Cultural change

• Personal freedom emerges as the restrictions are lifted under Khrushchev
• People could listen to western media and read it
• limited number of Soviets could go abroad

  • prove the soviet was a good place
  • the ballet companies took talent to show the world the Soviets
• Invit’s tourists into the Soviet Union and see the Moscow metro etc

  • Soviet citizens witnessed westerners and broadened their horizons
  • World festival of youth in 1957 attended by 30k people by 131 Countries
• Russian version of teddy boys emerge
• Students become rebellious

  • Bulk populaition under 30 which becomes threatening
• the system is most vulnerable when it’s reforming
• High culture :

  • Anna Akhmatova was ridiculed - rehabilitated and wrote poetry that was never published and it was published
  • Two russias stare each other - the ones who put them in prison and the ones put
  • Test the limits - any criticism of Stalin allowed but party not
• Novy Mir - main publish house

  • All literature had to stay in service of party when they asked to reveal realities of soviet life
• Boris Pasternak wrote Dr Zhivago - Novy Mir refuse it so he publishes it in Italy 1957

  • 1958 awarded Nobel prize for literature for it
  • CIA thought if they could smuggle copies into the soviet theyd wake up
  • Expelled from writers union and forced to denounce Nobel prize
• October 1960 Grossman releases Life and fate

  • 20th century war and peace
  • KGB arrest his book and typewriter
  • Difference between Stalin and Khrushchev
  • Appeals to Khrushchev directly but told no for 2 or 300 years
  • 1988 published in soviet
• One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich

  • About him being in a Gulag
  • Bewilderment
  • Sold over 1 million copies in 6 months
  • 1962 published
• Heirs of Stalin

  • Warning against Stalinism
• Height of freedom in publishing is under Khrushchev
• Khrushchev didn't use art like Stalin

  • He disliked modern art