In the “Thaw” following Stalin’s death, probing conversations about the nation’s violent past took place in the literary journal Novyi mir (New World). Readers’ letters reveal that discussion of the Terror was central to intellectual and political life during the USSR’s last decades. Denis Kozlov shows how minds change, even in a closed society.
Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, a major Soviet initiative was launched to rekindle popular enthusiasm for the revolution, which eventually gave rise to over 150 biographies and historical novels (The Fiery Revolutionaries/Plamennye revoliutsionery series), authored by many key post-Stalinist writers and published throughout late socialism until the Soviet collapse. What new meanings did revolution take on as it was reimagined by writers, including dissidents, leading historians, and popular historical novelists? How did their millions of readers engage with these highly varied texts? To what extent does this Brezhnev-era publishing phenomenon challenge the notion of late socialism as a time of 'stagnation', and how does it confirm it? By exploring the complex processes of writing, editing, censorship, and reading of late Soviet literature, Revolution Rekindled highlights the dynamic negotiations that continued within Soviet culture well past the apparent turning point of 1968, through to the late Gorbachev era. It also complicates the opposition between 'official' and underground post-Stalinist culture by showing how Soviet writers and readers engaged with both, as they sought answers to key questions of revolutionary history, ethics and ideology. Polly Jones reveals the enormous breadth and vitality of the 'historical turn' amongst the late Soviet population. Revolution Rekindled is the first archival, oral history, and literary study of this unique late socialist publishing experiment, from its beginnings in the early 1960s to its collapse in the early 1990s. It draws on a wide range of previously untapped archives, including those of the publisher Politizdat, of Soviet institutions in charge of propaganda, publishing, and literature, and of many individual writers. It also uses in-depth interviews with Brezhnev-era writers, editors, and publishers, and assesses the generic and stylistic innovations within the series' biographies and novels.
Between Stalin's death in 1953 and 1960, the government of the Soviet Union released hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag as part of a wide-ranging effort to reverse the worst excesses and abuses of the previous two decades and revive the spirit of the revolution. This exodus included not only victims of past purges but also those sentenced for criminal offenses. In Khrushchev's Cold Summer Miriam Dobson explores the impact of these returnees on communities and, more broadly, Soviet attempts to come to terms with the traumatic legacies of Stalin's terror. Confusion and disorientation undermined the regime's efforts at recovery. In the wake of Stalin's death, ordinary citizens and political leaders alike struggled to make sense of the country's recent bloody past and to cope with the complex social dynamics caused by attempts to reintegrate the large influx of returning prisoners, a number of whom were hardened criminals alienated and embittered by their experiences within the brutal camp system. Drawing on private letters as well as official reports on the party and popular mood, Dobson probes social attitudes toward the changes occurring in the first post-Stalin decade. Throughout, she features personal stories as articulated in the words of ordinary citizens, prisoners, and former prisoners. At the same time, she explores Soviet society's contradictory responses to the returnees and shows that for many the immediate post-Stalin years were anything but a breath of spring air after the long Stalinist winter.
Tamizdat offers a new perspective on the history of the Cold War by exploring the story of the contraband manuscripts sent from the USSR to the West. A word that means publishing "over there," tamizdat manuscripts were rejected, censored, or never submitted for publication in the Soviet Union and were smuggled through various channels and printed outside the country, with or without their authors' knowledge. Yasha Klots demonstrates how tamizdat contributed to the formation of the twentieth-century Russian literary canon: the majority of contemporary Russian classics first appeared abroad long before they saw publication in Russia. Examining narratives of Stalinism and the Gulag, Klots focuses on contraband manuscripts in the 1960s and 70s, from Khrushchev's Thaw to Stagnation under Brezhnev. Klots revisits the traditional notion of late Soviet culture as a binary opposition between the underground and official state publishing. He shows that even as tamizdat represented an alternative field of cultural production in opposition to the Soviet regime and the dogma of Socialist Realism, it was not devoid of its own hierarchy, ideological agenda, and even censorship. Tamizdat is a cultural history of Russian literature outside the Iron Curtain. The Russian literary diaspora was the indispensable ecosystem for these works. Yet in the post-Stalin years, they also served as a powerful weapon on the cultural fronts of the Cold War, laying bare the geographical, stylistic, and ideological rifts between two disparate yet inextricably intertwined fields of Russian literature, one at home, the other abroad. Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This edited volume assembles the work of leading international scholars in a comprehensive history of Russian literary theory and criticism from 1917 to the post-Soviet age. By examining the dynamics of literary criticism and theory in three arenas—political, intellectual, and institutional—the authors capture the progression and structure of Russian literary criticism and its changing function and discourse. The chapters follow early movements such as formalism, the Bakhtin Circle, Proletklut, futurism, the fellow-travelers, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers. By the cultural revolution of 1928, literary criticism became a mechanism of Soviet policies, synchronous with official ideology. The chapters follow theory and criticism into the 1930s with examinations of the Union of Soviet Writers, semantic paleontology, and socialist realism under Stalin. A more "humanized" literary criticism appeared during the ravaging years of World War II, only to be supplanted by a return to the party line, Soviet heroism, and anti-Semitism in the late Stalinist period. During Khrushchev's Thaw, there was a remarkable rise in liberal literature and criticism, that was later refuted in the nationalist movement of the "long" 1970s. The same decade saw, on the other hand, the rise to prominence of semiotics and structuralism. Postmodernism and a strong revival of academic literary studies have shared the stage since the start of the post-Soviet era. For the first time anywhere, this collection analyzes all of the important theorists and major critical movements during a tumultuous ideological period in Russian history, including developments in emigre literary theory and criticism.
Provides a bold new interpretation of the Soviet myth of World War II from its Stalinist origins to its emergence as arguably the supreme myth of state under Brezhnev. Jonathan Brunstedt offers a timely historical investigation into the roots of the revival of the war's memory in Russia today.
The Encyclopedia is an invaluable resource on recent and contemporary Russian culture and history for students, teachers, and researchers across the disciplines.
Before Josef Stalin's death in 1953, the USSR had, at best, an ambivalent relationship with noncommunist international organizations. Although it had helped found the United Nations, it refused to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other major agencies beyond the Security Council and General Assembly, casting them as foreign meddlers. Under new leadership, the USSR joined UNESCO and a slew of international organizations for the first time, including the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization. As a result, it enabled Soviet diplomats, scholars, teachers, and even some blue-collar workers to participate in global discussions on topics ranging from their professional specialties to worldwide problems. Reds in Blue investigates Soviet relations with one of the most prominent of these organizations, UNESCO, to present a novel way of thinking about the role of the United Nations in the Soviet experience of the Cold War. Drawing on unused archival material from the former USSR and elsewhere, the book examines the forgotten stories of Soviet citizens who contributed to the nuts-and-bolts operations and lesser-known activities of world governance. These unexamined dimensions of everyday participation in the UN's bureaucracy, conferences, publications, and technical assistance show the body's importance for a group of Soviet "one-worlders," who used the UN to imagine and work for a better world amidst the realities of the Cold War. Meanwhile, the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev governments sought to use their participation as a means of spreading Soviet influence within Western-dominated international organizations but discovered that this required risk-taking and a degree of openness for which the Soviet leadership and domestic institutions were often unprepared. Moving beyond debates over the successes and failures of UN diplomatic activities, Reds in Blue offers fresh perspectives on how Soviet citizens became citizens of the world and advocated for opening up Soviet society in ways that transcended Cold War categories without abandoning a sense of loyalty to their homeland. In doing so, it recaptures a space where East and West worked together towards a future without international conflict in the years before détente.
How was it possible to write history in the Soviet Union, under strict state control and without access to archives? What methods of research did these 'historians' - be they academic, that is based at formal institutions, or independent - rely on? And how was their work influenced by their complex and shifting relationships with the state? To answer these questions, Barbara Martin here tracks the careers of four bold and important dissidents: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Roy Medvedev, Aleksandr Nekrich and Anton Antonov-Ovseenko. Based on extensive archival research and interviews (with some of the authors themselves, as well as those close to them), the result is a nuanced and very necessary history of Soviet dissident history writing, from the relative liberalisation of de-Stalinisation through increasing repression and persecution in the Brezhnev era to liberalisation once more during perestroika. In the process Martin sheds light onto late Soviet society and its relationship with the state, as well as the ways in which this dissidence participated in weakening the Soviet regime during Perestroika. This is important reading for all scholars working on late Soviet history and society.
The Americanist community played a vital role in the Cold War, as well as in large part directing the cultural consumption of Soviet society and shaping perceptions of the US. To shed light onto this important, yet under-studied, academic community, Sergei Zhuk here explores the personal histories of prominent Soviet Americanists, considering the myriad cultural influences - from John Wayne's bravado in the film Stagecoach to Miles Davis - that shaped their identities, careers and academic interests. Zhuk's compelling account draws on a wide range of understudied archival documents, periodicals, letters and diaries as well as more than 100 exclusive interviews with prominent Americanists to take the reader from the post-war origins of American studies, via the extremes of the Cold War, thaw and perestroika, to Putin's Russia. Soviet Americana is a comprehensive insight into shifting attitudes towards the US throughout the twentieth century and an essential resource for all Soviet and Cold War historians.
