In 1948 it was the turn of the composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich, attacked for supposedly dissonant music that was too far removed from folk music and inaccessible to the masses. In many ways a repeat of the 1936 attack on formalism, this new campaign had behind it both the rivals of the serious composers among the writers of popular songs and the party authorities. In the same year Lysenko was able to crown his long fight for power in biology by his appearance at a “discussion” on genetics, where he declared genetics to be a reactionary and “idealist” science and his own ideas progressive and “materialist.” Stalin took a direct hand in this affair as well. Lysenko sent him his speech for criticism, and the General Secretary read it carefully. Lysenko originally wanted to contrast his own “proletarian” biology to the “bourgeois” biology of the geneticists and make a general pronouncement that scientific thought reflected class interests. Stalin crossed out that passage, writing in the margins, “Ha ha! What about mathematics?” He required Lysenko to drop the class terminology and substitute “progressive” and “reactionary.” The result, however, was to destroy genetics for nearly twenty years and do enormous harm to Soviet biology. There were plans to hold a similar “discussion” to provide an ideological framework for physics, but for whatever reason, it never materialized.
In the last years of Stalin’s life the official Soviet ideology was a strange mixture of dogmatic Marxism and nationalism. There were campaigns to prove Russian priorities in science, the most famous being the claim that the Russian engineer Alexander Popov had invented the radio in 1900 (Popov was in fact one of several pioneers in this area.) Pre-revolutionary Russian writers, composers, and artists became the object of mini-cults, with endless statues, films, and publications made in their honor. The promotion of Russian culture was largely aimed at the West, to show Russia to be equal to Western culture, if not superior. At the same time the party leadership continued the promotion of culture heroes from the other Soviet nationalities. The Politburo ordered celebrations of the work of medieval Muslim poets claimed as ancestors of Soviet nationalities, Alisher Navoi in Uzbekistan and Nizami of Gandzha in Azerbaidzhan. Russian poets were paid to translate their works and they were the objects of fulsome official praise in the central press. In these years, Shevchenko or the medieval Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli loomed larger than Shakespeare or Goethe. In every Soviet republic the authorities assigned composers, usually Russians or Caucasians, to help local talent produce “national” ballets and operas to provide repertory and prestige for the newly opened theaters. At the same time as the activity on the periphery, in Moscow and Leningrad the ballet struggled with the restrictions of Soviet esthetics. The sheer genius of the dancers like Galina Ulanova kept it alive. The anti-cosmopolitan campaign directed against Jews in 1948 only further poisoned the cultural atmosphere since so many musicians, writers, and artists were Jewish. The main Yiddish writers were imprisoned or shot. The intelligentsia remembered the 1930s and the various ideological campaigns seemed to be leading to another mass terror. That never materialized, and the number of actual arrests among the intelligentsia in those years was small, but for Shostakovich or Akhmatova, the fear in those years was real.
The death of Stalin changed the whole atmosphere. Within a few months prisoners began to return from the camps, and the intelligentsia sensed the possibilities. Ilya Ehrenburg, mainly known as a war correspondent and author of mildly modernist novels of the 1920s set in Western Europe, quickly produced a short novel called The Thaw, which gave its name to the whole period. The villain of the story is a factory director, a classic Stalinist boss. Attacked at first, the story set the tone for a whole series of writings that tried to deal with the past, if within definite limits. Khrushchev’s secret speech gave another great impulse to this sort of literature, as well as relaxing the demands for orthodoxy in music and art. By the early 1960s a number of works had appeared describing the camp system that had just come to an end, the most famous being One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The novella appeared in the literary journal Novyi Mir, which gained huge popularity for its publication of many works in sympathy with the program of destalinization. Some writers, especially young poets like Evgenii Yevtushenko, acquired enormous popularity at this time, even reading his poetry in sports stadiums that filled to capacity. Shostakovich used Yevtushenko’s poem “Babii Yar,” about the wartime massacre of Jews in Kiev by the Nazis, in his Thirteenth Symphony. The ending of the post-war cultural policies and the rehabilitation of imprisoned and executed writers meant a sudden boom in the republication of the literature of the 1920s with its frequently modernist styles. Soviet publishers began to put out a wave of translations of Western authors: William Faulkner, John Updike, and many European writers. Soviet opera and ballet moved away from the Stalinist canon toward styles that were less narrative and more innovative, a compromise style that still required elaborate sets and more “acting” than was then popular in the West, then at the height of fascination with abstractionism in all the arts. The Khrushchev era was not all liberalism, however. The renewed campaign against religion affected many areas of culture indirectly, making impossible the republication of nineteenth century classics like certain works of Dostoyevsky or the expression of religious themes. The great event of the decade was the scandal around the award of the 1958 Nobel Prize to Pasternak for his novel Doctor Zhivago, a clearly anti-Soviet account of the revolution and Civil War. A huge propaganda success for the West, the book was prohibited in the USSR and Pasternak became the object of press attacks and official condemnation. This was not Stalin’s time, however, and Pasternak continued to live quietly in his dacha in Peredelkino.
Perhaps the most striking relic of the Stalin era in Khrushchev’s time was his refusal to accept modern genetics. Lysenko remained king in biology, primarily because of Khrushchev’s support of him. At the same time science expanded enormously during these years. By the 1960s only the United States outranked the USSR in the number of publications in the natural sciences, and by the 1980s the Soviet Union had the largest number of natural scientists per capita in the world. The sciences had whole complexes at their disposal, like Akademgorodok (“Academy Town”) near Novosibirsk in Western Siberia. Started in 1958 at the inspiration of Academy scientists, this entirely new town came to have some fifty thousand scientists and their families, with new and comfortable (by Soviet standards) housing and privileged access to a whole range of consumer goods. For the party leadership, science was not only the basis of a “scientific” worldview but also the key to economic growth, the path to victory in the rivalry with the capitalist world. The ability to concentrate resources on crucial areas had brought spectacular successes in rocketry and the nuclear industry, both military and civilian, and the idea was to broaden the base so as to ensure a more thorough modernization of industry and agriculture.
With the removal of Khrushchev the new leadership quickly moved to end the anti-religious campaign and allowed the churches to continue a modest and heavily supervised existence that lasted until the 1980s. Lysenko finally lost his monopoly of power in biology, his work was repudiated and genetics reappeared as a recognized discipline. Until the end of the Soviet Union the relationship of the authorities to the science community was polite and collaborative, though not without tensions under the surface. For the writers, however, the new regime was less positive. The young poet Joseph Brodsky had been sent into northern exile for “parasitism” in the last months of Khrushchev’s leadership, and in 1972 the KGB threw him out of the country for publishing his work abroad. Brezhnev never repudiated the condemnation of Stalin, but he put an end to the toleration and encouragement of writing, historical or literary, that exposed the repressions of that era. Thus Solzhenitsyn’s work could no longer be published, and appeared only in the West, leading to his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Cultural policy was essentially frozen in time, for the works of many writers repressed under Stalin continued to appear, but Bulgakov’s unpublished writings or Doctor Zhivago could not. Large numbers of translations of Western literature appeared in translation, but major writers like Marcel Proust (published in the Soviet Union in the 1930s) or James Joyce could not. Soviet writers began to write in a mildly modernist vein, and avoided the classic subjects of socialist realism. Some, Vasilii Belov and others, began to turn in different directions, influenced by Solzhenitsyn. They wrote romanticized accounts of village life with a strong nationalist undertone, the idea being that the peasantry had once had true Russian values, patriarchal and religious, which the Soviet order had destroyed. They were highly critical of the kolhoz, and their historical stories described a harmonic village destroyed by urban outsiders, often Jewish, in the 1930s. The critical edge and the nationalist tone gave them wide popularity among the intelligentsia in the later Brezhnev years. The village writers and their ideology shaded off into the dissident movement, which was heavily nationalistic in its outlook, though a minority of dissidents shared the more westernizing approach of Andrei Sakharov. Both tendencies were actually well known among the elite intelligentsia from underground manuscripts, but more than the dissidents it was some of the “bards,” the singers like Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotskii, who performed their songs on the guitar and who most accurately reflected the mood among educated people. Vysotskii rarely gave public concerts, for no state agency could permit that, but his songs performed in small gatherings or Moscow apartments quickly spread all over the country in tape recordings and amateur performances, again behind closed doors. Not quite political enough to be overtly anti-Soviet, the songs and their lyrics reflected a kind of introspective alienation characteristic of the time. Above-ground recordings of Okudzhava’s songs appeared in the Soviet Union only in the later 1970s, and one recording of Vysotskii’s surfaced only shortly after his death in 1980.