The Alternative Tradition

The Alternative Tradition was a cluster of beliefs which had sustained the defeated and the repressed. At its heart lay the conviction that the Soviet experiment had been right at the beginning, had gone tragically wrong under Stalin, but could yet create a socialist society — provided the leadership democratized, made real economic reforms and returned to a proper conception of socialism. The origins of the Tradition went back to the 1920s and early 1930s, to the struggle against Stalin’s hijacking of the revolution and perversion of its purposes, though not until Khrushchev’s thaw had ‘alternative’ views begun to be heard. They were then voiced strongly through the 1960s, most of all by economists, who came up with ideas for change that had implications which went well beyond the economic. Alternative viewpoints also emerged in literature, literary criticism, history and most branches of the social sciences. The Tradition’s home was Novy Mir (New World), journal of the Union of Soviet Writers, which under the inspired editorship of Alexander Tvardovsky stood for a democratic socialism wholly purged of the Stalinist perversion. ‘We believed’, one of Tvardovsky’s colleagues wrote, ‘in socialism as a noble ideal of justice, we believed in a socialism that was human through and through and not just with a human face. We regarded the democratic rights of the individual as incontestable.’1