The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s 9781442661059

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The Thaw Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s

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The Thaw Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s

Edited by Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd

UNIVERSI T Y OF TORON TO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©

University of Toronto Press 2013 Toronto  Buffalo  London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada



Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.



Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication



The thaw : Soviet society and culture during the 1950s and 1960s / edited by Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd.



Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4460-1



1. Soviet Union – Social life and customs – 1917–1970.  2. Soviet Union – Intellectual life – 1917–1970.  3. Popular culture – Soviet Union – History – 20th century.  4. Soviet Union – History – 1953–1985.  I. Kozlov, D.A. (Denis Anatol’evich)  II. Gilburd, Eleonory



DK276.T53 2013   947.085   C2012-906368-1



University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.



University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

ISBN 978-1-4426-4460-1

Contents

Illustrations, Figures, and Tables  vii Archival Abbreviations  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction  3 denis kozlov 1 The Thaw as an Event in Russian History  18 denis kozlov and eleonory gilburd Part One: Looking Back 2 ‘Wait for Me and I Shall Return’: The Early Thaw as a Reprise of Late Thirties Culture?  85 katerina clark 3 Khrushchev’s Gulag: The Soviet Penitentiary System after Stalin’s Death, 1953–1964  109 marc elie 4 From Prisoners to Citizens? Ex-Prisoners in Vorkuta during the Thaw  143 alan barenberg

vi  Contents

  5 Remembering and Explaining the Terror during the Thaw: Soviet Readers of Ehrenburg and Solzhenitsyn in the 1960s  176 denis kozlov   6 The Personal and the Political: Opposition to the Thaw and the Politics of Literary Identity in the 1950s and 1960s  231 polly jones Part Two: Looking Forward   7 From White Grave to Tselinograd to Astana: The Virgin Lands Opening, Khrushchev’s Forgotten First Reform  269 michaela pohl   8 The Empires Pay a Visit: Gulag Returnees, East European Rebellions, and Soviet Frontier Politics  308 amir weiner   9 The Revival of Soviet Internationalism in the Mid to Late 1950s  362 eleonory gilburd 10 Soviet Fashion in the 1950s–1960s: Regimentation, Western Influences, and Consumption Strategies  402 larissa zakharova 11 Cine-Weathers: Soviet Thaw Cinema in the International Context  436 oksana bulgakowa 12 Afterword: The Thaw in Retrospect  482 sheila fitzpatrick List of Contributors  493 Index  497

Illustrations, Figures, and Tables

Illustrations   4.1 Leonid Markizov, a former prisoner, Syktyvkar, April 2003  145   4.2 Vorkutinskaia mine, Vorkuta  148   4.3 A monument to Gulag victims in Vorkuta  167   7.1 German youths in the Virgin Lands  270   7.2 An old Kazakh woman and her German neighbour in a former Virgin Lands sovkhoz  271   9.1 Preparatory sketch for festival street decorations, Moscow, 1957  377   9.2 Festival street decorations, Tverskoi Boulevard, Moscow, 1957  378   9.3 Festival opening procession, Moscow, 28 July 1957  383   9.4 American festival participants dancing in a Moscow street, 1957  385 10.1 A female fashion-follower (Ministry of Textile Industry employee), dressed in a sarafan custom-tailored at an atelier  408 10.2 French fashion exhibition, Moscow, 1958  410 10.3 Finnish fashion exhibition, Moscow, October 1966  411 10.4 Austrian fashion exhibition, Moscow, May 1960  412 10.5 A ‘dress-suit’ made of artificial silk  414 10.6 ‘Ensembles’  418 11.1 Ivanovo detstvo (Andrei Tarkovskii, 1961)  453 11.2 Ivanovo detstvo (Andrei Tarkovskii, 1961)  454 11.3 Letiat zhuravli (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)  456 11.4 Letiat zhuravli (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)  457 11.5 Letiat zhuravli (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)  458 11.6 Letiat zhuravli (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)  459

viii Illustrations, Figures, and Tables

11.7 Zastava Il’icha (Marlen Khutsiev, 1962, 1964)  468 Figures   3.1 Inmate population, USSR, 1940–1970  113   3.2 Proportion of political prisoners in the Gulag, 1951–1960  119   3.3 Liberation from detention and conviction to deprivation of freedom, USSR, 1950–1966  124 Tables   4.1 Former prisoners occupying ITR positions in KVU, 1955– 1966  159 10.1 Price differences (rubles) for factory- and craftsmen-made goods in Krasnodar  417 10.2 Spending on fabrics and ready-made clothing, Leningrad, 1961  421

Archival Abbreviations

APRK

Arkhiv Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstan (Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan) DAMVSU Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Ministerstva Vnutrishnikh Sprav Ukrainy (State Archive of the Ministry of the Interior of Ukraine) EKLA Eesti kultuurilooline Arhiiv (Estonian Cultural History Archives) ERAF Eesti Riigiarhiivi Filiaali (Estonian State Archives, Branch) GARF Gosudarstvenyi Arkhiv Rossisskoi Federatsii (State Archive of the Russian Federation) GURK NARK 1 Gosudarstvennoe uchrezhdenie Respubliki, Komi Natsional’nyi Arkhiv Res­publiki Komi, Fondokhranilishche no. 1 (State Institution of the Komi Republic, National Archive of the Komi Republic, Repository 1) GURK NARK 2 Gosudarstvennoe uchrezhdenie Respubliki, Komi Natsional’nyy Arkhiv Res­publiki Komi, Fondokhranilishche no. 2 (State Institution of the Komi Republic, National Archive of the Komi Republic, Repository 2) LYA Lietuvos ypatingasis archyvas (Lithuanian Special Archive) NARB Natsyianal’ny arkhiu Respubliki Belarus’ (National Archive of Belarus) OPDAO Otdelenie partiinoi dokumentatsii Akmolinskoi oblasti (archive of the former regional committee of the Communist Party in Akmola, Kazakhstan) RGAE Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (Russian State Archive of the Economy)

x Archival Abbreviations

RGAKFD RGALI RGANI RGASPI RGASPI-M

TsAE i ADM TsAGM TsAOPIM TsDAHOU TsGA SPb VMKM OF ch. d. f. l. op.

Rossiiskii gosudartvennyi arkhiv kinofotodokumentov (Russian State Archive of Documentary Films and Photographs) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (Russian State Archive of Contemporary History) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no- politicheskoi istorii (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History) Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no- politicheskoi istorii, Dokumenty molodezhnykh organizatsii (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, reading room for documents of youth organizations) Tsentral’nyi arkhiv elektronnykh i audiovizual’nykh dokumentov Moskvy (Central Archive of Electronic and Audiovisual Documents of Moscow) Tsentral’nyi arkhiv goroda Moskvy (Central Archive of Moscow) Tsentral’nyi arkhiv obshchestvenno-politicheskoi istorii Moskvy (Central Archive of Socio-Political History of Moscow) Tsentral’nyi Derzhavnyi Arkhiv Hromads’kykh Ob’iednan Ukraïny (Central State Archive of Public Organizations of Ukraine) Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga (Central State Archive of Saint Petersburg) Vorkutinskii Mezhraionnyi Kraevedcheskii Muzei, osnovnoi fond (Vorkuta Interdistrict Regional Studies Museum, main fund) chast’, part delo, file fond, record group list, page opis’, inventory

Acknowledgments

This book grew out of the productive discussions at the international and interdisciplinary conference, ‘The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s,’ which took place at the University of California, Berkeley, 12–15 May 2005, and brought together participants from Russia, the United States, Canada, Britain, France, and Germany.1 We want to express our gratitude to everyone who helped our project to materialize. Funding came from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Sheila Fitzpatrick/Mellon Foundation; the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the Munk Centre for Global Affairs at the University of Toronto; the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Dalhousie University; and the University of California, Berkeley, where we thank the Social Sciences Division of the College of Letters and Sciences, the Arts and Humanities Division of the College of Letters and Sciences, the Institute for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Institute of International Studies, the Institute of European Studies, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Department of History, the Graduate Division, the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Abigail Reynolds Hodgen Fund at the Social Sciences Division. Behind institutions are, of course, people. Our colleagues welcomed this project from the very start, and it was only with their generous help that it became possible. Our thanks go to Yuri Slezkine, Lynne Viola, Thomas Lahusen, and Sheila Fitzpatrick for their vital contributions to the various phases of this work – from organizing and taking part in the conference, to reading numerous (lengthy!) drafts, to offering invaluable advice about publication. Without their help, on more occasions than we can count, this book would not have seen the light of day. At

xii Acknowledgments

Berkeley, we also thank George Breslauer, Victoria Bonnell, Martin Jay, David Frick, Mary Ann Mason, Olga Matich, Candace Slater, Matthew Tiews, Steven Weber, as well as the late Gerald Feldman and Reginald Zelnik. At the University of Toronto, we thank Peter Solomon for his advice and support of this work at its earliest stages. Edward Walker, Barbara Voytek, and the staff of the Institute for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley helped in many ways with both the conference and the book. At the University of Toronto Press, we are grateful to our editor, Richard Ratzlaff, who took enthusiastic interest in the volume while it was still in manuscript form and, throughout our numerous conversations and email exchanges, helped us immensely in structuring and shaping the book on its way to print. We also thank the anonymous reviewers who read the manuscript and offered many helpful suggestions that made it better. The inevitable errors and omissions are, of course, our own. We can only hope that, with all the valuable advice we received, there will not be too many of them in the book.

Note 1 The conference had a workshop format, with participants reading each other’s papers in advance. The presenters and discussants were Alan Barenberg, Steven A. Barnes, Stephen Bittner, Victoria Bonnell, George W. Bres­ lauer, Per Brodersen, Katerina Clark, Susan Costanzo, Miriam Dobson, Marc Elie, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Gregory Freidin, Eleonory Gilburd, Anne Gorsuch, Steven E. Harris, Polly Jones, Denis Kozlov, Brian LaPierre, Ann Livschiz, Karl Loewenstein, Olga Matich, Eric Naiman, Benjamin Nathans, Nordica Nettleton, Irina Paperno, Michaela Pohl, Alexander Prokhorov, Susan E. Reid, Kristin Roth-Ey, Galina Rylkova, Shawn Salmon, Peter Schmelz, Yuri Slezkine, Kathleen E. Smith, Christine Varga-Harris, Lynne Viola, Amir Weiner, and Larissa Zakharova.

The Thaw Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s

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Introduction denis kozlov

This book examines major problems of the Thaw – the epoch in Soviet history that spans the post-Stalin 1950s and most of the 1960s. We interpret these years as a paradigmatically defining moment for the entire period from Stalin’s death until – and largely also beyond – the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not overtly revolutionary, the Thaw nonetheless produced crucial shifts in policies, ideas, artistic practices, daily behaviours, and material life. The immense diversification of culture and language undermined the outward semblance of stability, uniformity, and coherence that had existed under Stalin. Distant historical legacies gained increasing cultural prominence. As never before, the social, cultural, and intellectual processes in the USSR began to parallel those in the West, particularly in western Europe. Exploring the Thaw thus helps to answer fundamental questions about the nature and ultimate fortunes of the Soviet order in its internal dynamics, as well as its long-term and global perspectives. Accordingly, in this volume our goal is twofold. Firstly, we want to tell the story of the Thaw in some of its key aspects, examining in detail (and with inevitable selectivity) various facets of Soviet life during the 1950s and 1960s. Secondly, where possible, we seek to place that story within broader Russian and international contexts, analysing the Thaw as part of larger historical frameworks – or at least to suggest a few potential paths for such contextualization. One such path is to discuss Soviet phenomena as integrated in a modern Russian cultural tradition that crossed the 1917 divide and dated back to the imperial era, if not to more distant times. Another path, parallel and closely related, is to consider the Soviet Union as one of the

4 Denis Kozlov

twentieth-century European societies that went through similar, if not identical, historical experiences and faced similar, often common problems. This approach is particularly relevant to the post–Second World War decades, when, as it is becoming increasingly clear, cultures and societies east and west of the Iron Curtain interacted in the realms of ideas, artistic trends, demographic and social change, material life, and consumption. Marked by a major increase in the circulation of information and cultural products, these decades regularly brought the two parts of the divided continent into meaningful contact with each other. Historians have started a detailed systematic exploration of the Soviet 1950s and 1960s fairly recently. Nonetheless – or probably because of this – research on this period is becoming increasingly popular among both established and young scholars. It is not a great exaggeration to say that, at least in the field of Soviet studies in the West, these decades have lately moved from the margins to the centre of scholarly attention. What makes this growing body of research unique is that, possibly for the first time in the history of the field, conceptualization develops hand in hand with the incorporation of remarkably vast and fresh empirical evidence available from the Russian archives. However, the other side of the excitement of novelty and the numerous opportunities for discovery is that scholars who work on the Thaw are only beginning to relate to each other’s arguments. A major goal of the present volume is to promote such scholarly dialogue and reflection on how this new research may affect a broader interpretation of modern Russian history. During the Thaw, Soviet people made historic choices that still resonate in the current politics, culture, and media of many European and Asian societies, in open and private conversations, in individual memories and family histories. The chapters in the volume combine new archival research with interpretations in an effort to discuss some of these choices and their outcomes. With some exceptions, we have deliberately eschewed the ‘top-down,’ leadership-heavy approach that focuses on the personalities of political leaders or evolution of high authority. While important, such aspects in the history of the Thaw have by now received fairly extensive scholarly attention.1 Taking this scholarship as a valuable point of departure, our volume focuses on issues of society and culture, on the large-scale and long-term tectonic shifts in cultural authority, social agency, and consciousness that the Thaw set in motion. These objectives have determined the structure of the book. It opens with a chapter by the editors that introduces the reader to this historical period and discusses interpretations of the term Thaw as well as alter-

Introduction  5

native designations for the Soviet 1950s and 1960s. We emphasize the broader significance of this epoch in the Soviet, long-term Russian, and European contexts, particularly highlighting the legacies of twentiethcentury mass violence, the increasing role of international contacts and cross-cultural transfers, issues of material culture and consumption, problems of language, and generational identities. The main body of the volume comprises two parts: ‘Looking Back’ and ‘Looking Forward.’ This is not a neat subdivision, because evaluating the past and envisaging the future during the Thaw were unthinkable without one another. Experiences of state repression and contemporary literary or artistic debates, Gulag legacies and government-initiated economic reforms, memories of ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ struggles and the country’s opening to the outside world informed and contextualized each other throughout these years. Nonetheless, the subdivision may alert the reader to the complexities and inner tensions of the Thaw culture, where yesterday and tomorrow kept in a constant dialogue. A discussion of a somewhat more distant ‘yesterday’ is a good starting point for situating the Thaw in modern Russian history. Part One opens with the chapter by Katerina Clark, who raises the issue of the Thaw’s historical uniqueness. Clark begins by considering the ‘Thaw’ metaphor as characteristic of Russia’s historical and cultural evolution – thaw as a recurrent natural phenomenon that has a seasonal and cyclical rhythm. Questioning the perception of Stalin’s death in 1953 as ‘an absolute BC/ AD dividing line,’ she argues that many of the shifts in Soviet culture with which the Thaw is commonly credited might have had earlier predecessors. Clark draws unexpected parallels – not between the late Stalin years and the Thaw (such parallels would be obvious and not very surprising), but instead between the culture of the early Thaw (1953–7) and the late 1930s, the peak of terror. She argues that, as early as 1937–40, a group of young writers and poets put in circulation some of the terms that would be central in the literary discourse of the 1950s – genuine (podlinnyi), sincerity (iskrennost’), or the lyric (lirika). The participants in the polemics of the late 1930s, such as Konstantin Simonov and Olga Berggol’ts, were among those authors who would subsequently coin the vocabulary of the early Thaw. When put in this context, the story of the Thaw becomes part of longer-term cycles of ideas and generational continuities – little-analysed yet crucial features of the Soviet intellectual landscape that Clark reveals. Despite the continuities, Clark notes one fundamental difference between the late 1930s and the Thaw. Whereas the literary debates of the

6 Denis Kozlov

1930s took place at the height of terror, in the 1950s mass repression came to an end, producing a political environment vastly different from that of twenty years earlier. Following Clark’s piece are several chapters devoted to this central theme of the Thaw – ending the terror. First of all, they focus on the dismantling of the Gulag. In his work, Marc Elie describes how the Gulag shrank to a fraction of its Stalin-era size and ceased to be the backbone of Soviet economy.2 This was a long and complicated process. The main tension accumulated between three conceptual approaches to the penal system – something Elie terms a ‘conservative’ approach, embodied by many senior officers in the Ministry of the Interior (MVD) who favoured the old Stalin-time system; a ‘functionalist’ approach, personified by Beria who, before his 1953 downfall, had been preoccupied with the Gulag’s economic efficiency; and finally what we may term a futuristic approach, which insisted on mitigating the brutality of the old penal regime and on the genuine re-education of prisoners. The main proponents of this last approach were the short-term Minister of the Interior Nikolai Dudorov and his patron, Khrushchev himself. From Elie’s account it follows that their noble initiatives of transforming the camps into smaller colonies for re-educating prisoners with more humane treatment, little isolation from local society, and moderate economic exploitation proved too advanced for the majority of the MVD personnel. A pragmatic approach based on the conservative notions of state expediency prevailed over considerations of humaneness. Similarly, many amnesties of the Khrushchev years were dictated by pragmatic rather than humanitarian reasons – budgetary constraints and camp overpopulation. In the early 1960s, the penal system went through a conservative shift, embodied in the 1961 statute of places of detention, which hardened the regime and reversed some of the earlier reformist achievements. It remains to be seen whether the economic rationale of the Gulag bosses in the 1950s and 1960s completely excluded any other pro-reform considerations on their part, or whether the language and logic of pragmatism (as opposed to futuristic humanism) were the only ones the reformists could successfully employ to ensure changes. Be that as it may, while showing the lukewarm attitude of many senior police officials to the Khrushchev-inspired humanitarian impulses, Elie demonstrates that the conservatives did not quite end up winning. Neither the concept nor the practice of the Soviet penal system ever actually returned to the Stalin-era model. Separation of inmates in different regimes of detention, the enhanced role of courts, and the obligation to detain convicts

Introduction  7

in regions where they were sentenced were important – if incomplete – gains that remained in place in the 1960s. Most importantly, pragmatic reasoning, even if not necessarily accompanied by a conceptual desire to ‘end the terror,’ ultimately did contribute to the unmaking of the Gulag. The economically minded administrators gradually moved away from using the cheap yet inefficient convict labour in many industrial projects, except for the most labour-intensive and hazardous. As Elie concludes, during the Thaw the Gulag was not only reduced to a small part of its original population but also, from a major presence in the economy, evolved into ‘a supply company of mobile workforce capable of filling gaps and clearing backlogs.’ What came to replace the empire of slave labour was a rather conventional network of corrective institutions with marginal economic significance. What happened to those three-quarters of the prisoners who had left the camps and now had to find their ways back into society? In his chapter, Alan Barenberg investigates life after Gulag in Vorkuta, a city above the Arctic Circle in the northeastern extreme of European Russia. During the 1950s, when Vorkutlag, the local camp branch of the Gulag, was gradually dismantled, Vorkuta made the transition from penal colony to what Barenberg describes as an industrial ‘company town’ – a story quite comparable to Elie’s. Tens of thousands of men and women released from prison sentences and terms of exile sought to build careers, families, and lives outside the ‘zone.’ Although many returned home or struck out anew in places as far as the Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan, others chose to remain in Vorkuta for the rest of their lives, or eventually to return there, despite the harsh environment, painful memories, and physical vestiges of brutality. Exploring the social reintegration of the former prisoners, Barenberg shows all the mistrust and discrimination these people often faced in their new life.3 Nonetheless, an important aspect of his work is that he also treats reintegration as a real possibility and analyses factors that aided it. Thus, the scarcity of labour urged employers to overlook the camp backgrounds of their (often highly qualified) new hires. More importantly, the personal networks that the ex-prisoners had built in the camps persisted in their new lives. Outside the barbed wire, these people reconstituted and relied on those networks, using them to find housing and jobs, to restore old and form new families. If we extrapolate these findings to the larger question of how successful the reintegration of the former prisoners ultimately proved to be, then Barenberg’s work suggests that the answer is in the nuances. The

8 Denis Kozlov

term reintegration embraces a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. On the one hand, the fact of an ex-prisoner staying in his geographic area of incarceration or even returning there after a failed attempt to rebuild life at a former home does not exactly project the image of successful reintegration. On the other hand, Barenberg shows that quite a few of the former prisoners did manage to build meaningful lives for themselves, if in Vorkuta. His work thus proposes a plausible middle ground between the two polarized perspectives on the prisoners’ return from the Gulag – the intelligentsia narrative of a welcome back4 and the later scholarly argument that the Soviet population generally clung to the stereotype of ‘enemies of the people,’ largely rejecting the returnees.5 The reality, as Barenberg shows, was somewhere in between. Meticulously reconstructing the ex-prisoners’ life stories, he reveals the constraints these people faced, but also the choices they made, the ideas they developed and voiced, as well as the important successes they achieved. Reintegration was an intellectual as much as a socio-cultural process, inseparable from how society – which now included both the Gulag returnees and all others whom they faced upon return from the camps – conceptualized the experiences of the recent catastrophic political violence. The people of the Thaw thought and acted with constant references to historical realities that had had a formative impact on their lives and now had to be re-evaluated.6 As often in modern Russia, historical interpretation was centred on literature, the prime mover of intellectual evolution and public self-expression in this country of readers. In his chapter Denis Kozlov analyses the pivotal moment of this evolution of consciousness – the early 1960s, when, for a few years following the 22nd Party Congress (1961), the polemics about the Stalin-era executions and camps became relatively legitimate, overflowing into print. On the basis of archival readers’ letters, Kozlov discusses the impact of the two literary publications that for decades defined the parameters of conceptualizing the Stalin terror. One was Ilya Ehrenburg’s memoir People, Years, Life, while the other was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For the first time vividly describing the human experiences of arrests and imprisonment of Stalin’s time, these texts provoked a crisis in the readers’ established world view. People began to see their country’s twentieth-century history through the prism of terror, drawing the lineage of the Soviet order not so much from the revolution but from the state violence that had followed it – not from 1917 but from 1937. Literature of the Thaw did much to discredit the established venues

Introduction  9

and language of mass persuasion. Many time-honoured literary and journalistic devices were compromised by association with the time when they had originated – the Stalin time, which was now inescapably tied to the image of terror. Also, the media’s language and ethos proved unfit for explaining or even describing the tragic past. Asking themselves why they had kept silent during the 1930s as thousands of people were disappearing, many letter-writers of the 1960s concluded that fear had not been the only reason for silence. They also noted the absence, either then or now, of words and categories for describing and evaluating this massive destruction of lives. By proposing the centrality of individual human existence, and by greatly diversifying the literary language, the writings by Ehrenburg and Solzhenitsyn became landmarks in the emergence of new ethical and verbal standards of formulating experience. Quite a few readers engaged in this historical, linguistic, and moral quest with remarkable willingness to share a degree of responsibility for the recent tragedy. Ultimately, the principle of a critical reassessment of the Soviet past, which the party leadership under Khrushchev espoused, and which made publications such as Ehrenburg’s and Solzhenitsyn’s possible, threatened nothing less than the regime’s historical legitimacy. This was clear to many observers, certainly not all of whom accepted the critical paradigm. In her chapter, Polly Jones examines the conservative intellectual opposition to the Thaw, a phenomenon that has received little scholarly attention.7 What was the relationship between the conservatives’ personalities, political ideas, and literary-aesthetic visions? How did they imagine resisting the intellectual turmoil that endangered the regime’s foundations? Jones focuses on a group of writers such as Vsevolod Kochetov, Anatolii Sofronov, Nikolai Gribachev, and Vadim Kozhevnikov, who rallied around several major literary periodicals – the journals Oktiabr’ (edited by Kochetov), Ogonek (Sofronov), Znamia (Kozhevnikov), and the newspaper Literaturnaia Rossiia. Often labelled by their opponents as ‘Stalinists,’ these writers (together with several leading politicians in the Central Committee) were indeed cautious about the dismantling of the Stalin cult and admitting the crimes and blunders of the past. However, Jones complicates the picture by examining not so much the relationship between the literary conservatives and their political patrons as, rather, the infighting within the literary environment itself. Party authorities, she suggests, played a secondary and often balancing role in the struggle between the conservatives and their opponents in the journals

10 Denis Kozlov

Novyi mir and Iunost’ (whom she terms ‘liberal’). Rather, pride of place in the rivalry belonged to personal factors. The tactics and methods of the two literary camps had much in common: both parties eagerly employed connections, patronage politics, ties of mutual responsibility, and a variety of ad hominem arguments. In this sense, the literary politics of the Thaw might not differ significantly from those of the Stalin years. However, Jones also shows that both camps took shape in the characteristic Thaw atmosphere of conceptual uncertainty, including uncertainty over the meanings of the key concept of ‘Stalinism.’ Ultimately, the notion of Stalinism itself, as well as the broader aesthetic and political platforms it denoted, evolved in the context of these personal literary hostilities. It remains to be seen whether the frictions between the two literary camps were indeed ‘not based on deeper understanding of the ideological stakes of the debate,’ as Jones argues. It might well be that the polemic also did involve more serious historical and philosophical reflection. Nonetheless, Jones’s work deepens our own understanding of the literary environment of the 1950s and 1960s. The world of the ‘villains’ of the Thaw, just as that of its ‘heroes,’ was far from linear. The Stalin past was in a constant dialogue with the daily realities of the Thaw, as well as with how contemporaries envisioned and built the future. Part Two of the volume opens with a chapter that amply demonstrates this connection. Under Khrushchev, in a visible rupture with the Stalin years, the Soviet regime openly premised the validity of socialism not only on the departure from mass violence but also upon the immediate satisfaction of the people’s material needs. The economic reforms of the Thaw were also ideological ventures, intended at once to improve the citizens’ living standards and to reinvigorate the socialist ideal. In her chapter, Michaela Pohl explores one of the most important such ventures – the Virgin Lands campaign. Launched in 1954 to cultivate the vast territories in Kazakhstan and Siberia and thus remedy the agricultural crisis, this initiative was propagated as a specifically socialist endeavour of voluntary, enthusiastic labour: thousands of young people were mobilized for the task. However, the Virgin Lands were not exactly virgin. Pohl shows that they were populated by present and former Gulag inmates, Chechen, Ingush, and German exiles, as well as indigenous Kazakhs. Whether staying in Kazakhstan or (recently) homeward bound, these people interacted with each other, often in a tense and hostile way. It was in this explosive milieu that the new settlers landed, with hundreds of violent episodes and ethnic clashes rocking the north of Kazakhstan.

Introduction  11

Like the story of Vorkuta told by Barenberg, Pohl’s story of the Virgin Lands depicts the transition of a former Gulag terrain to life without terror. In either case, there was much chaos and violence, but in Ka­zakhstan, furthermore, a new ambitious economic initiative was unfolding at the same time in the same place. And yet in both cases the transition inspired hope among contemporaries, while chaos eventually yielded to some order. Among other aspects, the value of Pohl’s work is that she questions the widespread interpretation of any Soviet project as a failure. Ultimately, Pohl argues, the Virgin Lands cultivation proved a success, both for the government and for the many people it involved. The massive investment benefited the national and regional economy while bringing tangible advantages to the settlers. The Virgin Lands ‘passport’ offered geographical and status mobility to numerous young collective farmers, and the cultivated lands eventually yielded not only larger harvests but also higher living standards than anything the settlers had enjoyed in Russian or Ukrainian villages. The ethnic groups that clashed with each other eventually found ways of coexistence. The town formerly known as ‘White Grave’ was renamed Tselinograd and became a model city, acquiring new apartment buildings, roads, clubs, theatres, schools, and newspapers. Not incidentally, perhaps, it was this new city that, under the name of Astana, would decades later become the capital of Kazakhstan. Pohl’s work adds a significant and previously unwritten chapter to the history of the Thaw, exploring the relationship between ideology, mobilization, and human agency in an important Soviet periphery, as well as the ultimate implications of Khrushchev’s reforms. These implications, and the crucial role of the periphery in the Thaw, become even clearer in Amir Weiner’s chapter, which focuses on Ukraine and the Baltic states – the areas where the Soviet rule was least established and nationalist resistance to the regime was the strongest. Weiner explores the fate of thousands of Ukrainian and Baltic nationalists and former guerrilla fighters who were released from the camps during the Thaw and bound for their homes. With this mass exodus, two empires met in the western borderlands of the Soviet Union – the disintegrating empire of the Gulag and the post–Second World War empire of newly Sovietized Eastern Europe. The encounter proved all the more turbulent since the western regions acutely felt the impact of the 1956 uprisings in Hungary and Poland. What was it that prompted the Khrushchev leadership to make the paradoxical, seemingly self-destructive step of granting amnesty to those who had fought against Soviet power only a few years earlier and

12 Denis Kozlov

made no secret of their continued hostility to the regime? Drawing on evidence from the Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusan, Estonian, and Lithuanian archives, Weiner observes the remarkable degree of the regime’s flexibility, resolve, and confidence in its own stability, as well as in the success of its efforts to relinquish mass violence and become a less repressive polity based on citizens’ voluntary political participation. What boosted the confidence was that a great share of the population in the western borderlands was now committed to the Soviet order, seeing it as permanent and stable. In this environment, strange and unfamiliar to them, the Gulag returnees were not necessarily welcome, especially since the wounds of the war and bitter ethnic strife were still fresh, and the exprisoners’ homecoming was complicated by memories of who they had been in wartime. As Weiner shows, in response to these shifts, the very nature of opposition to the Soviet regime in the western borderlands began to change. From an overt, violent anti-Soviet stance of the late Stalin years, the oppositionists moved to political dissidence, working within the system and, importantly, embracing the legal culture that the authorities now promoted.8 Weiner’s work, whose arguments find many parallels in the chapters by Barenberg and Pohl, makes it evident that the Thaw was neither an exclusively Russian phenomenon nor a prerogative of the capitals. Regional variables and experiences, particularly those of non-Russian ethnicities, were essential in the key processes of the epoch. His work elucidates the origins and dimensions of the Soviet human rights movement, rooted in the Thaw-era transition from mass repression to extensive participatory politics and the growing importance of legality. Most significantly, Weiner highlights the interconnectedness of the intellectual and political processes of the 1950s and 1960s in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe – or more broadly, Europe. The mutual influence and the exchange of information were widespread and constant. In western Ukraine and the Baltics, thousands of people listened to Western radio broadcasts, while repatriates or their relatives moved across the recently established Soviet borders. Weiner thus shows a much more important and versatile presence of the West in the Thaw than was known before. In fact, Western presence in Soviet society and culture at the time was ubiquitous. These were the years of the country’s extraordinary opening to the outside world, especially to Western cultural imports. How foreignness became a regular presence in this culture is the subject of Eleonory

Introduction  13

Gilburd’s chapter, which examines the revival of Soviet internationalism through the prism of cultural exchange with Western countries. Gilburd presents cultural relations with the West as a case of ‘governmental internationalism.’ In the mid to late 1950s, she argues, the government initiated an unprecedented campaign for popular diplomacy. The idea flared briefly and died down by the early 1960s, but the impulse behind it remained, sustaining the continued Soviet participation in international cultural traffic for years to come. That impulse was the notion of a shared language called ‘culture.’ From the mid-1950s and early 1960s, a group of Soviet philosophers and experts in international cultural affairs began to postulate a set of ‘universal values’ – fundamental behavioural norms, science, anti-militarism, and a ‘world culture.’ The class approach to social life and ethics was not abandoned, and socialism and capitalism were still seen as incompatible. However, certain creations of ‘capitalist culture’ were recognized as having a universal value. This new language of ‘common humanity’ helped to justify the new ties with the West. Internationalism was the Soviet Union’s ‘back door to power,’ another way of achieving political supremacy, creating an international audience, and gaining recognition in the West. The USSR was a latecomer to the circulation of cultural and consumer goods in post-war Europe – the process usually termed ‘Americanization.’ American goods and symbols, movies and music had made it to many places first, so that by the mid-1950s the Soviets had a lot of winning over to do. The projects of confirming Soviet political ascendancy and gaining cultural supremacy coalesced in the Sixth International Youth Festival in Moscow during the summer of 1957. This was an event of unparalleled scale, investment, excitement, and impact on the lives of its participants, as well as on the cityscape itself. The festival launched cultural institutions, artistic styles, careers, and biographies. Gilburd explores how the festival became conceivable, how it was fashioned at home and abroad despite the recent Hungarian Revolution, and how it was experienced and remembered. The legitimacy of foreign presence in Moscow squares and on street corners – the stamp of government approval and sponsorship that the event bore – was as central to the festival experience as the presence of foreigners themselves. From now on, foreign cultural imports became integral to the official public face of the USSR, at home and abroad. As Gilburd argues, the festival facilitated the transformation of the Soviet Union, from an alleged beacon for communist, socialist, and other ‘progressive’ causes into a big European city, a centre of international ‘mega-events’

14 Denis Kozlov

– film festivals, exhibitions, or Olympics – on a par with major Western capitals. Experienced by vast audiences of readers, viewers, listeners, and consumers, the opening to the West became crucial in the evolution of the Soviet order, up to and beyond its collapse. The new imports and ideas, of course, landed in an environment of long-developed notions and cultural perceptions. The country’s opening to the world, and the Thaw-era projects of satisfying the Soviet public in its daily demands, were inseparable from endeavours of shaping and regulating those demands, of differentiating between the healthy and the harmful, the beautiful and the ugly. One place where such endeavours were especially conspicuous, but also ran into endemic crises, was fashion. In her chapter, Larissa Zakharova takes up the Soviet clothing industry in the 1950s and 1960s as a case study of reforms that were meant to overcome the shortages, poor quality, and aesthetic deficiencies of consumer goods. In what is also a study of the place of aesthetics in Soviet daily life, Zakharova argues that the economic reforms were accompanied by the policing and suppression of numerous illegal and semi-legal private entrepreneurs who filled the gaps between the inefficient industry and the consumer. Policing extended to fashion itself: the suppression of the private sector paralleled an intensified regulation of stylistic practices. Tracing what it meant to be ‘tasteful,’ ‘fashionable,’ and ‘beautiful,’ Zakharova shows how a set of prescribed fashions was aggressively forced upon consumers through state tailoring enterprises, fashion magazines, manuals on cutting and sewing, and the like. These strategies of regulation and indoctrination – which, we may surmise, originated not only in the vicissitudes of Soviet economy but also in the time-honoured intelligentsia’s ideals of culture and ‘culturedness’9 – suffered from the same chronic ills and shortages as the entire system. There was, for example, a shortage of textiles and sewing machines. More importantly, perhaps against the will of its authors, the official orientation toward promoting fashion encouraged a variety of semi-independent activities in clothing production and a fashion-oriented consumption culture. Ironically, domestic clothing production followed the same illicit paths that the authorities were trying to eliminate. Moreover, tailors and consumers gleaned fashionable models not so much from Soviet magazines as from the newly accessible Western films and clothing items, as well as from foreigners and those few who travelled to the West. Zakharova’s work thus is an exploration of the mutually constitutive relationships among Soviet economic structures, government policies, consumption strategies, and aesthetic ideals.

Introduction  15

While Soviet consumers were borrowing the fashionable looks of Western film stars, European moviegoers and festival juries were watching Soviet films. The Soviet Union became a regular presence at international film festivals, up to earning the Palme d’Or at the 1958 Cannes festival. Soviet films, perceived as archaic in the late Stalin years, became understandable to Western audiences, while Western critics could now describe them in familiar terms, situating them within national and transnational trends. In her chapter, Oksana Bulgakowa examines how in the 1950s and 1960s Soviet film rejoined the global cinematic culture. From the familiar models of liberalization and ‘de-Stalinization,’ she shifts the reader’s attention to a radical alteration in perception paradigms, a visual and aesthetic revolution for millions of spectators in Europe, America, Asia, and the Soviet Union. For the first time, Soviet studio directors, cultural officials, and film-makers alike perceived their efforts as part of global stylistic and technological phenomena. The changes in cinematic technology – Cinemascope, wide screen, colour film, or television – arrived in the USSR at about the same time as elsewhere. Soviet films were also inscribed within transnational stylistic aspirations to rescue physical reality from linguistic conventions. As Bulgakowa suggests, in its search for image beyond interpretation, for accident and ambiguity, in its rejection of professional actors, artificial lighting, and voice training, Thaw cinema shared aesthetic projects and approaches with Italian neorealism, French cinéma vérité, the Free Cinema movement in Britain, Brazilian cinema novo, and Direct Cinema in North America. Young film directors such as Andrei Tarkovskii and Andrei Konchalovskii saw their work as adaptations of Bergman, Kurosawa, or Buñuel to Soviet reality. The relationship was not unidirectional but rather mutual and diachronic, as some French and Italian directors also acknowledged having been influenced by the early Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s. The films of all these schools had another thing in common: thanks to simplified filming techniques, they were relatively low-budget productions. Whereas under Stalin, Soviet studios had produced a handful of expensive films per year, from the mid-1950s the film industry expanded dramatically, requiring significantly more people and tighter budgets per film. All this expansion, innovation, and the emergence of a new generation of film-makers who promoted and benefited from the changes led to the integration of Soviet film in the international visual culture. Offering a panorama of shifts in cinema across national borders, Bulgakowa integrates the aesthetic, technical, financial, political, and generational aspects of Soviet film, analysing it in its broad context.

16 Denis Kozlov

All the chapters thus demonstrate the formative impact that the Thaw had on many aspects of Soviet, and often post-Soviet, societies and cultures. Its repercussions are still heard, as it occupies a special place – or, rather, a variety of special places – in the memory and mythology of the past century. In her afterword to the volume, Sheila Fitzpatrick reflects on some of the themes raised by the contributors. Examining the memories and significance of the Thaw as an event and a myth, she discusses the possible meanings of the Thaw, and of the ‘Sixties’ with which it is often associated, in the Soviet, post-Soviet, American, and (East) European contexts. Fitzpatrick’s essay suggests new possibilities for the study of the Thaw in a broad historical and cross-cultural perspective. On our part, we hope that the volume, as a whole and in its constituent parts, does justice to this epoch, whose importance is becoming increasingly evident.

Notes 1 See, e.g., Oleg Leibovich, Reforma i modernizatsiia v 1953–1964 gg. (Perm’, 1993); Vladimir Naumov, ‘Repression and Rehabilitation,’ in Nikita Khrushchev, ed. William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Gleason (New Haven, 2000), 85–112; Aleksandr Pyzhikov, Khrushchevskaia ottepel’, 1953–1964 (Moscow, 2002); Pyzhikov, Opyt modernizatsii sovetskogo obshchestva v 1953–1964 godakh: Obshchestvenno-politicheskii aspekt (Moscow, 1998); Anatolii Strelianyi, ‘Khrushchev and the Countryside,’ in Taubman, Khrushchev, and Gleason, Nikita Khrushchev, 113–37; William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003); William J. Tompson, ‘Industrial Management and Economic Reform under Khrushchev,’ in Taubman, Khrushchev, and Gleason, Nikita Khrushchev, 138–59; Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life (New York, 1995); Mariia Zezina, ‘Shokovaia terapiia: ot 1953-go k 1956 godu,’ Otechestvennaia istoriia 2 (1995): 121–35; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennai intelligentsia i vlast’ v 1950-e – 60-e gody (Moscow, 1999); Elena Zubkova, ‘The Rivalry with Malenkov,’ in Taubman, Khrushchev, and Gleason, Nikita Khrushchev, 67–84; Melanie Ilic and Jeremy Smith, eds., Khrushchev in the Kremlin: Policy and Government in the Soviet Union, 1953–1964 (New York, 2011). 2 On the Gulag’s role in Soviet economy under Stalin, see Steven A. Barnes, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society (Princeton, 2011); James R. Harris, The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System (Ithaca, 1999), 105–22; Galina Ivanova, Gulag v sisteme totalitarnogo gosudarstva (Moscow, 1997), esp. 69–126, 188–90; Oleg Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven, 2004), e.g., 332–8.

Introduction  17 3 For another detailed exploration of this issue, see Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, 2009). 4 E.g., Evgeniia Ginzburg, Krutoi marshrut: Khronika vremen kul’ta lichnosti (Moscow, 1990). 5 E.g., Nanci Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 88–9, 110–11, 136–7, 139–46, 156–62, 178–9. 6 On this, see also Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, and Dreams (Ithaca, 2009). 7 In the Russian-language literature, the only major work exploring the antiThaw intellectual tendencies is Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia: Dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1953–1985 (Moscow, 2003) – a valuable unconventional study, which, however, does not exhaust the subject. In the Englishlanguage literature, notable is the study by Yitzhak Brudny, which focuses on Russian nationalism while paying less attention to other agendas of anti-Thaw thinkers. Brudny, Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953–1991 (Cambridge, MA, 1998). 8 In her history of dissidence in the USSR, Ludmilla Alekseeva makes a point that in Ukraine the human rights movement was much stronger and better organized than in Russia. Alekseeva, Istoriia inakomysliia v SSSR: Noveishii period (Moscow, 1984), 7–44, 396–413. 9 On ‘culturedness,’ see Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, MA, 1976; republished Duke, 1990), 22; Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste,’ in her The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992): 216–37.

1 The Thaw as an Event in Russian History denis kozlov and eleonory gilburd

The epoch that was born when Joseph Stalin died in March 1953 was a time of great expectations. Contemporaries described these years as a moment of awakening. With metaphors of air, freshness, and light, writers and film-makers created an image of dawn. And the fiery publicist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) gave his otherwise inconspicuous novella the title that has demarcated the Soviet 1950s and 1960s. Ehrenburg titled his book The Thaw. Metaphor Ehrenburg’s title belonged to, but also worked against, some of the most stable and meaningful associations in Russian poetry and lyrical imagination. For many poets, thaw was not a favourite time. Pushkin decried it for ‘stench and filth’: a spring thaw made him sick with melancholy and boredom. By contrast, ‘severe winter’ brought energy and freshness, planting colour on the cheeks of maidens and exciting passions.1 Nineteenth-century poets lauded winter’s purity, describing it as a young beauty, enchantress, and dream. For them, winter often was an allegory of Russia itself.2 The severity of Russian winter has also traditionally provided a less benign association, with the stern and repressive power of the state. In Ivan Lazhechnikov’s (1792–1869) famous historical novel The House of Ice (1835), the phantasmagoric ice palace epitomizes the rule of Empress Anna Ioannovna (1730–40) and her favourite, Ernst Johann von Biron. The palace is inspired by an ugly sculpture, a man frozen to death as a punishment for truth-telling, and embodies Anna’s much-hated reign of police repression, fear, denunciation, and torture (as represented by her

The Thaw as an Event in Russian History  19

successor Elizabeth and recorded in history).3 In his depiction of a political winter, Lazhechnikov also may have referred to his own times, the reign of Nicholas I – at least this was how the censors read his novel.4 But ice palaces inevitably melt, and in the novel a ‘thaw’ (ottepel’) succeeds the ‘cruel frosts,’ destroying the House of Ice shortly before Anna’s death. The new sovereign, Elizabeth, ‘throws off the people’s chains,’ ‘heals their wounds,’ ‘tears off a black seal’ from their hearts and mouths, promotes science, and founds Moscow University. The people bless the new empress and soon forget about the ‘bloody Bironovshchina.’5 Lazhechnikov’s contemporary Fedor Tiutchev (1803–73) certainly did have Nicholaevan Russia in mind when he represented the autocracy as ‘iron winter’ (zima zheleznaia) and a ‘heap of ice’ (gromada l’dov).6 Upon Nicholas’s death, Tiutchev transferred the meteorological term thaw onto the Russian political and emotional environment. The educated society received the new metaphor as wonderfully refreshing, a mot juste, because in the spring of 1855 the changes Tiutchev felt were indeed atmospheric, intangible. Nobody was yet sure of specific policies that Alexander II would adopt, but Tiutchev did capture a certain anticipatory mood ‘of things getting easier with regard … to spirit.’7 He was a poet of spring. Tiutchev’s thaw was not all mud and melancholy, but a vigorous, audible herald of spring: a ‘fair child’ (prekrasnoe ditia) or a youth, it ‘ran,’ ‘rang,’ and ‘laughed.’ Winter could be resilient, but spring was inexorable and irresistible:8 No matter what severe trials Upon you life may ever bring – What can resist the first encounter And breath of the arriving spring!9

Many decades later, it was this verse of Tiutchev’s that the young Ilya Ehrenburg, then an exile in Europe, liked to recall in his days of hardship. Ehrenburg felt an affinity for Tiutchev. He often cited or mentioned the poet and even wrote a poem about Tiutchev’s last love, while living through the last years of his own.10 In 1953, deliberately or not, Ehrenburg reinvented Tiutchev’s forgotten metaphor of thaw, for a different audience but at a similar historical juncture. The metaphor embodied familiar images – motion, awakened feelings, and above all, anticipation. The Thaw’s action takes place mostly in the winter, in an atmosphere anguished and expectant. The main protagonists are desperate for reasons they know not: they are lonely, bored, and almost nauseous from

20 Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd

malaise and cold. Ehrenburg offers dozens of synonyms for this cosmic winter. Snowflakes flutter like scared birds, birds freeze amid flight and fall dead on the ground, and breath turns into ice. Winter suffering is both physical and linguistic: one of the characters is blinded by a snowstorm, while another feels as if he lost words in the snow.11 The only language the characters know is frozen bureaucratese. They speak in hollow words and of things for which they do not care, keep silent when conscience orders them to speak, act in theatrical performances that contain ‘not a single living word’ (ni odnogo zhivogo slova), sit in awkward silences, arrest each other’s confessions, and suffer throughout.12 A blizzard puts an end to the languished immobility of winter, and a spring thaw sets the frozen town in motion. Icicles drip, surfaces shine, birds chirp, women wash windows, children scamper, and an inveterate cynic follows suit, rushing to break floating chunks of ice. Thawing nature suggests an emotional, linguistic, and implicitly also political emancipation: the sounds of spring encourage simple, natural words, lifting the fear of human communication.13 In his memoirs, Ehrenburg pointed to how important speech was ‘after the long months of silence, after the cold that was kin to loneliness, after the trial of winter.’14 For him, the thaw was a new freedom in behaviours and relationships, a kinetic and verbal spontaneity. The thaw heralded a lyrical, intimate disposition – after all, the novella told of late love as the last chance for deliverance from an emotional winter. With the thaw metaphor, Ehrenburg wished to depict, and perhaps also create, a psychological climate (dushevnyi klimat).15 What outraged his critics, Khrushchev above all, was this very metaphor. To them, thaw suggested nothing but slush and mud, sickly confusion and instability – a reading that reflected the word’s longstanding connotations of disarray, slackening, and enfeeblement.16 In a few decades, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, disenchanted Russians would mock the Thaw in similar terms – as ‘short-lived and unreliable,’ ‘snotty’ in the sense of pathetically naive, ridiculous, and altogether embarrassing.17 As late as 2008, following the Russian presidential succession, the deputy head of the president’s administration Vladislav Surkov dismissed hopes for a liberalization by declaring, ‘There will be no thaw or any other political slush [sliakot’]’ – a remark that provoked an outrage among the intelligentsia.18 Some remembered that the identification of a political thaw with ‘slush’ itself dated back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the ideologically militant press used this derisive label to smear the alleged home-grown ‘agents of bourgeois ideology.’ ‘State power is remarkably

The Thaw as an Event in Russian History  21

rude and disrespectful,’ exploded in September 2008 the popular radio host Matvei Ganapol’skii, born in 1953. ‘They know perfectly well what the word “thaw” means in Russia…. And yet they utter such words, and they do so deliberately … they have invoked “slush.” Well, history will determine who is slush in Russia…. You know, people gave their lives for that thaw…. One cannot use such words: this is an insult to the living and to people’s memory.’19 Historians usually avoid such value judgments, but even they sometimes use the thaw metaphor in a similar sense of ‘slush,’ underscoring confusion and instability.20 This is precisely the interpretation against which Ehrenburg objected. In his memoirs, he dismissed it with a dictionary definition: ‘Thaw – warm weather in the midst of winter or at the arrival of spring, causing snow and ice to melt.’21 The title of his novella, he argued, heralded above all this arrival of spring, ‘the spring that had to come.’22 In 1958, Ehrenburg returned to the metaphor and remade his novella into a poem about waiting for spring.23 Again there were cruel winters, whose ‘March frosts’ brought despair, and whose ‘dry blizzards’ blinded. Incarceration was verbally tangible: ‘grown into such cold,’ ‘in solid, icy bitterness,’ Ehrenburg’s ‘we’ ‘waited and waited until the bulky ice began to budge.’ Three years later, in 1961, Grigorii Chukhrai made the metaphor visible in his film Clear Skies, which depicted the ordeal of an ex-POW suspected of treason and expelled from the party. In the final shot, symbolizing the triumph of justice and absolution from the Stalin past, the entire expanse of the screen fills with a huge block of ice beginning to drift.24 In so turning word back into image, Chukhrai materialized and reinforced the already stable metaphor. What was it in the thaw metaphor that assured it such stability in art and literature? In common expressions, weather is a fickle thing beyond human agency. Weather metaphors suggest instability and unpredictability.25 However, the cyclicality and recurrence of meteorological phenomena also impart to such metaphors a sense of outwitting nature by anticipation and prognosis.26 Furthermore, seasonal changes affect everyone. Grounded in fundamental sensory experiences – warmth, natural sounds, and levity (thanks to lightweight clothing) – the thaw metaphor made sense of complex politics and ambivalent emotions by making them immediate and physiological.27 Organic and mechanistic metaphors had long vied with each other in Soviet rhetorical efforts in relating the individual to the community. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, ‘the root metaphor’ for Soviet society was the machine.28 The metaphor ascribed to people ‘a flaming mo-

22 Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd

tor instead of a heart’ and, to use Stalin’s dictum, transformed humans into ‘cogs’ with little individual value other than as parts of the grand mechanism.29 Products of fascination with technology and rationality, mechanistic metaphors connote uniformity, rigidity, and standardization.30 Organic metaphors, on the other hand, specifically those for weather, allow for contingency and flexibility. In the symbolic ordering of Soviet society, machine metaphors yielded to organic ones, to the garden and the family, as early as the mid-1930s. Nature became the setting where the Soviet man stood trial, conquered space, the elements, and his own limitations, emerging victorious and ‘tempered’ by fires and snowstorms.31 During the 1950s, such scenarios were played out anew in Thaw culture, but with a fundamental difference. If previously natural disasters were the hero’s chief antagonists, in Ehrenburg’s novella the snowstorm was the champion of justice: it destroyed the workers’ shabby dwellings, thus toppling the evil bureaucrat who had refused to invest in new housing. The coming spring embodied not only environmental but also emotional and social harmony. Later, in the 1960s, the conquest of nature became an increasingly ambivalent image, as the Soviet man began to fail the test of the elements. In the literature and film of the 1960s, man returned to nature as its fraction, not its subjugator, to learn from it rather than to battle it – and when he did try to battle, fires and snowstorms often effortlessly wiped him off the face of the earth.32 By the 1970s, most visibly in village prose, nature as a symbol of eternal normality had become an object of veneration, while struggle against nature was now represented as useless, harmful, and altogether immoral.33 Ehrenburg’s 1953 thaw metaphor may have been an early herald of these new sensibilities, a desire for a harmonious, non-conflicted relationship between nature and society.34 Emerging in direct opposition to the conceptualization of society as a machine, the metaphor focused not on mechanism but on nature in a transitional stage and thereby suggested a world in the making, a cultural system open to chance and change. As it sought to impose coherence upon polyvalent societal developments, the thaw metaphor inevitably concealed a great deal. But metaphors are meant to conceal, highlighting what their inventors and users see as essential while suppressing other aspects of reality.35 Scholars have taken the thaw metaphor to task for what it obscures and have identified the mentalities and practices (such as continuing surveillance, anxieties about returning camp prisoners, and the persistent imagery of enemies and social strife), which do not accord well with the metaphor’s optimistic interpretation.36 In this approach, the metaphor is taken to reflect

The Thaw as an Event in Russian History  23

historical reality, whether accurately or poorly. Yet what if we consider the thaw metaphor not as reflective but as constitutive of historical phenomena?37 The metaphor became operative precisely because it singled out what the contemporaries saw as consequential about the Thaw, what they hoped for and desired. Even the post-Soviet disappointment with the Thaw was itself a product of the metaphor’s promising, positive implications, of its capacity to be a formative ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ that structured reality.38 No metaphor is perfectly consistent with all its possible connotations, let alone capable of accounting for all aspects of politics and society. Thaw is not an entirely coherent metaphor. It is, for example, not as cheerful as it seems: to push it to its ultimate logic (as contemporaries understood only too well), the metaphor foretold as much of another winter as of arriving spring in the unbreakable cycle of seasons. In linking weather and politics, it presented climate as destiny. And yet the thaw metaphor is heuristically useful. It created an environment of anticipation. It was inclusive, accessible, and broadly comprehensible. It reconstituted the relationship between social and natural orders. It admitted chance and alternative into a deterministic ideology. It highlighted the issue of language, with which Soviet writers, journalists, artists, and ordinary citizens would grapple henceforth. It heralded lyricism and emotionality. In all these ways, the thaw metaphor shaped social, political, and cultural realities. Ilya Ehrenburg defended his interpretation of the word thaw with a contemporary dictionary definition, but he also shaped the way subsequent dictionaries came to define the word. In Tiutchev’s time, thaw as metaphor was a witticism of limited circulation. In Ehrenburg’s time, the dictionary listed only the meteorological definition. After Ehrenburg, thaw became a conventional metaphor, a stable concept habituated in the common language and established in the cultural tradition. Today’s dictionaries list two meanings for thaw: one meteorological, the other metaphoric and political.39 Histories of the Thaw Until the early twenty-first century, the Thaw was underprivileged in historical writing. It was as if historians presumed the Soviet order to have taken final shape by the late 1930s, perhaps by the end of the Second World War at the latest, viewing the subsequent decades as a postscript. Even today, textbook chapters on the 1950s and 1960s remain relatively

24 Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd

cursory, compared to the better-rounded examinations of the 1920s and 1930s.40 Yet writing about the Thaw has a rich history. Some of the earliest students of the Thaw were its memoirists, and its first story was the intelligentsia’s tale of nostalgic remembrance, reinforced ex post facto by the negative perception of the subsequent Brezhnev years that made the Thaw look all the brighter.41 Memoirists often wrote themselves into the intelligentsia’s conventional saga of martyrdom for liberty, portraying their noble standoff against various incarnations of ‘power.’ Members of ‘the Thaw generation,’ to use Ludmilla Alexeyeva’s term, many of them had matured in the 1950s and 1960s and later became proponents of Gorbachev’s reforms, seeing the perestroika as a logical continuation of the Thaw’s unfinished business.42 It was not accidental that the voices of human rights activists, countercultural figures, escapists, and professed nonconformists became prominent in writings about the Thaw from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, or that the voices of conservative loyalists and étatistes were muted at that point.43 Perestroika claimed the Thaw heritage, and the first historical scholarship on the ‘lessons of the Twentieth Congress’ appeared in the party press of the final Soviet years.44 Yet, for the most part, historical research on the Thaw in Russia emerged in a different epoch – following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both before and after the collapse, historians also tended to see the Thaw as an unfinished business resumed t