(9 of 10)
I regret that I had a hand in banning the book. We should have given readers an opportunity to reach their own verdict. By banning Doctor Zhivago we caused much harm to the Soviet Union. The intelligentsia abroad, including many who were not opposed to socialism, rose up against us.
Today you hear it said that we have no censorship. That's nonsense. That's talk for children. We have the most real -- and I might even say the most cruel -- censorship. We should not turn criticism into censorship, because critics and ideologues will turn into police bullies.
I just wish I'd handled the Pasternak affair the way I dealt with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ((published in 1962)). In that case, I read the book myself. It is very heavy but well written. It made the reader react with revulsion to the conditions in which Ivan Denisovich and his friends lived while they served their terms.
Only Suslov squawked. He wanted to hold everything in check. "You can't do this!" he said. "That's all there is to it. How will the people understand?" My answer then and now is that the people will always distinguish good from bad.
In deciding not to interfere with Solzhenitsyn's book, I proceeded from the premise that the evil inflicted on the Communist Party and on the Soviet people had to be condemned; we had to lance the boil, to brand what had happened with shame so that it would never happen again. We had to brand the truth firmly into literature.
Readers really devoured Solzhenitsyn's book. They were trying to find how an honest man could end up in such conditions in our socialist time and our socialist state.
Stalin was to blame. He was a criminal in this respect, and criminals should be tried. They should be tried not only in a courtroom by a judge but by society as well. The strongest trial is to brand Stalin a criminal in literature.
I am now of an age to repent my own mistakes of judgment about what to support. Too often we relied on administrative means rather than permitting events to develop in a creative direction. We were too concerned with what to restrain, what to forbid. I shared responsibility for that form of governing, but now I'm against it. We have to show tolerance toward change. Do these changes really affect communist ideology? In my opinion, no.
The Question of Questions
Nor should we be afraid of letting people leave the Soviet Union. Paradise is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from! Yet in this country, which is supposed to be the workers' paradise, the doors are closed and locked. What kind of socialism is that? What kind of shit is it when you have to keep people in chains? Some curse me for the times I opened the doors. If God had given me the chance to continue, I would have thrown the doors and windows wide open.
The revolution was made for a piece of bread. We must provide that bread. Through the existing system it is not possible to acquire food on time and in the quantity needed. Moscow can't satisfy the needs of its own population, yet it is better off than other cities of the Soviet Union. Kiev, for example, has always been a mirror that reflected the state of agricultural production. Now this mirror shows us a very unattractive image.