Contents Prologue: The Fate of Zhivago's Intelligentsia 1. The "Children" Grow Up, 1945-1955 2. Shock Effects, 1956-1958 3. Rediscovery of the World, 1955-1961 4. Optimists on the Move, 1957-1961 5. The Intelligentsia Reborn, 1959-1962 6. The Vanguard Disowned, 1962-1964 7. Searching for Roots, 1961-1967 8. Between Reform and Dissent, 1965-1968 9. The Long Decline, 1968-1985 Epilogue: The End of the Intelligentsia List of Abbreviations Notes Acknowledgments Index
Zubok distills the ideas, personalities, and ultimate failures of the generation of Russian intellectuals who sought to cleanse socialism of its Stalinist stain. His poignant portrait raises the question of whether Russia will ever again be fully open to the mixture of idealism and moderation that Zhivago's children represented. -- William Taubman, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Khruschev: The Man and His Era This magnificent book reveals like no other the deepest currents of Russian culture that flowed beneath the surface of Soviet political life and helped sweep away the rusted remnants of Stalin's oppressive creation. Zubok reaffirms his reputation as one of our preeminent historians of Soviet politics and culture. -- Martin J. Sherwin, Pulitzer prize- winning co-author with Kai Bird of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer An epic story indeed! Zubok tells the checkered tale of the Soviet intelligentsia with critical acumen and admirable compassion. He pursues their agonies and aspirations through the terrors and thaws of Soviet history as the intelligentsia rose to an apogee of hope in the years of glasnost, only to fall into today's abyss of market banditry. -- Richard Stites, Professor of History, Georgetown University Zhivago's Children charts the generation of educated Russians coming of age after Stalin's death whose socialist idealism ultimately helped bring down the Soviet state. An absorbing and important account of civic hopes and disillusionments that continue to resonate today in Russia and beyond. -- Jochen Hellbeck, author of Revolution on My Mind
Vladislav Zubok is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics.
Zubok distills the ideas, personalities, and ultimate failures of
the generation of Russian intellectuals who sought to cleanse
socialism of its Stalinist stain. His poignant portrait raises the
question of whether Russia will ever again be fully open to the
mixture of idealism and moderation that Zhivago's children
represented.
*William Taubman, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Khruschev:
The Man and His Era*
This magnificent book reveals like no other the deepest currents of
Russian culture that flowed beneath the surface of Soviet political
life and helped sweep away the rusted remnants of Stalin's
oppressive creation. Zubok reaffirms his reputation as one of our
preeminent historians of Soviet politics and culture.
*Martin J. Sherwin, Pulitzer prize- winning co-author with Kai Bird
of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert
Oppenheimer*
An epic story indeed! Zubok tells the checkered tale of the Soviet
intelligentsia with critical acumen and admirable compassion. He
pursues their agonies and aspirations through the terrors and thaws
of Soviet history as the intelligentsia rose to an apogee of hope
in the years of glasnost, only to fall into today's abyss of market
banditry.
*Richard Stites, Professor of History, Georgetown University*
Zhivago's Children charts the generation of educated Russians
coming of age after Stalin's death whose socialist idealism
ultimately helped bring down the Soviet state. An absorbing and
important account of civic hopes and disillusionments that continue
to resonate today in Russia and beyond.
*Jochen Hellbeck, author of Revolution on My Mind*
Students of 1960s cultural ferment, Russian-style, will find much
substance in Zubok's account.
*Booklist*
Using Zhivago as a metaphor for the postwar intelligentsia, Zubok
presents a compelling, well-written, and well-researched history of
an important but neglected aspect of Soviet history.
*Library Journal*
Vladislav Zubok takes us into the creative and intellectual world
of all Zhivago's children: that generation of artists, scientists
and thinkers who came after Boris Pasternak and Stalin. Zubok has
no illusions about them. In the end they may not have lived up to
the hopes they inspired or have met the standards of generations of
Russian intellectuals that went before. But it was an idealistic
generation as well and, in the end, they paved the way for end of
the Soviet regime.
*The Age*
In his moving Zhivago's Children, historian Vladislav Zubok
chronicles the rise and fall of this generation of Russian
intellectuals, a group he calls "the spiritual heirs of Boris
Pasternak's noble doctor."...The players in Zubok's fascinating
study come from all corners of the Soviet intelligentsia, from
leftist socialist true believers to right-wing patriots. The result
is a thorough, scholarly examination of a vital era in Russian
history whose themes of human rights, freedom and dissent will
resonate among experts and lay readers alike.
*Washington Post Book World*
A revealing, thoroughly researched and important book infused with
elegiac tones. Stalin's Russia had encouraged education and
technical know-how, yet its leaders had blindly assumed that the
country's intellectuals would remain unthinking, easily controlled
cogs in the vast machine of the state. But some men and women born
in the 1930s and '40s refused to play their assigned role,
particularly after the leader's death in 1953 and Nikita
Khrushchev's new policies of de-Stalinization and the Thaw
suggested a new dawn was at hand...Zhivago's children flourished
throughout the second half of the 1950s and into the '60s. It was a
time of great optimism and hope. Among the best known in the West
of these shestidesiatniki, or men of the sixties, is the poet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, but Zubok's book chronicles the stories of
many other noteworthy figures.
*Seattle Times*
Zubok has done a thorough and worthwhile job in recounting the fate
of Zhivago's children, drawing on their own numerous diaries and
memoirs, but also on archives and personal interviews with
them.
*Times Literary Supplement*
This book is a worthy tribute to the history of a unique, and
uniquely important, feature of modern Russian life.
*Times Higher Education*
The Soviet Union was a prison, especially for the lively minded,
whose travel abroad and activities at home were dictated by the
Communist Party's cultural commissars. But in the period between
the end of the Stalin terror and the start of the Brezhnev era's
grim stagnation, a lucky few enjoyed some wisps of freedom.
Cultural continuity between that period and a lost past is the
central theme of Zhivago's Children. The metaphorical reference is
to Tanya, the child of Yuri and Lara Zhivago in Boris Pasternak's
great novel. Brought up by peasants, "she has no opportunity to
inherit the tradition of free-thinking, spirituality and creativity
that her father embodied." How will she turn out? The novel leaves
that fictional question unanswered. Vladislav Zubok's book shows,
with great sympathy and insight, what happened to Tanya's real-life
counterparts.
*The Economist*
Vladislav Zubok has written a splendid account of Russian
intellectual and cultural life in the half century after the Great
Patriotic War, which we call World War II. He vividly portrays not
only "the struggle of intellectuals and artists to regain autonomy
from an autocratic regime," but "the slow and painful disappearance
of their revolutionary-romantic idealism and optimism, their faith
in progress and in the enlightenment of people."...Zubok makes it a
glorious story to read!
*New Leader*
Zubok is a reliable and prodigiously well-informed guide to the
opinions, attitudes, and changing fortunes of loyal Soviet
intellectuals during the approximately twenty years between the
early 1950s and 1970s...Zubok tells his story with a density of
detail and complexity of analysis that is truly remarkable. Ranging
across the entire spectrum of Soviet cultural life, he carefully
plots the rise and fall of magazines, publishing houses, and
cultural institutions, together with the changing consciousness of
the intellectuals--writers, editors, scholars, government
bureaucrats--as they adjusted to ongoing revelations about the
past, digested each new crisis, and tried to take advantage of the
new freedoms they appeared to promise...Zubok has done a fine job
of characterizing a slice of Russian intellectual life over a
couple of turbulent decades of Soviet history...[An] intelligent
and engrossing book.
*New York Review of Books*
Vladislav Zubok has written a meticulously researched and
perceptive study of the generations succeeding Zhivago, showing how
desperately they tried, against the worst efforts of successive
leaderships from 1945 to 1985, to retain values that they regarded
as vital to their own and their society's moral survival. The
record shows a jagged graph of comparative freedoms and stern
reprisals, but their struggles are inspirational...Zubok's detailed
book is a highly rewarding and unusual foray into a fascinating
national situation, but its implications are universal. Any country
too busy doing business to support the values kept alive by
idealistic artists, writers and critics will visit moral bankruptcy
on its own children.
*Australian Book Review*
In this magnificent book, Zubok eviscerates the reductive
opposition of communist and anti-communist, of hard-liner and
dissident, of being for or against the regime, categories that are
far too crude to capture the nuances of Soviet life. Zhivago's
Children were never entirely communist or anti-communist, and they
were simultaneously Soviet and anti-Soviet.
*Dissent*
For Vladislav Zubok, the author of Zhivago's Children, Khrushchev's
Thaw inaugurated a period of tremendous optimism, a Soviet-style
New Deal following the deep freeze of postwar Stalinism. Surveying
a vast array of published and unpublished sources with an exquisite
eye for telling detail, Zubok shows how the optimism of the era
drew deeply on the classical inheritance of Marxism-Leninism.
Contrary to assessments by foreign observers eager for signs of
anticommunist ferment, the '60s intellectuals of the USSR were
inspired by the dream of fulfilling, not transcending, the ideals
of 1917...Vladislav Zubok began his academic career in Moscow as a
specialist in American political history, only to move to the
United States in the mid-1980s, where he became an internationally
renowned scholar of Soviet cold war foreign policy. With Zhivago's
Children Zubok has reinvented himself yet again, this time as an
accomplished cultural historian of his native land. His book is an
elegiac account of the final chapter in the history of the Russian
intelligentsia, a group that survived revolution, civil war, Nazi
onslaught and Stalinist repression, only to succumb to the supreme
solvent of its life-ways: the free market.
*The Nation*
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