Live and Remember | CU Experts

Abstract; Village writers’ critique of the Soviet state became increasingly radical in the late Brezhnev era, setting the stage for an explosion of activism in the late 1980s. Russian Village Prose writers, along with the Moldovan author Ion Druță and the Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov (both of whom had relocated to Moscow due to “policies of exclusion” in their native republics), portrayed memory of the rural, national past as central to morality in their literary works. They suggested that Soviet policies produced “mankurts,” Aitmatov’s term for denationalized individuals who had lost their memory and moral bearings. Meanwhile, in Ukraine and Moldova, Party officials adopted harsh policies toward writers who espoused similar ideas. The policy of exclusion in Ukraine further alienated intellectuals like the Ukrainian prose writer Oles’ Honchar from the Soviet state. Village writers’ criticism of the Soviet state became increasingly bold in the early years of the 1980s. The Belarusian writer Vasil’ Bykaŭ directly attacked Stalin’s policy of agricultural collectivization, the foundation of Soviet rule in the countryside. The need for environmental protection also emerged in works by the Armenian writer Hrant Matevosyan and the Russian writer Valentin Rasputin, laying the groundwork for environmental activism in the Gorbachev era.

VIVO