The West got its own serious, if widely distorted, glimpse of the thaw generation once Khrushchev started letting artists and writers and filmmakers and athletes out of the country (in limited numbers, of course). The incessantly touring Yevtushenko – a man who had everything going for him, but who ended up being one of the most scorned figures of that generation – and a constellation of brilliant writers who were forced into exile from the USSR: Brodsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergey Dovlatov, Vasiliy Aksyonov and, last but not least, Victor Nekrasov whose love and knowledge of Kiev guided me on this trip. These were all people whose creative trajectories were intimately connected with what happened – or what was allowed – in those few years of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Undoubtedly the thaw did produce a renaissance – brief, doomed and divisive it may have been, but it was still a moment of untold cultural significance. Everything was blooming – literature, theatres, cinema, bard songs, even newspapers. Serious journals such as Novy Mir, dear to every liberal’s heart, but also the newly created Yunost (Youth), of which my mum says, ‘Every page was worth its weight in gold.’ Stadiums were used for public poetry readings, which attracted tens of thousands. You could tell the start of the thaw, my father tells me, by seemingly tiny things, such as how some French characters in Mikhail Romm’s 1956 movie The Murder on Dante Street were not imperialists and collaborators but genuine and courageous anti-Fascists (in other words, friends not foes).
It still defies belief that the man responsible for this artistic boom was the same shoe-stomping, corn-loving political leader who, in a much-mythologised episode, went berserk at the sight of several avant-garde artworks exhibited at the famous Manezh exhibition, calling them ‘dog shit’. Or the man who in ‘meetings with artistic intelligentsia’ (at which attendance was compulsory, of course) referred to the now-famous sculptures of Ernst Neizvestniy as pederasty in art: ‘So why do, I ask, pederasts get ten years and these artists want a medal. Why?’ (Applause.) Or, for that matter, the man who was in charge of the Soviet Union during the 1956 invasion of Hungary, the 1961 crisis that led to the partition of Berlin and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, during which the world seemed to come to the brink of outright nuclear conflict. Oh, the paradoxical nature of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev…
While the late 1950s and early 1960s was undoubtedly one of the best times to be young in the Soviet Union, the State’s unmistakable interest in fostering the passions and enthusiasms of the young could be explained in less-than-innocent terms, of course. For example: with the rehabilitation of political prisoners under Khrushchev, the Gulag population had significantly decreased, leaving gaps in the slave labour force on which the country was built. These gaps were filled by the country’s young – idealistic students enthused by the heady language of ‘construction projects of the century’. As one writer of the era, Alexander Ageev, commented, ‘A young worker on some faraway building site costs the State a bit more than a Gulag inmate [they are fed better] and maybe even less – you don’t pay for the guards, plus they are healthy, while the productivity of free labour is higher than that of slave labour.’ In exchange for becoming ‘the cannon fodder in “battles for harvest” ‘, young people got their dose of romantic adrenaline – guitar songs around campfires, tents in the middle of nowhere, love under the stars. And, of course, untrodden expanses of their country tamed and transformed for the nation’s benefit.
Four decades later my parents can still quote from countless poems and songs of the time – they are part of their vocabulary and, in a received way, part of mine too. ‘Did you think of yourself as shestidesyatniki?’ I ask them. ‘No,’ Mum replies, ‘these were the people who actually did something, a pleiad of passionate people burning from within. We just devoured the fruits of their labour.’ As I watch my parents remember the late 1950s and early 1960s, I see not a trace of cynicism in their attempts to distill the era; so unlike the cynicism dressed in irony’s weatherproof clothing that in Russia’s independent media characterises a great deal of commentary about the shestidesyatniki as a cultural and social phenomenon.
‘You know, Masha, your mum and I spoke on the phone just the other day, and we confessed to each other that we never again had such a close friend in our lives,’ Ira says on our first day in Kiev. Why cannot I get enough of Ira’s stories? Of how she and Mum separated at night only to be reunited without fail the next morning, whether at work or somewhere else; how their friendship came first and everything else needed to fit around it (even Ira’s post-secondary education – she went to evening classes in whatever time she had left from being with Mum). I have, of course, been treated to plenty of these stories before – their repertoire of shenanigans and all – but somehow hearing them now in Ira’s kitchen with Billie by my side is eye-opening. Maybe it is because of the fact that I have only recently given up the arrogance of a child who thinks they know their mother inside out. But there’s also a symmetrical pleasure in hearing about your mother when young from a woman who was young alongside her, in the company of your young daughter and in the place of your mother’s youth.
Billie and I particularly like the ridiculous stories in which Mum and Ira bend rules in the name of some silly prank, or defy authorities for a laugh and still come out on top. Their practical jokes were risky and renowned for their complexity, with seemingly unreformable bachelors at work among their persistent targets (poor guys who in hindsight simply turned out to be late-bloomers). In many ways these stories compensate for much of what I know firsthand about my mum’s working life in Kharkov; while not altogether gloomy, it was certainly devoid of the carefree spirit of the ‘Mum and Ira’ era. I think of my mum in Kharkov at the age that I am now, and I see her constantly running to work (on high heels, of course), because an entire work team was punished, their bonus payments often withheld, if one of its members was late. But the young woman in Ira’s stories is my mum before my sister and me, before marriage, family, responsibilities, before the right things to do, before too much is at stake, before the onset of selflessness and maturity. One day to get out of work, Ira tells us, she let wasps that used to congregate around the vending machines that dispensed mineral water (no syrup – one kopek, with syrup – three kopeks) repeatedly sting her arm. To the queue waiting to buy a drink, she explained that wasp therapy was the best way to cure a very rare disease from which, sadly, she suffered. Released from work, Ira went to her aunt’s centrally located apartment. (She lived with her mother on the city outskirts.) When my mum, infinitely entertained, called her from the institute to find out how she was going, Ira was just waiting for her friend to finish up at work, not knowing what to do with herself without her ‘second half ‘.