ABSTRACT
In the early days of civil war, intervention, and famine when the state was most in danger art was most free. In the war years of 1939-1945, when the state was once more in danger and its very survival was in question, there was a new era of comparative liberalism. Then censorship relaxed and poets like the gentle Akhmatova, silenced for more than twenty years, were encouraged to write again and given a chance to be published. The state did not begin to dictate in detail until the danger had passed, just as the Menshevik party was not finally outlawed until the civil war and the Polish war were safely over. In 1946, when the war danger was at an end, came the new decrees on "formalism", "internationalism", "cosmopolitanism", "servility to the West". Unending terror or the threat of terror is inherent in totalitarianism. Total power is not sobered by responsibility nor softened by submission.
