Word: khrushchevism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...nearly as tragic as its subject matter. Although Solzhenitsyn had begun researching the book in 1958, he did not start writing it until 1964, just as official Soviet acceptance of his works had be gun to wane. The 1962 publication in Russia of One Day, by Premier Nikita Khrushchev's order, had prompted hundreds of former prisoners to write to Solzhenitsyn, detailing their own experiences. Deeply moved, Solzhenitsyn shut himself up in a ramshackle dacha to work. He completed Gulag four years later. Solzhenitsyn was then unwilling to risk endangering his correspondents and those he had interviewed by allowing...
...published in the U.S., Ten Years is a crisp, contemptuous and sometimes sardonic record of Russia's intellectual life in the decade since Nikita Khrushchev's temporary thaw allowed Alexander Solzhenitsyn to publish his novel about life in a Stalinist work camp. At first Khrushchev praised One Day, but in March 1963 he told a meeting of party leaders and intellectuals: "Take my word for it, this is a very dangerous theme. It's a kind of stew that will attract flies like a carcass; all sorts of bourgeois scum from abroad will come crawling all over...
Orchestrated Mail. After Khrushchev, the new Soviet leaders took up repression again in a serious way - isolating the rebellious, taking away their jobs, jailing them, sending them to asylums. Lesser-known dissidents were easily silenced. The better known, like Solzhenitsyn, have tried to save themselves with publicity. Yet in May 1972, says Medvedev, it seemed that the stage had been set to charge Russia's greatest living writer with defaming the Soviet state. Richard Nixon was then on his way to Moscow, however. As Medvedev dryly relates: "An agreement was expected, amongst many others, on cultural and scientific affairs...
...book is most interesting. He understands how campaigns of public opinion are mounted, as when Pravda presented an outpouring of orchestrated "mail" against awarding Solzhenitsyn the Lenin Prize. There is a cold fascination in learning that Glavlit-the machinery of hacks that controls censorship-could overrule even First Secretary Khrushchev about what should be published. More recently, Novelist Mikhail Sholokhov (Quiet Flows the Don) had to delete a chapter from a new novel called They Fought for the Motherland at the censors' insistence because it dealt with prison-camp tortures. In its place, Sholokhov substituted a discussion of fishing...
Then history began to play tricks on Allen Drury. The U-2 incident and Khrushchev banging his shoe. First moves into Viet Nam. Civil rights in the South. In the 1962 sequel to Advise and Consent, Drury tried to keep up. He escalated his story into a counterinsurgency war in Central Africa, coupled with radical attempts to exploit racial strife in the U.S. He also moved his senatorial heroes into the still windier forum of the United Nations. But these days no writer should play "Can You Top This?" with history...