Bittner, Stephen V. The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw

Bittner, Stephen V. The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008.

A focus on artistic intelligentsia. An interesting metaphor – Thaw as an operation of ‘inclusion’ in comparison to ‘exclusion’. Discusses why Thaw was not an attempt of ‘liberalization’ in its own right (which is true), but doesn’t mention the point that it was an attempt of return to ‘pre-stalinist’ visions of the soviet state, hence it could not, by definition, be anything going in the western direction. Chapter 1 “History and Myth of the Arbat” – a socio-cultural description of the place, “the Arbat myth.” Chapter 2 “A Cult of Personality and a Rhapsody in Blue.” Gnesin institute as a site of struggle over formalism and reforms.

Interestingly – he doesn’t make this conclusion, but his material shows that since there was only one site of cultural production in the Soviet Union, stakes in struggle between different cultural forms were unusually high: whereas in other societies they simply differentiated in different sites, here that had to come along within one framework of cultural production (chapter 1, second part – 54-65, for example, but in many other places as well).

Chapter 3, “Raining on Turandot.” Theater as a return to the revolutionary poetics of the 1920s. Chapter 4, “Remembering the Avante-garde” – how New Arbat was built to embody new post-Stalinist architecture and visions of the urban space. Arbat as an old place of memory damaged. New Arbat as rehabilitation of constructivism. Chapter 5, “Preserving the Past, Empowering the Public”: how public support was rallied to preserve certain (read: intellectuals’) visions of the past and secure their voice and say in politics/cultural production. Preservation of historical buildings as a field where new Russian nationalist discourse of Brezhnev’s time was born. Chapter six “Dissidence and the End of the Thaw” – about ‘closing’ of the political and cultural system in the wake of Khrushchev’s dismissal. Arrest of Daniel and Sinyavsky as a turning point where Thaw became an object of nostalgia itself.