Suchergebnisse

Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, a major Soviet initiative was launched to rekindle enthusiasm for the revolution, giving rise to over 150 biographies and historical novels, authored by prominent dissidents, leading historians, and popular historical novelists. What new meanings did revolution take on as it was reimagined by these writers?

This article offers a comprehensive examination of the editing, publication, reception, and after-effects of the almanac Pages from Tarusa (1961), a major, but little-analyzed, Soviet publication of the Thaw. Drawing on a wide range of memoir and local archive material, it argues that Pages was crucially shaped by Tarusa's position astride dacha territory and the "101st kilometer", the borders of the metropolitan zone from which Gulag and exile returnees were banned. Pages' diverse and flexible cohort, and its editing practices, were shaped by the migration, residency, and socializing practices associated with both these territories. The almanac's concern with cultural and social (re-)inclusion and innovation was visible both in its content (especially its overlooked documentary texts) and in the "emotional style" of its cohort and their activities in Tarusa. The almanac's production, as well as its content, epitomized key elements of Thaw sensibility and sociability that had hitherto largely been confined to private kompanii, and more inchoate. In concluding, the article outlines the subsequent development of these Thaw agendas and behaviors in the "Tarusa fraternity" and in Tarusa itself, including the emergence of samizdat and dissidence, as well as the "provincialization" of the local Soviet literary scene.

In this article, I analyze the production of late Soviet propaganda, highlighting the shifts toward greater literary sophistication and the reinvention of revolutionary biography, instituted in order to re-enthuse the population about revolutionary ideals. In the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras, the State Political Publishing House (Politizdat) grappled with a profound crisis of political persuasion and came to realize that collaboration and compromise with literary writers constituted the only solution. The key outcome of this debate over mass political literature was the innovative and unpredictable ";Fiery Revolutionaries" series of biographies, published from 1968 to the end of the Soviet Union. Arguing against the view of the Brezhnev era as a time of political language's standardization, and complicating the binary opposition between Soviet and dissident writers, I argue that it was the sophisticated and nuanced debates and editorial practices within this ";niche" in the post- Stalinist propaganda state that ultimately enabled many of the period's most talented (and sometimes notorious) writers to contribute sophisticated biographies to the series later in its history.