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of the marriage between state ideology and individual imagination. Rather,

artistic products served ‘to make conscious that which was made known in the

language of decrees’.

Within a year of the war’s end, the nation’s wartime unanimity of patriotic

purpose disappeared, replaced by a reshufﬂed deck of social sectors with new

allocations of privileges, rewards and penalties, and a welter of new domestic

enemies. A miasma of belligerent isolation and xenophobia stiﬂed wartime

exposure to the outside world, and controls over culture tightened with dra-

matic harshness. Party leaders, often Stalin himself, ‘selected the main themes

and topics of literature and carefully supervised its ideological content’, plac-

ing particular emphasis on both Russian and Soviet chauvinism, hatred of

everything foreign and gloriﬁcation of the Communist Party and of the coun-

try’s ruler,

and favouring the epic genres – long novels, marathon narrative

poems, historical ﬁlms, operas – that most readily accommodated themselves

to expressing these themes. During the Zhdanovshchina, the crudest expression

of the regime’s general approach to the arts in the post-war years, every news-

paper and journal joined the offensive against individual works and artists,

excoriating the least suspicion of veracity, artistic independence (‘formalism’)

and apoliticism (‘ideological emptiness’) and demanding militant, ideologi-

cally pure and edifying art. If artists wanted to address the real moral and

social dilemmas of their world, they could do so only in the most oblique

fashion; lakirovka, or make-believe, reigned supreme.

Andrei Zhdanov and his epigones viliﬁed great artists, such as poet Anna

Akhmatova, satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, ﬁlm director Sergei Eisenstein, com-

posers Dmitrii Shostakovich and Sergei Prokoﬁev. But they scrutinised with

equalvigilance individualsof considerably less talent and reputation: Ukrainian

Petro Panch, for the brazen notion that the writer had the ‘right’ to make

mistakes; playwright Aleksandr Gladkov, for his ‘complete ignorance of Soviet

man and an irresponsible attitude toward his own literature’; scriptwriter

Pavel Nilin, whose play provided the basis for Leonid Lukov’s ﬁlm A Great

Life (Bol’shaia zhizn’): ‘In the imaginary people portrayed by Nilin there is no

power of enthusiasm, no knowledge, no culture, which the Soviet man in the

ranks, who matured during the years of the mighty growth of our state, bears

1 Evgeny Dobrenko, ‘The Literature of the Zhdanov Era: Mentality, Mythology, Lexicon’,

in Thomas J. Lahusen with Gene Kuperman (eds.), Late Soviet Culture: From Perestroika to

Novostroika (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 131.

2 Deming Brown, Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin (Cambridge and London: Cambridge

University Press, 1978), p. 2.

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within himself.’

The ﬁlm itself, an attempt to portray with some degree of

verisimilitude the life of miners in the Donbass, elicited a Central Committee

ban (4 September 1946) as an ‘ideologically and politically vicious’ ﬁlm, and

artistically weak to boot.

The rhetoric of assault, the shortcomings singled out for attack and the sanc-

tions imposed recurred throughout the years 1945–53, with different segments

of the creative intelligentsia targeted at different times. Music, for instance,

took its turn on the chopping block in 1948, when the Central Committee made

an example of composer Vano Muradeli and his ‘vicious and inartistic’ opera

The Great Friendship (Velikaia druzhba). The State Museum of Modern West-

ern Art was closed down in 1948, the same year that libraries were instructed

to ‘process’ their holdings of foreign literature captured abroad during the

war, and to eliminate once-acceptable domestic works that had slipped into

disfavour through political vicissitudes, such as a novel expressing ‘friendly

feelings’ for Communist Yugoslavia, now turned enemy under renegade Tito.

Chauvinist xenophobia rehabilitated the Russian past and hailed all aspects

of Soviet life while denigrating everything Western. Seductively attractive

foreign art masked a ‘putrid, baneful bourgeois culture’. Soviet productions

of foreign plays disseminated ‘the propaganda of reactionary bourgeois ide-

ology and morals’. Revised editions of books excised favourable references

to foreign nations and negative details about Russia. A 1948 edition of Stepan

Razin, a historical novel set in the seventeenth century, for instance, eliminated

obscenities, gory descriptions of torture and details about body odour, bed-

bugs, ﬂatulence and sex that suggested an ‘uncivilized’ Russia. New editions

of Vsevolod Ivanov’s 1922 novel and play, Armoured Train No. 14–69 (Bronepoezd

No. 14–69), inserted tributes to the Russian people and interpolations about

America’s hostile role in the Far East during the civil war, including American

plans ‘to annex Siberia and China’.

For a few years after the war audiences hungry for entertainment had

the chance to see German and American ‘trophy’ ﬁlms captured by the Red

Army: the regime authorised their distribution partly for revenues, partly to

compensate for the absence of new domestic ﬁlms. Introductory texts and

revised titles provided requisite ideological adjustments: Stagecoach became

3 George S. Counts and Nucia Lodge, The Country of the Blind: The Soviet System of Mind

Control (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1949), pp. 113, 101, 102.

4 Ibid., p. 125.

5 Herman Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature: 1917–1991 (New York and London:

Rowman and Littleﬁelds, 1997), pp. 106, 110–11.

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The Journey will be Dangerous, ‘an epic about the struggle of Indians against

White imperialists on the frontier’, and Frank Capra’s Mr Deeds Goes to Town

became The Dollar Rules.

Though rarely reviewed, these ﬁlms were popular

enough to annoy the authorities: a central newspaper censured Dom Kino,

the ﬁlm industry’s Moscow clubhouse, for screening too many foreign ﬁlms,

including ﬁlms ‘with jazz and fox-trot’, to mark the ﬁfth anniversary of the

Nazi invasion.

In post-war culture, one blueprint served for all cultural products. Russian

chauvinism dictated Russifying the ethnic designations of Greek and Tatar

settlements in the Crimea to obliterate their pasts. Eisenstein had repeatedly

to answer for the ‘lack of Russian spirit’ in Part II of Ivan the Terrible (Ivan

Groznyi); composers, a couple of years later, were anathematised for violating

the ‘system of music and singing native to our people’. Soviet chauvinism dic-

tated rewriting recent history: new editions of Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don

(Tikhii Don)(1928), for instance, added quotations from Lenin and Stalin, and

cleansed individual Bolsheviks ‘of a wide array of personal vices pertaining,

among other things, to sex, marriage, foul language, drinking and brutality’.

Aleksandr Fadeev cut or altered descriptions of the Red Army’s hasty retreat

during the war in his novel The Young Guard (Molodaia gvardiia)(1945) after a

critical Pravda editorial, and Valentin Katayev increased the ‘operational capa-

bilities of [an underground] group’ by adding several local Communists to For

the Power of the Soviets (Za vlast’ Sovetov)(1949–51) after Pravda had a go at him.

The trophy ﬁlms disappeared from Soviet screens in the late 1940s. Instead

audiences could choose from a thin stream of anti-Western ﬁlms (Aleksan-

drov’s Meeting on the Elbe (Vstrecha na Elbe), Romm’s Secret Mission (Sekretnaia

missiia), Room’s Court of Honour (Sud chesti), historical spectacles explicitly glo-

rifying Stalin (The Vow (Kliatva), The Battle of Stalingrad (Stalingradskaia bitva),

The Fall of Berlin (Padenie Berlina)), and biographies of scientists and musicians

implicitly doing the same thing.

From its outset the anti-cosmopolitan cam-

paign had viliﬁed the intelligentsia, many of whom were Jews, but after 1948

the campaign turned categorically anti-Semitic, ﬁrst in print – the leading seri-

ous ﬁlm journal, Iskusstvo kino, published a list of ‘aesthete-cosmopolitans in

cinema’, nearly all Jews – and then in action, with the NKVD execution of

6 Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 127.

7 Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin, 2nd edn

(London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001), p. 193.

8 Ermolaev, Censorship,pp.120–6 passim.

9 See David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold

War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 112–59.

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Solomon Mikhoels, the Soviet Union’s leading Yiddish actor, in January 1948

and the execution of thirteen prominent Jews in August 1952, four of them

writers.

With very few exceptions, the arts between 1945 and 1953 operated in the

realm of fantasy. ‘Even the recently ended war,’ Dobrenko comments, ‘a horri-

ble wound that continued to bleed, was immediately externalized and became

yet another thematic.’

As Boris Slutskii, a poet who fought in the war, wrote,

‘And gradually the cracks were painted over, / The strong wrinkles smoothed

out, / And gradually the women grewprettier / And sullen men grew merry.’

Painters produced ‘meaningless mass scenes’, canvases ﬁlled with cheerful

civiliansandclean, well-restedsoldiers.

Playwrightsstruggled with the absurd

and inherently anti-dramatic theory of ‘no conﬂict drama’, premised on ‘the

alleged impossibility of conﬂict in a “classless society”’,

which dominated

discourse in the early 1950s. ‘Hortatory’ writing on rural themes, ‘designed

to promote discipline and enthusiasm for the painful sacriﬁces involved in

restoring agriculture after the war’s devastation’, presented the depopulated,

devastated countryside as a thriving hive of enthusiasm and productivity.

The

collision of ‘the good and the better’ (in one famous formulation), whether on

stages or cinema screens, left little space for ambivalence, weakness and death,

except for heroic death on the battleﬁeld; it left no room at all for tragedy. As

environment – factory, shop, school, ﬁeld, farm – supplanted human beings

and roles replaced character, protagonists became virtually interchangeable,

clones identiﬁable only by their jobs.

Thusart shrivelled to function as deﬁned

by the Communist Party.

Between 1945 and 1953, nearly every genuine artist fell silent. Authentic

popular culture was restricted to the labour camps of the Gulag, and reached

a wider public only after Stalin’s death. Ersatz, ofﬁcially sponsored popular

culture reﬂected the regime’s conservatism, its determination to preserve the

10 See Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir Naumov (eds.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar

Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, trans. Laura Esther Wolfson (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2002).

11 Dobrenko, ‘Literature of the Zhdanov Era’, p. 117.

12 Boris Slutskii, ‘1945 god’, in Segodnia i vchera (Moscow: 1963), p. 162. Cited by Brown,

Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin,p.87.

13 Musya Glants, ‘The Images of War in Painting’, in John and Carol Garrard (eds.), Wo r l d

War 2 and the Soviet People (London: Macmillan and New York: St Martins Press, 1993),

p. 110.

14 Melissa T. Smith, ‘Waiting in the Wings: Russian Women Playwrights in the Twentieth

Century’, in TobyW.Clyman andDiana Greene (eds.), WomenWritersin Russian Literature

(Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1994), p. 194.

15 Brown, Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin, p. 218.

16 Dobrenko, ‘Literature of the Zhdanov Era’, p. 123.

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status quo, its insistence on stability and normalisation. The rising middle

class shared many of those values. At a time when Soviet citizens had little

opportunity to amuse themselves in caf

es or dance halls and no opportunity

to travel, and movie houses recycled hits from a decade before, the bulk of

middle-brow reading material – mainly novels – provided diversion, escapist

happy endings and ‘one of the few ways of meeting the people’s need to

understand their society’s major workaday problems . . . a chance [for the

reader] to check his own questions about postwar adjustments against the

paradigms of current social issues’.

The discrepancy between reality and

the ‘utterly profane’ version

advanced in ﬁction like Babaevskii’s Cavalier of

the Golden Star (Kavaler zolotoi zvezdy) (and Raizman’s 1950 screen version) and

ﬁlms like Pyr’ev’s Cossacks of the Kuban’ (Kuban’skie kazaki) troubled the regime

not at all. As for the Soviet public, or a large part of it, they suspended belief –

willingly or reluctantly – in the pursuit of enjoyment and whatever scraps and

tatters of meaning they could relate to their own lives.

The Thaw, 1953–67(?)

Although the beginning of the Thaw is far easier to date than its terminus,

even the death of Stalin did not mark an absolute turning point. After all, indi-

viduals and institutions involved in the creation, regulation, dissemination and

reception of cultural products did not simply vanish the day Stalin died, nor

did their modus operandi. At the same time, signs of renewal pre-dated March

1953, in the arts and in society at large. Valentin Ovechkin’s ‘District Routine’

(Raionnye budni), a ﬁctional sketch that began ‘the process of returning rural

literature to real life’,

appeared in Novyi mir in September 1952. Vsevolod

Pudovkin’s last ﬁlm, The Return of Vasilii Bortnikov (Vozvrashchenie Vasiliia Bort-

nikova), marked by psychological credibility and imaginative camerawork, was

shot in 1952. Young people rebelled against grey Soviet monotony by wear-

ing imitations of Western styles, tight trousers and short skirts. Still, Stalin’s

death unquestionably liberated the psychocultural shifts characteristic of the

Thaw years. Belles-lettres responded the most quickly. The ﬁne lyric poet Ol’ga

Berggol’ts insisted on the poet’s right to express personal emotions in her own

voice; the established novelist Ilya Ehrenburg and the novice literary critic

17 Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: MiddleClass Values inSoviet Fiction, enlarged edn (Durham,

N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 1990), pp. 25–6.

18 Dobrenko, ‘Literature of the Zhdanov Era’, p. 130.

19 Kathleen Parth

e, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Path (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1992), p. 13.

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Vladimir Pomerantsev both demanded more spontaneity and ‘sincerity’, less

ofﬁcial interference in literature.

The termination of the Thaw cannot so readily be pinpointed, in part

because it did not skid to a dead halt in one violent action like the 1968

invasion of Czechoslovakia. Indeed, many of the ideas discussed and trends

inaugurated during the Thaw years outlasted the political career of the man

most clearly associated with it, Nikita Khrushchev, who fell from power in

1964. They endured and evolved over the next two decades, albeit forced

into alternative channels as ofﬁcial ones constricted. Most individuals who

identiﬁed themselves with the goals of the Thaw continued to work within

the Soviet cultural sphere, although some emigrated and others conﬁned their

audiences to friends or to anonymous purveyors of samizdat.

Nonetheless, the term ‘Thaw’ legitimately denotes a dozen years during

whichSoviet society moved out from under the worst shadowsof the late Stalin

years. Artists and audiences alike pressed for greater candour in the arts, an

end to mendacious representations of Soviet life, a recognition of the puissance

of private concerns, more latitude in subject and style and a ‘less paternalis-

tic concern’ over what the Soviet reader/ﬁlm-goer/museum visitor ‘should

and should not be permitted to know’.

Khrushchev’s major de-Stalinisation

speeches spurred a passion for truth-telling, expressed in a variety of artistic

forms that shared a common concern with the moral compromises endemic to

Soviet society. And although the party attempted to maintain hegemony over

cultural matters, the thawing process persisted despite, beneath and around

the ice ﬂoes of ofﬁcial reversals, skittish compromises and dogmatic retrench-

ments.

Already in 1955, before Khrushchev’s 1956 ‘Secret Speech’, access to foreign

culture increased, with events like the week of French cinema held in October

1955. After Khrushchev’s speech the pace accelerated dramatically. Personnel

shake-ups replaced bureaucrats with active artists and balanced conservatives

with progressives (such as the new, liberal Moscow branch of the national Writ-

ers’ Union, an organisation Mikhail Sholokhov mordantly dubbed the ‘Union

of Dead Souls’

). The party allocated funds to build or refurbish theatres and

movie houses, to buy better equipment, to pay higher authors’ fees, to revi-

talise languishing republican ﬁlm studios, to rejoin the world’s cultural com-

munity. (The First Moscow International Film Festival took place in August

1959.) Khrushchev’s attempts to decentralise decision-making and encourage

20 Brown, Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin,p.5.

21 John and Carol Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union (New York and London: Free

Press, 1990), p. 72.

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individual initiative, though formulated to achieve economic goals, had cul-

tural repercussions. The Ministry of Culture, the party’s umbrella organisation

for all broadcasting, educational and cultural institutions, remained in charge,

but ofﬁcial censors relinquished some of their authority to editorial boards of

journals and ﬁlm studio artistic councils; senior literary editors and theatre

directors had more access to the ideological watchdogs.

In order to secure the trust of a nation profoundly wary of the repercus-

sions of autonomy, Khrushchev enjoined writers to tell the truth (up to a

point) without fear of lethal consequences. As Shimon Markish, a writer and

son of one of the Yiddish poets murdered in 1952, wryly – but accurately –

observed, while both Stalin and Khrushchev were whimsical and capricious,

with Khrushchev ‘we knew that whatever happened, it would not be arrest

and death’.

Artists who felt both anger and guilt at their own acquiescence

in falsehood proffered mea culpas: in Evgenii Evtushenko’s dramatic poem

‘Zima Station’ (1956), for instance, he reproaches himself for saying ‘what I

should not have said’ and failing to say ‘what I should have said’. Censors

excised many of the once-obligatory disparaging references to the West and

to non-Russian nationalities in new editions of previously published works,

and scrapped equally obligatory laudatory references to Stalin: his very name

was cropped from phrases like ‘Stalin’s army’ and ‘Stalin’s generation’. While

censors continued to discourage bleak descriptions of the purges, they – emu-

lating Khrushchev – partially rehabilitated the victims of Stalinist repression.

‘The censorship did not cease to operate,’ Geoffrey Hosking notes, ‘but its

implementation became less predictable.’

The early years of the Thaw gave artists the chance to scrape the excres-

cences of Stalinism off what they perceived as the authentic revolutionary

idealism of the 1920s. They could retain the possibility of utopian socialism,

sans Stalin’s crippling despotism and Stalinism’s lies. Even the relatively ortho-

dox writer Konstantin Simonov, editor of Novyi mir in 1956, urged acceptance

of any literature imbued with ‘socialist spirit’, and a large part of Soviet society

embraced the opportunity to examine the actual circumstances and dilemmas

of Soviet life. For a time, at least, party directives, creative impulses and popular

desires galloped along as a troika.

The same desiderata – less embellishment, greater truthfulness, more atten-

tion to individuals and their private dramas, the mufﬂing of authorial judge-

ment, multiple perspectives – characterise nearly all ﬁction and ﬁlm in the early

22 Ibid., p. 78.

23 Geoffrey Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism: Soviet Fiction since Ivan Denisovich (London:

Granada, 1980), p. 20.

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The politics of culture, 1945–2000

Thaw years, whether historical or contemporary. As early as 1954, the novelist

Fedor Abramov published a damning survey of post-war rural prose, which

centred on the collective farm and frequently came from the pens of urban

writers ignorant of country life. He and other derevenshchiki – writers of ‘village’

(rather than kolkhoz) prose – began to correct the spurious approach to rural

themes characteristic of post-war ﬁction in favour of sympathetic yet unsen-

timental portraits of everyday rural reality, including the religious faith that

sustained the peasantry. Themselves usually scions of village life, they avoided

the (falsely) picturesque, folksy and romantic, and, over the next decade or so,

elaborated a set of values virtually opposite to those that dominated kolkhoz

literature.

Film had less room to manoeuvre, since the party’s demand for more and

better ﬁlms ‘about agriculture’ pointedly implied kolkhoz achievements, not

retrograde village traditions, and ﬁlm-makers were understandably reluctant

to tackle such a fraught subject. When they did turn to the countryside,

however, they starkly contradicted the ﬂorid and grotesquely synthetic images

of peasant life on display in musicals like Cossacks of the Kuban’. Camerawork

favoured medium and long shots and pans of the entire environment, as if

to offer trustworthy images saturated with reality; the happy ending that

reassuringly concluded most kolkhoz movies yielded to ambiguity. A wedding

opens – rather than closes – Mikhail Shveitser’sAlien Kin (Chuzhaia rodnia, 1955):

trouble starts afterwards. Stanislav Rostotskii’s It Happened in Penkovo (Delo

bylo v Penkove, 1957) pays lip-service to ofﬁcial rhetoric, encasing a ﬂashback

within a narrative framework that shows a poor collective farm becoming

prosperous, but for most of the ﬁlm only drinking, romance and ﬁghting

alleviate the tedium of village life.

In Vasilii Shukshin’s ﬁrst two ﬁlms, ABoy

Like That (Zhivet takoi paren’, 1964), and Your Son and Brother (Vash syn i brat,

1965), exterior shots convey the omnipresence of Siberia’s natural environment

while interiors are panned matter of factly, their furnishings (wood-burning

stoves, vodka decanters, framed photographs) neither quaint, ethnographic

objects nor fetishes to be venerated but the stuff of people’s lives.

History – the Decembrist uprising of 1825, the populist movement of the

1880s,Bolshevism, the Second WorldWar – served as a template through which

to examine the present, both because the past gave writers and ﬁlm-makers

more freedom, and because it had directly engendered the present with which

24 The artistic council sharply criticised the spurious depiction of a neighbouring kolkhoz,

commenting that peasants would deride its magniﬁcent cowherds and elegant pig-

tenders. See Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London: I. B.

Tauris, 2000), p. 67.

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josephine woll

they were primarily concerned. With Khrushchev himself calling for a return

to Leninist norms, the years during which the Soviet state took shape offered

a dramatic framework in which to investigate contemporary hopes and ideals.

Thus the Thaw’s ﬁrst historical ﬁlms – Iurii Egorov’s They Were the First (Oni byli

pervymi, 1956), Alov and Naumov’s Pavel Korchagin (1956), based on Ostrovskii’s

novel How the Steel Was Tempered (Kak zakalialas’ stal’), Grigorii Chukhrai’s The

Forty-ﬁrst (Sorok pervyi, 1956), Iulii Raizman’s The Communist (Kommunist, 1958)–

re-create the civil-war years and the 1920s, not as they had actually been,

certainly, but as they were viewed through the lens of the 1950s: as a relatively

noble, inspiring and passionate period. Alov and Naumov replaced Ostrovskii’s

robotic Pavel Korchagin with a hero who renounces personal happiness (‘this

isn’t the time for love’) at the cost of horriﬁc, graphically delineated suffering.

Chukhrai’s protagonists, White Army ofﬁcer and Red Army sniper, fall so

deeply in love, and Chukhrai’s cameraman Sergei Urusevskii ﬁlmed their idyll

with such lyricism and beauty that the lovers’ passion and tenderness enjoy

parity with – if not primacy over – revolutionary duty.

Throughout the Thaw, and well into the Brezhnev years, the Second World

War became a touchstone of Soviet culture, in part because it represented the

single unifying experience of a history otherwise bloody with political and ide-

ological divisions. At the Twenty-Second Congress Khrushchev extended his

earlier criticism of Stalin to include the army purges of 1937 and the treatment of

returning Soviet POWs, unleashing a wave of memoirs, lyrics, autobiographi-

cal ﬁction and movies that reﬂected the knowledge and experience of the vast

majority of Soviet citizens. Finally, civilian dedication to the war effort ranked

as no less heroic than combat bravery, and civilian losses as no less painful

than death on the battleﬁeld. In ﬁction by Vasilii Grossman, Boris Balter and

Bulat Okudzhava, the private dramas (and melodramas) contingent upon the

war took precedence over military strategy, to the point that movies began

routinely to avoid battle-scene heroics, instead locating their heroes in the

interstices between battles (Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo)), in

the undramatic hell of the Nazi prison camp, where heroism equalled dogged

determination to survive (Bondarchuk’s Fate of a Man (Sud’ba cheloveka, 1959)),

or away from the front altogether, as in Chukhrai’s Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o

soldate, 1959) (see Plate 22), where the only ‘battle scene’ mocks conventional

heroics by showing the hero running away from a tank.

The idealism and/or naivety of the early Thaw years disappeared by the end

of the decade, its demise hastened by the establishment’s loathsome attacks on

Boris Pasternak when he won the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the Thaw

lurched into the early 1960s, the ‘real, struggling, ascetic’ hero morphed into

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The politics of culture, 1945–2000

many kinds of hero operating in every sort of context (war, village, kolkhoz, fac-

tory, scientiﬁc institute, rapidlygrowing city) and genre. Consistently,however,

characters were ‘no longer apprehended primarily in terms of their attitudes

toward the work they perform, their degree of social dedication or the extent

to which they have absorbed ofﬁcial dogma and patterns of conduct’.

encounter many vulnerable and/or innocent protagonists: children, whose

age protects them from the corruption of adults and whose lack of subterfuge

authenticates their vision of the world; teenagers, honest about their fears and

tentative about their hopes; young women who fail to live up to their own

ideals or who succumb to intolerable pressures. These heroines, not coinci-

dentally, animated the many melodramas that appeared during the Thaw; the

genre’s ‘revival of private life as a legitimate subject for the arts’ made it ‘an

especially apt tool for exploring the individual within the collective, the pri-

vate morality underneath the strictures on public performances, the tensions

resulting from political manipulations of both public and private morality. [It

offered] escape...from a social and moral certainty imposed from above.’

So did the poetry recited at open-air readings, a public event revived in the

late 1950s that attracted thousands of listeners and turned younger poets –

Robert Rozhdestvenskii, Evtushenko and Voznesenskii, Iunna Morits, Bulat

Okudzhava, Bella Akhmadulina – into cult ﬁgures; so did the concurrent wave

of ‘youth prose’ and its attendant cinematic movement. Although many clich

lurk beneath the colloquialisms, sly humour and taste for rock’ n’ roll that char-

acterise Vasilii Aksenov and Andrei Bitov’s heroes, these authors confronted

the painful ﬁssures of Soviet society without proposing easy or dogmatic

solutions. Their characters, tired of ‘kvass patriotism, ofﬁcial bombast, and

village-style surveillance by the neighbours of their clothing, their morals, and

their leisure habits’,

did not obediently turn to their elders for paradigms.

‘Puzzled and concerned about the future, socially disoriented and, in some

degree, psychologically bemused’,

they tried to devise ‘ethical standards to

replace outworn or suspect ones’.

Khrushchev’s speech at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961

invigorated the liberals and stimulated a year of exciting cultural develop-

ments. Stravinsky made his ﬁrst visit to his homeland in half a century, as did

George Balanchine (after forty years away), who brought the New York City

25 Brown, Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin,p.149.

26 Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, ‘Introduction’, in Louise McReynolds and Joan

Neuberger (eds.), Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia (Durham, N.C.:

Duke University Press, 2002), p. 13.

27 Stites, Russian Popular Culture,p.127. 28 Hosking, Beyond Socialist Realism,p.185.

29 Brown, Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin,pp.142–3.

615