History - the Decembrist uprising of 1825, the populist movement of the 1880s, Bolshevism, the Second World War-served as a template through which to examine the present, both because the past gave writers and film-makers more freedom, and because it had directly engendered the present with which they were primarily concerned. With Khrushchev himself calling for a return to Leninist norms, the years during which the Soviet state took shape offered a dramatic framework in which to investigate contemporary hopes and ideals. Thus the Thaw's first historical films - Iurii Egorov's They Were the First (Oni byli pervymi, 1956), Alov and Naumov's PavelKorchagin (1956), based on Ostrovskii's novel How the Steel Was Tempered (Kak zakalialas' stal'), Grigorii Chukhrai's The Forty-first (Sorokpervyi, 1956), Iulii Raizman's The Communist (Kommunist, 1958)- re-create the civil-war years and the i920s, not as they had actually been, certainly, but as they were viewed through the lens of the 1950s: as a relatively noble, inspiring and passionate period. Alov and Naumov replaced Ostrovskii's robotic Pavel Korchagin with a hero who renounces personal happiness ('this isn't the time for love') at the cost of horrific, graphically delineated suffering. Chukhrai's protagonists, White Army officer and Red Army sniper, fall so deeply in love, and Chukhrai's cameraman Sergei Urusevskii filmed their idyll with such lyricism and beauty that the lovers' passion and tenderness enjoy parity with - if not primacy over - revolutionary duty.
Throughout the Thaw, and well into the Brezhnev years, the Second World War became a touchstone of Soviet culture, in part because it represented the single unifying experience of a history otherwise bloody with political and ideological divisions. At the Twenty-Second Congress Khrushchev extended his earlier criticism of Stalin to include the army purges of 1937 and the treatment of returning Soviet POWs, unleashing a wave ofmemoirs, lyrics, autobiographical fiction and movies that reflected the knowledge and experience of the vast majority of Soviet citizens. Finally, civilian dedication to the war effort ranked as no less heroic than combat bravery, and civilian losses as no less painful than death on the battlefield. In fiction by Vasilii Grossman, Boris Balter and Bulat Okudzhava, the private dramas (and melodramas) contingent upon the war took precedence over military strategy, to the point that movies began routinely to avoid battle-scene heroics, instead locating their heroes in the interstices between battles (Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo)), in the undramatic hell of the Nazi prison camp, where heroism equalled dogged determination to survive (Bondarchuk's Fate of a Man (Sud'ba cheloveka, 1959)), or away from the front altogether, as in Chukhrai's Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o soldate, 1959) (see Plate 22), where the only 'battle scene' mocks conventional heroics by showing the hero running away from a tank.
The idealism and/or naivety of the early Thaw years disappeared by the end of the decade, its demise hastened by the establishment's loathsome attacks on Boris Pasternak when he won the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature. As the Thaw lurched into the early i960s, the 'real, struggling, ascetic' hero morphed into many kinds of hero operating in every sort of context (war, village, kolkhoz, factory, scientific institute, rapidly growing city) and genre. Consistently, however, characters were 'no longer apprehended primarily in terms of their attitudes toward the work they perform, their degree of social dedication or the extent to which they have absorbed official dogma and patterns of conduct'.[66] We encounter many vulnerable and/or innocent protagonists: children, whose age protects them from the corruption of adults and whose lack of subterfuge authenticates their vision of the world; teenagers, honest about their fears and tentative about their hopes; young women who fail to live up to their own ideals or who succumb to intolerable pressures. These heroines, not coinci- dentally, animated the many melodramas that appeared during the Thaw; the genre's 'revival of private life as a legitimate subject for the arts' made it 'an especially apt tool for exploring the individual within the collective, the private morality underneath the strictures on public performances, the tensions resulting from political manipulations of both public and private morality. [It offered] escape . . . from a social and moral certainty imposed from above.'[67]
So did the poetry recited at open-air readings, a public event revived in the late 1950s that attracted thousands of listeners and turned younger poets - Robert Rozhdestvenskii, Evtushenko and Voznesenskii, Iunna Morits, Bulat Okudzhava, Bella Akhmadulina - into cult figures; so did the concurrent wave of'youth prose' and its attendant cinematic movement. Although many cliches lurkbeneath the colloquialisms, sly humour and taste for rock' n' roll that characterise Vasilii Aksenov and Andrei Bitov's heroes, these authors confronted the painful fissures of Soviet society without proposing easy or dogmatic solutions. Their characters, tired of 'kvass patriotism, official bombast, and village-style surveillance by the neighbours of their clothing, their morals, and their leisure habits',[68] did not obediently turn to their elders for paradigms. 'Puzzled and concerned about the future, socially disoriented and, in some degree, psychologically bemused',[69] they tried to devise 'ethical standards to replace outworn or suspect ones'.29
Khrushchev's speech at the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961 invigorated the liberals and stimulated a year of exciting cultural developments. Stravinsky made his first visit to his homeland in half a century, as did George Balanchine (after forty years away), who brought the New York City
Ballet. Yehudi and Hepzibah Menuhin toured the Soviet Union; Shostakovich's 'Babii Iar' Symphony, incorporating the text of Evtushenko's poetic memorial to Jewish victims of Nazi slaughter outside Kiev, premiered in December 1962. Moscow museums dusted off and displayed canvases by modernists like Bakst and Larionov. Evtushenko's 'Heirs of Stalin', a passionate and forceful assault on neo-Stalinism, appeared in the autumn, as did the first half of Viktor Nekrasov's account of trips to Italy and the USA, Both Sides of the Ocean (Po obe storony okeana), in which he criticised isolationist Soviet cultural policies. Most shocking, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in November's Novyi mir, principally thanks to editor Aleksandr Tvardovskii and his shrewd campaign for Khrushchev's personal intervention. The top box-office success of 1962, The Amphibious Man (Chelovek-amfibiia), responded to Khrushchev's revelations by presenting a political allegory about a brilliant scientist's underwater utopia whose only inhabitant - his amphibious son Ikhtiandr - pays for the dreams and desires of his father. 'I wanted to make you the happiest of men,' Dr Salvator apologises to his son, 'and instead I made you unhappy. Forgive me.'
Conservatives fought back, especially after the humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Khrushchev retreated: he 'had to give his conservative opponents something', and culture 'was the most disposable part of his reforms'.[70]Throughout 1963, at a series of meetings between party leaders and artists, Khrushchev and his ideological overseer Leonid Ilichev delivered speeches (immediately printed in major newspapers) insisting on party control of the arts, rejecting Western and modernist influences, and shrilly denying anything resembling a generation gap in Soviet society. Khrushchev personally denounced Nekrasov, for Both Sides ofthe Ocean and for the writer's praise of Marlen Khutsiev's Ilich's Gate (Zastava Il'icha), a particularly provoking film.
67
Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, 'Introduction', in Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger (eds.),