Word: thaws
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Yevgeni Yevtushenko, 53, has for three decades been the most famous poet in the Soviet Union, a country where poets often become national heroes. A young rebel in the late 1950s, he flourished during the cultural thaw of the Khrushchev years. After Brezhnev came to power in 1964, Yevtushenko adapted to more conservative times, becoming a supporter of the government and writing verse acceptable to the Kremlin. In this article written for TIME, he gives his views of the changes under Gorbachev...
Then we had our famous but short-lived thaw. It came to an end when Khrushchev, unnerved by the Cuban missile crisis, scornfully attacked a number of writers and artists. Later, during his retirement, Khrushchev asked me to convey his belated apologies to some of them. So, always in the past, when the international climate cooled, the ideological screws were tightened...
...current ferment is reminiscent of the early 1960s, when Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev allowed the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the first detailed description of life in ! the Soviet Gulag. That thaw gradually congealed after Khrushchev's ouster. It remains to be seen how long Gorbachev will leave Soviet culture open to the winds of free inquiry...
...that it can be modified. It can give way to a society with more space. How much? Writing 20 years ago, one of the great theorists of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, noted a "detotalitarization" in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. This could not be dismissed as a temporary thaw, she argued. True, the Soviet Union has never since returned to the depths of Stalinism. But it has not moved significantly in the opposite direction either. Instead, it has been subject to cycles of thaw and freeze. The relative liberalization under Khrushchev was significantly reversed under Brezhnev. The cycle...
Five days after they were installed, Jewett ordered the grates dismantled. The television cameras stopped rolling. And the issue of homelessness silently receded into the background as the nearby river began to thaw...