There are a number things I found interesting in Hingley's short book. One of the things I found most interesting in Russian Writers and the Soviet Union was Hingley's typology of Soviet writers particularly in the era after Stalin. Hingley argues that post-Stalinist Soviet writers can be grouped into three categories: custodians, those who supported the Soviet powers that be and the Soviet status quo, liberals, those who favoured reform of the Soviet system, and dissidents, revolutionaries who wanted an end to the Soviet system itself.
What I found particuarly interesting about Hingley's typology is that, despite Hingley's contention that the USSR was totalitarian and his assertion of the utility of the totalitarian model as a way to understand Soviet society, Hingley's book falls outside the early Cold War hardshell totalitarian perspective, an approach that sees Soviet totalitarian elites as calling out the dance steps the rest of the population danced to particularly once dissidents disappeared from their midst. Hingley's softshell totalitarianism with its post-Stalinist dissidents and their samizdat and export only literature, stretches the totalitarian model so far that it raises questions about the validity and usefulness not only of the hardshell totalitarian model but of the totalitarian model itself particularly when applied to the post-Stalin era USSR. One invariably wonders, in fact, whether the phrase modern autocracy might not be a more useful and valid ideal type and concept to apply to the Soviet Union than totalitarian.
Hingley's utilisation of the totalitarian model, which, after it was applied to Mussolini and Hitler came to be applied to Stalin, also raises the question of the impact of the Cold War on Hingley's monograph. There are times, reading retrospectively back from the twenty-first century, that Hingley's book seems, given the manichean Cold War context and its rhetoric of good versus evil that impacted it, a bit over the top particularly as it toggles between descriptive analysis and normative praise and blame on occasion. Additionally, this normative manicheanism seems to be aligned with a rather romantic conception of authors and authorship, an approach not everyone will find compelling in the wake of the postmodernist and post this or that revolution.
This Cold War context of Hingley's book also raises questions about Hingley's typology of Soviet writers. One invariably wonders, from the vantage point of the end of the Cold War and the the 21st century, whether this degree of distance from the Cold War allows for an even more complex, nuanced, fluid and more accurate typology of, particularly, post-Stalinist Soviet writers (and composers for that matter), one of insider-insiders, insider-outsiders, outsider-insiders, and outsider-outsiders.
Finally, the Cold War context of Hingley's book raises questions about any Cold War canon of "great" Soviet literature. As Hingley notes, Soviet bureaucrats canonised literature that was socialist realist though, as Hingley notes, the conception of socialist realism was not static in the USSR. Some in the West, particularly on the left, of course, likewise, at times, canonised texts associated with socialist realism and socialist realism itself. Some on the right, on the other hand, canonised dissident literature that criticised the evil godless totalitarian Soviet state such as that of Vladimir Andreyev and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the latter, at least, until ostracism from the USSR eventually showed him to be a Russian Christian nationalist, something that wasn't particularly palatable to some on the right. Beauty and value seem, in other words, to be in the social and cultural eyes of the beholder and very much impacted by culture and ideology.
Like so many books written about the USSR, Hingley's book seems, at least in part, to be highly time bound and heavily context bound. It seems, in other words, to be, a product of its time. When one instead looks at Hingley's book from the vantage point of Max Weber's writings on rational means-ends forms of modern bureaucracy, the USSR looks less like an entirely different beast from the modern and now postmodern West and more like an autocratic variant or ideal type of the modern and now postmodern bureaucratic and oligarchic states that dominate the core nations of the world.
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