Nonconformity from the 1950s

• Khrushchev and Art

  • 'Thaws and Freezes'.
  • Contradictions in Khrushchev's approach to art; Khrushchev under pressure from Communist Party to maintain control and suppress the truth about the true horrors of Stalin's policies.
  • Alliance between Party and Artists; increase university investment meant Soviet intelligentsia grew rapidly; Khrushchev said intellectuals should help build socialism.
  • Communism should liberate artists.
  • Inconsistent; believed workers not ready for total freedom; could destabilise the Party; policy flip-flopped.
• Khrushchev's Thaws

  • 1953-54; Ehrenburg's story 'The Thaw' published; critical of Stalinist mass terror.
  • 1956-57; Khrushchev's Secret Speech led to Dudintsev's 'Not by Bread Alone'; focus on worker's battles with unjust Party bureaucracy.
  • 1961-62; after 22nd Party Congress - many books critical of Stalin published; Solzhenitsyn's 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' tells the story of a GULAG Prisoner.
  • World Youth Festival 1957; young people danced to jazz music and African Drumming; US Jazz Composer George Gershwin taught in Soviet schools from late 1950s.
• Khrushchev's freezes

  • Artistic expression went beyond the limits that authorities were prepared to tolerate.
  • Doctor Zhivago; Boris Pasternak; critical of Lenin so unacceptable to Khrushchev; banned until 1980s.
  • Moscow Art Exhibition; Khrushchev called Neizvestny's abstract artwork 'dog shit'.
  • Final Freeze; arrest and imprisonment of several artists; poet Josef Brodsky arrested in 1964.
• Propaganda and 'Popular Oversight'

  • Portrayal of Citizens; under Stalin, heroic portrayal; under Khrushchev, posters poked fun at Soviet people; Fomichev and Denisovski designed posters that showed a new perspective.
  • 'Popular Oversight'; non-conformists shown as bald, fat, lazy; 'The Alcoholic' shows drunk in pool of own vomit; citizens would keep others under surveillance; good citizens encouraged to give helpful advice - poster 'When two girls met'.
  • Economic ineffiency; 'The Cowshed' pokes fun at ineffiencies of Soviet farms by showing two cows living in a palace with chandeliers.
• Disciplining 'Style Hunters'

  • Anti-Consumerism; officials felt women would engage in glamour and reckless shopping; campaign against 'stilyaga' (style-hunters); Gosplan felt women's desires to shop caused economic problems in consumer society; 'Teacher's Gazette' advice.
  • Female Sexuality; 'loose women' wore fashionable clothes - sexual promiscuity; 1957 World Music Festival - women caught having sex with foreign men had heads shaved, sent to Virgin Land Scheme; rise in teenage pregnancies; abortion increased; welfare encouraged women to marry and raise kids instead of expressing sexuality.
• The 1970s and early 1980s

  • Anti-Western Fashion; teachers discouraged Western clothing; comedy film 'An Office Romance' backfired as many female viewers identified with the ridiculed fashionable secretary rather than her conservatively-dressed Boss.
  • Men; during 1970s, men approached private tailors for Western-style suits.
  • Pop culture; government lost the battle against urban women.
  • By mid-1970s, the fashion hunters had won.
• Deviant Artists

  • 'Samizdat' movement; Khrushchev thaw did not extend to all artists; writers produced 'samizdat' (self-published) literature; Ginzburg led 'samizdat' movement; edited magazine 'Syntax' which circulated on Black Market; Dr Zhivago refused.
  • Psychiatric Repression; artists who refused to submit to goernment control sent to mental asylums to be cured; Josef Brodsky sent to the Serbsky Institute, where he was confined with people who suffered from violent mental illness; poor conditions; inmates lived on watery soup, in cold and damp conditions; mental health deteriorated.