Telling the Truth About the Soviet Village | CU Experts

Abstract; Chapter 2 unfolds in Moscow during the early years of the “Thaw” in the 1950s, when Stalin’s death and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev opened the door for a public discussion of Stalin’s oppressive policies toward the countryside. This chapter argues that the reaction against Stalinist agricultural policies was a major aspect of de-Stalinization and demonstrates that much of the early discourse of the Thaw revolved around the policies of the late Stalin years, rather than the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Encouraged by Aleksandr Tvardovskii (head editor of the journal Novyi mir), the Russian writers Valentin Ovechkin, Fedor Abramov, and Aleksandr Yashin criticized the wide gap between rosy Stalinist literature about the village and harsh postwar realities. In works published in Novyi mir and Literaturnaia Moskva, they challenged Stalinist narratives by depicting the village (and not the Party) as the source of the truth, laying the groundwork for future nationalist discourse. Debates over the representation of rural life under Stalin spurred the revival of 1930s discourses of “truth” and “sincerity,” which became the central terms of the Thaw in literature. The chapter introduces the term “de-Stalinization from below” to describe efforts to challenge Stalinist policies and narratives that went beyond the top-down form of de-Stalinization initiated by Nikita Khrushchev in his famous “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956.

VIVO