The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009. — 464 p.
Among the least-chronicled aspects of post–World War II European intellectual and cultural history is the story of the Russian intelligentsia after Stalin. Young Soviet veterans had returned from the heroic struggle to defeat Hitler only to confront the repression of Stalinist society. The world of the intelligentsia exerted an attraction for them, as it did for many recent university graduates. In its moral fervor and its rejection of authoritarianism, this new generation of intellectuals resembled the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia that had been crushed by revolutionary terror and Stalinist purges. The last representatives of the Russian intelligentsia, heartened by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinism in 1956, took their inspiration from the visionary aims of their nineteenth-century predecessors and from the revolutionary aspirations of 1917. In pursuing the dream of a civil, democratic socialist society, such idealists contributed to the political disintegration of the communist regime.
Vladislav Zubok turns a compelling subject into a portrait as intimate as it is provocative. The highly educated elite—those who became artists, poets, writers, historians, scientists, and teachers—played a unique role in galvanizing their country to strive toward a greater freedom. Like their contemporaries in the United States, France, and Germany, members of the Russian intelligentsia had a profound effect during the 1960s, in sounding a call for reform, equality, and human rights that echoed beyond their time and place. Zhivago’s children, the spiritual heirs of Boris Pasternak’s noble doctor, were the last of their kind—an intellectual and artistic community committed to a civic, cultural, and moral mission. Zubok distills the ideas, personalities, and ultimate failures of the generation of Russian intellectuals who sought to cleanse socialism of its Stalinist stain. His poignant portrait raises the question of whether Russia will ever again be fully open to the mixture of idealism and moderation that Zhivago's children represented. Vladislav Zubok is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics.
A revealing, thoroughly researched and important book infused with elegiac tones. Stalin's Russia had encouraged education and technical know-how, yet its leaders had blindly assumed that the country's intellectuals would remain unthinking, easily controlled cogs in the vast machine of the state. But some men and women born in the 1930s and '40s refused to play their assigned role, particularly after the leader's death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev's new policies of de-Stalinization and the Thaw suggested a new dawn was at hand...Zhivago's children flourished throughout the second half of the 1950s and into the '60s. It was a time of great optimism and hope. Among the best known in the West of these shestidesiatniki, or men of the sixties, is the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, but Zubok's book chronicles the stories of many other noteworthy figures. The Soviet Union was a prison, especially for the lively minded, whose travel abroad and activities at home were dictated by the Communist Party's cultural commissars. But in the period between the end of the Stalin terror and the start of the Brezhnev era's grim stagnation, a lucky few enjoyed some wisps of freedom. Cultural continuity between that period and a lost past is the central theme of Zhivago's Children. The metaphorical reference is to Tanya, the child of Yuri and Lara Zhivago in Boris Pasternak's great novel. Brought up by peasants, "she has no opportunity to inherit the tradition of free-thinking, spirituality and creativity that her father embodied." How will she turn out? The novel leaves that fictional question unanswered. Vladislav Zubok's book shows, with great sympathy and insight, what happened to Tanya's real-life counterparts.
Vladislav Zubok has written a splendid account of Russian intellectual and cultural life in the half century after the Great Patriotic War, which we call World War II. He vividly portrays not only "the struggle of intellectuals and artists to regain autonomy from an autocratic regime," but "the slow and painful disappearance of their revolutionary-romantic idealism and optimism, their faith in progress and in the enlightenment of people...Zubok makes it a glorious story to read. Zubok is a reliable and prodigiously well-informed guide to the opinions, attitudes, and changing fortunes of loyal Soviet intellectuals during the approximately twenty years between the early 1950s and 1970s...Zubok tells his story with a density of detail and complexity of analysis that is truly remarkable. Ranging across the entire spectrum of Soviet cultural life, he carefully plots the rise and fall of magazines, publishing houses, and cultural institutions, together with the changing consciousness of the intellectuals--writers, editors, scholars, government bureaucrats--as they adjusted to ongoing revelations about the past, digested each new crisis, and tried to take advantage of the new freedoms they appeared to promise...Zubok has done a fine job of characterizing a slice of Russian intellectual life over a couple of turbulent decades of Soviet history...[An] intelligent and engrossing book. Vladislav Zubok has written a meticulously researched and perceptive study of the generations succeeding Zhivago, showing how desperately they tried, against the worst efforts of successive leaderships from 1945 to 1985, to retain values that they regarded as vital to their own and their society's moral survival. The record shows a jagged graph of comparative freedoms and stern reprisals, but their struggles are inspirational...Zubok's detailed book is a highly rewarding and unusual foray into a fascinating national situation, but its implications are universal. Any country too busy doing business to support the values kept alive by idealistic artists, writers and critics will visit moral bankruptcy on its own children.
Contents
Prologue: The Fate of Zhivago’s Intelligentsia
The “Children” Grow Up, 1945–1955
Shock Effects, 1956–1958
Rediscovery of the World, 1955–1961
Optimists on the Move, 1957–1961
The Intelligentsia Reborn, 1959–1962
The Vanguard Disowned, 1962–1964
Searching for Roots, 1961–1967
Between Reform and Dissent, 1965–1968
The Long Decline, 1968–1985
Epilogue: The End of the Intelligentsia
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index