Vladimir Pomerantsev both demanded more spontaneity and 'sincerity', less official interference in literature.
The termination of the Thaw cannot so readily be pinpointed, in part because it did not skid to a dead halt in one violent action like the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Indeed, many of the ideas discussed and trends inaugurated during the Thaw years outlasted the political career of the man most clearly associated with it, Nikita Khrushchev, who fell from power in 1964. They endured and evolved over the next two decades, albeit forced into alternative channels as official ones constricted. Most individuals who identified themselves with the goals of the Thaw continued to work within the Soviet cultural sphere, although some emigrated and others confined their audiences to friends or to anonymous purveyors of samizdat.
Nonetheless, the term 'Thaw' legitimately denotes a dozen years during which Soviet society moved out from under the worst shadows ofthe late Stalin years. Artists and audiences alike pressed for greater candour in the arts, an end to mendacious representations of Soviet life, a recognition of the puissance of private concerns, more latitude in subject and style and a 'less paternalistic concern' over what the Soviet reader/film-goer/museum visitor 'should and should not be permitted to know'.[61] Khrushchev's major de-Stalinisation speeches spurred a passion for truth-telling, expressed in a variety of artistic forms that shared a common concern with the moral compromises endemic to Soviet society. And although the party attempted to maintain hegemony over cultural matters, the thawing process persisted despite, beneath and around the ice floes of official reversals, skittish compromises and dogmatic retrenchments.
Already in 1955, before Khrushchev's 1956 'Secret Speech', access to foreign culture increased, with events like the week of French cinema held in October 1955. After Khrushchev's speech the pace accelerated dramatically. Personnel shake-ups replaced bureaucrats with active artists and balanced conservatives with progressives (such as the new, liberal Moscowbranch ofthe national Writers' Union, an organisation Mikhail Sholokhov mordantly dubbed the 'Union of Dead Souls'[62]). The party allocated funds to build or refurbish theatres and movie houses, to buy better equipment, to pay higher authors' fees, to revitalise languishing republican film studios, to rejoin the world's cultural community. (The First Moscow International Film Festival took place in August 1959.) Khrushchev's attempts to decentralise decision-making and encourage individual initiative, though formulated to achieve economic goals, had cultural repercussions. The Ministry of Culture, the party's umbrella organisation for all broadcasting, educational and cultural institutions, remained in charge, but official censors relinquished some of their authority to editorial boards of journals and film studio artistic councils; senior literary editors and theatre directors had more access to the ideological watchdogs.
In order to secure the trust of a nation profoundly wary of the repercussions of autonomy, Khrushchev enjoined writers to tell the truth (up to a point) without fear of lethal consequences. As Shimon Markish, a writer and son of one of the Yiddish poets murdered in 1952, wryly - but accurately - observed, while both Stalin and Khrushchev were whimsical and capricious, with Khrushchev 'we knew that whatever happened, it would not be arrest and death'.[63] Artists who felt both anger and guilt at their own acquiescence in falsehood proffered mea culpas: in Evgenii Evtushenko's dramatic poem 'Zima Station' (1956), for instance, he reproaches himself for saying 'what I should not have said' and failing to say 'what I should have said'. Censors excised many of the once-obligatory disparaging references to the West and to non-Russian nationalities in new editions of previously published works, and scrapped equally obligatory laudatory references to Stalin: his very name was cropped from phrases like 'Stalin's army' and 'Stalin's generation'. While censors continued to discourage bleak descriptions of the purges, they - emulating Khrushchev - partially rehabilitated the victims of Stalinist repression. 'The censorship did not cease to operate,' Geoffrey Hosking notes, 'but its implementation became less predictable.'[64]
The early years of the Thaw gave artists the chance to scrape the excrescences of Stalinism off what they perceived as the authentic revolutionary idealism of the 1920s. They could retain the possibility of utopian socialism, sans Stalin's crippling despotism and Stalinism's lies. Even the relatively orthodox writer Konstantin Simonov, editor of Novyi mir in 1956, urged acceptance of any literature imbued with 'socialist spirit', and a large part of Soviet society embraced the opportunity to examine the actual circumstances and dilemmas of Soviet life. For a time, at least, party directives, creative impulses and popular desires galloped along as a troika.
The same desiderata-less embellishment, greater truthfulness, more attention to individuals and their private dramas, the muffling of authorial judgement, multiple perspectives - characterise nearly all fiction and film in the early
Thaw years, whether historical or contemporary. As early as 1954, the novelist Fedor Abramov published a damning survey of post-war rural prose, which centred on the collective farm and frequently came from the pens of urban writers ignorant of country life. He and other derevenshchiki - writers of'village' (rather than kolkhoz) prose - began to correct the spurious approach to rural themes characteristic of post-war fiction in favour of sympathetic yet unsentimental portraits of everyday rural reality, including the religious faith that sustained the peasantry. Themselves usually scions of village life, they avoided the (falsely) picturesque, folksy and romantic, and, over the next decade or so, elaborated a set of values virtually opposite to those that dominated kolkhoz literature.
Film had less room to manoeuvre, since the party's demand for more and better films 'about agriculture' pointedly implied kolkhoz achievements, not retrograde village traditions, and film-makers were understandably reluctant to tackle such a fraught subject. When they did turn to the countryside, however, they starkly contradicted the florid and grotesquely synthetic images of peasant life on display in musicals like Cossacks of the Kuban'. Camerawork favoured medium and long shots and pans of the entire environment, as if to offer trustworthy images saturated with reality; the happy ending that reassuringly concluded most kolkhoz movies yielded to ambiguity. A wedding opens -ratherthan closes - Mikhail Shveitser's Alien Kin (Chuzhaia rodnia, 1955): trouble starts afterwards. Stanislav Rostotskii's It Happened in Penkovo (Delo bylo v Penkove, 1957) pays lip-service to official rhetoric, encasing a flashback within a narrative framework that shows a poor collective farm becoming prosperous, but for most of the film only drinking, romance and fighting alleviate the tedium of village life.[65] In Vasilii Shukshin's first two films, A Boy Like That (Zhivet takoi paren , 1964), and Your Son and Brother (Vash syn i brat, 1965), exterior shots convey the omnipresence of Siberia's natural environment while interiors are panned matter of factly, their furnishings (wood-burning stoves, vodka decanters, framed photographs) neither quaint, ethnographic objects nor fetishes to be venerated but the stuff of people's lives.
62
John and Carol Garrard,
64
Geoffrey Hosking,
65
The artistic council sharply criticised the spurious depiction ofa neighbouring