorative roles. In the final
analysis, it was not the dissidents but the conformists who emerged vic-
toriously. Their long path through the institutions ended with complete
victory. Ideas and slogans from twenty years ago were brought forth from
some sort of archives, but they were not used for long. Even those who
mouthed these slogans no longer believed in them. The generation of the
1960s was called upon not to rejuvenate and cleanse the original Soviet
ideology but to decisively destroy it. And the shestidesiatniki shared the
glory of victory with the corrupted functionaries. Those who had promised
to renew the system now without hesitation acknowledged their role in the
matter of its destruction. In an amusing way, the long journey of Western
intellectuals came to an end at the same time. They also achieved positions
of responsibility in governments, parliaments, and international organiza-
tions. But the institutions turned out to be stronger than the young radi-
cals had thought at one time. The system successfully digested the former
rebels and only became stronger. It needed fresh blood!
And so our shestidesiatniki and the New Left in the West accom-
plished something quite contrary to what they had promised. The principles
of hierarchy and subordination were victorious, and the ideology of privilege
triumphed. The utopia of social injustice was realized to the fullest possible
extentand not without the help of those who promised to struggle for the
ideal of a just world. Does this mean that the struggles of the 1960s were
senseless? Not at all. The fate of ideas is richer and more interesting than
the fate of the generation that produces them. The books of the decade
of dissent again came into fashion at the very moment when those same
young rebels finally turned into elderly bureaucrats and dejected prae-

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torians. A new generation of young radicals came out onto the streets with
very familiar slogans. Does this mean that everything will just go through
another round? Far from it. Todays movement is much deeper, stronger,
and widespread than that which took place in the 1960s. That was the first,
unsuccessful draft; every new attempt at liberation will be more serious and
more successful.

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