I. Scan the text, explain the words in bold, search the dictionary for the collocations these words may be used in. Make up your own examples with these words.

The Stalin era was a dark and destructive age in the history of Russian culture, by far the most repressive since Muscovite times. It is to Khrushchev’s credit that under his leadership that terrible era came to an end. To be sure, there was nothing like the cultural freedom enjoyed in the democratic West, nor, for that matter, did Soviet artists, writers, and musicians have the freedom of expression their counterparts enjoyed in Imperial Russia during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union still determined the limits on artistic expression. But those limits became far less restrictive, and artists who exceeded them did so at the risk of their careers, not, as was the case under Stalin, their freedom or lives. At the same time, it was not always clear what those limits were, as Khrushchev extended or limited them according to the political pressures he was under from conservative forces within Soviet ruling circles or, sometimes, according to his own arbitrary personal agenda or motives.

Soviet cultural life began to revive, albeit haltingly, almost immediately after Stalin’s death, a period that received its unofficial title from a novel called The Thaw by llya Ehrenburg (1891–1967), a talented novelist and journalist who during his long career had shown occasional flashes of independence while serving mainly as an apologist for Stalin. The pace of change quickened in 1956 after the 20th Party Congress, most notably with the publication of Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, an exposé of party corruption. The upheavals in Poland and Hungary in the fall of 1956 led to a crackdown that put Dudintstev under a cloud and culminated in the persecution of Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), one of the many pre-revolutionary poets silenced during the Stalin years.

Pasternak ran afoul of the authorities in 1957 when he allowed his novel Dr. Zhivago to be published abroad. The book focused on the individual’s fate during times of upheaval and raised serious questions about the Bolshevik Revolution. Making matters worse, Dr. Zhivago was both a commercial and a critical success, winning its author the Nobel Prize in literature in 1958. A torrent of official abuse poured down on Pasternak, who, it turned out, had only three more years to live.

But the cultural genie was out of the Stalinist bottle, and Khrushchev – whose fundamental commitment to de-Stalinization did not change – did not want to imprison the genie in that vessel again. By 1959 Dudintsev was restored to good standing.

During the mid-1950s a youthful group of talented poets came of age, among them Yevgeny Yevtushenko, an admirer of Pasternak. In the decades to follow Yevtushenko would use his art and his international celebrity status to extend the limits of reform; he walked a fine line between dissidence, which the authorities would tolerate, and outright dissent, which they would not. In 1961 Yevtushenko published “Babi Yar,” a stunning, emotional denunciation of Soviet anti-Semitism. In 1962 came “The Heirs of Stalin,” eerie and ominous, which warned that despite the reforms since 1953 Stalin’s heirs were still alive and powerful and that a Stalinist reaction was therefore possible. That same year Khrushchev personally intervened to permit the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a novella that became a literary bombshell by exposing the horrors of Stalin’s labor camps to the general Soviet population as never before.

Khrushchev’s tolerance for artistic expression was fickle as well as erratic, and it most definitely did not extend to modern art. In December 1962, while visiting an exhibition of standard socialist realist art in the Manezh Exhibition Hall near the Kremlin, Khrushchev was directed to an exhibition of modern art elsewhere in the building. It was not a serendipitous detour but rather a scheme by conservatives who wanted to enlist the first secretary in their effort to curb unconventional artistic expression. Khrushchev did not disappoint them, at least in terms of his initial reaction. Among his printable remarks, which included threats against the artists, was the observation that “a donkey could do better with its tail” (Medvedev 1984: 217).

But Khrushchev’s response to the exhibit went further, and in doing so showed that times truly had changed. After his initial outburst the Soviet premier demanded to meet the person in charge of the exhibition. That happened to be a tough former paratrooper turned sculptor named Ernst Neizvestny. In spite of what he later called “the fear in the air,” Neizvestny did not back down in the face of harsh criticism, a daring act that would have been inconceivable under Stalin, and bluntly told Khrushchev that he knew nothing about art. The two men argued back and forth until Khrushchev ended the conversation with words that showed how far the Soviet Union still had to go, but also with a simple gesture that revealed how far it had come. As Neizvestny later recalled, “My talk with Khrushchev ended like this. He said, ‘You’re an interesting man – I enjoy people like you – but inside you there are an angel and a devil. If the devil wins, we’ll crush you. If the angel wins, we’ll do all we can to help you.’ And he gave me his hand” (Medvedev 1984: 218).