THAW, THE

The Thaw describes the loosening of restrictions over the arts when Nikita Khrushchev served as general secretary of the Communist Party, after the death of Josef Stalin in 1953 until the mid-1960s. Although associated with the Secret Speech at the Twentieth Congress in 1956 when Khrushchev denounced some of Stalin's dictatorial activities, the name derives from Ilya Ehrenburg's 1954 book The Thaw. The novel hinted that Stalin's death signaled an end to the long winter of sacrifice and persecution, and that a new era for socialism was emerging in which individuals' private lives were valued as much as industrial productivity. Censorship eased, but its intensity varied as party leaders struggled to redefine the priorities of Soviet society.

During the Thaw, all artistic media offered new themes and stylistic innovation that had been banned under Stalin. Literary magazines, called "thick" journals, published a wide array of new works. Most notably, in 1961 Novy mir, edited by Alexander, published Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a portrayal of a labor camp inmate's efforts to survive and maintain his dignity over the course of one day. Theater also flourished, especially with the 1956 creation of the Sovremennik, a troupe of recent graduates of the School of the Moscow Art Theater led by Oleg Efremov. The company championed the work of Viktor Rozov and young dramatists. Yuri Lyubimov directed Shchukin Theater School students in a watershed production of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Sechuan and in 1964 assumed the leadership of the Taganka Theater, which subsequently premiered several controversial plays.

Theaters were increasingly able to stage synthetic theater, a movement that uses lights, sets, and music to evoke meaning rather than the rigid naturalist approach of accurate historical detail. Amateur student troupes, both traditional dramatic and sketch comedy, thrived. A new generation of poets emerged, including those whose works were later staged as poetic theater by Lyubimov. One of those poets, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, penned "Babi Yar" (1961), which commemorated the Nazi slaughter of Jews and alluded to ongoing Soviet anti-Semitism. The poem became the basis of Dmitri Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony, which premiered in late 1962 and was sharply criticized in the press. A new musical genre, with performers known as bards, performed private concerts of their guitar poetry. Films also appeared that focused on the difficulties of private lives, often with respect to the enormous losses of World War II: Mikhail Kalatozov's Cranes are Flying (1957), Georgi Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier (1958), and Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (1961).

There were definite limits to the party's toleration of this expression. Boris Pasternak's novel Dr. Zhivago was published in Italy in 1957 after it was banned at home. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, Pasternak declined the aware after he was attacked in the press and expelled from the Writers' Union. In 1964 poet Joseph Brodsky was charged with parasitism, spent over two years in an Arctic labor camp, and later emigrated. When young painters and sculptors, including Ernst Neizvestny, showed their abstract works at the Manezh exhibition hall in late 1962, Khrushchev and other leaders expressed their acute dislike. On various occasions, Pasternak, Shostakovich, Neizvestny, Yevtushenko, and others apologized for works that were deemed unacceptable.

In spite of the expanded opportunities, the absence of freedom of expression and other civil liberties led some intellectuals, labeled "dissidents" by the Party, to more direct opposition to the status quo. Beginning in this era, they circulated essays, memoirs of labor camps, and literature in manuscript form, known as samizdat, rather than submit their work to censors. They smuggled other works, referred to as tamizdat, abroad for publication. Although this group of intellectuals was small in number, it included scientist Andrei Sakharov, who called for an end to nuclear testing in the late 1950s and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968. When it became clear that the Thaw had been temporary, these individuals grew increasingly active and were persecuted and sometimes imprisoned by the KGB.

Scholars disagree on the end date of the Thaw. Some argue that it was 1964, when Khrushchev was ousted. Others maintain that the 1966 trial of dissidents Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel marks its end. A third interpretation suggests 1968, when Soviet-led troops invaded Czechoslovakia, where the Thaw threatened the hegemony of its Communist Party.

See also: communist party of the soviet union; ehrenberg, ilya grigorovich; khrushchev, nikita sergeyevich; taganka; theater

bibliography

Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, and Goldberg, Paul. (1993). The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Brown, Deming. (1978). Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, Priscilla, and Leopold Labedz, eds. (1965). Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rothberg, Abraham. (1972). The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime, 1953–1970. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Spechler, Dina R. (1982). Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novy mir and the Soviet Regime. New York: Praeger Publishers.

Taubman, William. (2003). Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Woll, Josephine. (2000). Reel Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw. London: I. B. Tauris and Company.

Susan Costanzo