Nonconformity From the 1950s (Edexcel A Level History): Revision Note

Summary

• This note will examine the development of the arts in Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's regimes

• From the 1950s to 1985, cultural life swung between thaw and freeze

  • Khrushchev’s reforms opened the door to limited creativity

  • Brezhnev’s rule reinstated control

• Despite censorship, artists and intellectuals found ways to resist

  • This created a second culture outside of official Soviet ideology

Impact of de-Stalinisation on culture

The 'thaw'

• Khrushchev’s Secret Speech (1956) criticised Stalin’s cult of personality and brutality

  • This created a “cultural thaw”

• Censorship was relaxed slightly

  • Artists and writers began to explore new themes such as:

    • Individual emotion

    • Everyday life

    • Moral questions

Achievements of the 'thaw'

Ilya Ehrenburg and 'The Thaw' (1954)

• Ehrenburg’s novella The Thaw gave its name to the whole period of relaxed censorship after Stalin’s death

• The story follows ordinary Soviet citizens coming to terms with fear, guilt, and moral compromise after years of repression

• This was revolutionary because it portrayed Soviet people as flawed and emotional, rather than heroic and perfect as in Socialist Realism

Vladimir Dudintsev and 'Not by Bread Alone' (1956)

• Dudintsev’s novel told the story of an engineer who invents a new machine but faces endless challenges from Party bureaucrats

• The book exposed how bureaucracy prevented innovation and progress

  • This connected with people's real frustrations of Soviet society

Limitations of the 'thaw'

• The 'thaw' was only temporary

  • Towards the end of Khrushchev's rule, the government began restricting the arts again

Boris Pasternak and 'Doctor Zhivago' (1957)

• Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago told the story of a doctor and poet living through the Revolution and the Russian Civil War

• The book subtly criticised the:

  • Brutality of the Revolution

  • Loss of personal freedom

• The Soviet government reacted furiously

  • They expelled Pasternak from the Writers’ Union

  • The state forced him to decline a Nobel Prize

  • State media launched a propaganda campaign calling him a “traitor to socialism”

Nonconformity under Khrushchev and Brezhnev

Why was nonconformity an issue?

• Many young people began to dress, speak, and think differently

  • Western music, fashion, and films influenced them

• The leadership worried that cultural openness was turning into moral decay and ideological weakness

Nonconformity under Khrushchev

The focus on 'popular oversight'

• To tackle nonconformity, the regime promoted the idea of “popular oversight” (narodnyi kontrol)

  • Ordinary citizens were expected to police each other’s morals and loyalty

  • People were encouraged to offer advice to people living in 'morally wrong' ways

    • This was different that the mass reporting to the state under Stalin's regime

Disciplining “style hunters”

• The Soviet press in the late 1950s and early 1960s began criticising stilyagi, or 'style hunters'

  • These were young people who copied Western fashion and culture by:

    • Wearing bright, tight suits

    • Listening to jazz and rock ’n’ roll

• Officials and newspapers labelled them as:

  • Lazy

  • Wasteful

  • Ideologically impure

• The government organised campaigns of ridicule and re-education

  • The state even arrested stilyagi for “hooliganism”

• Films and propaganda showed stilyagi as comic villains who failed to live up to socialist ideals

Nonconformity under Brezhnev

• Under Brezhnev, censorship tightened again

  • Brezhnev criticised the impact of Khrushchev's 'thaw' on Soviet society

  • He wanted to regain political stability under his concept of 'developed socialism'

• Official art focused on predictable, safe subjects, such as:

  • Happy workers

  • Loyal Party members

  • Pride for the Revolution

  • Soviet achievements

• Official attempts to ridicule non-conformity often failed

  • An Office Romance (1977) ridicules a fashionable young female secretary for provocative clothing

  • However, audiences identified with her

    • It became a mass hit with around 58.4 million viewers in 1978

    • It normalising Western-style dress and boosting demand for trendy clothes

Clashes between Soviet artists & the government to 1985

Joseph Brodsky (1964)

• Brodsky was a poet who refused to join the Soviet Writers’ Union

  • This made his work technically illegal to publish

• In 1964, he was arrested and charged with “social parasitism”

  • The state saw him as someone who did not contribute to society because he had no 'official job'

• At his trial, Brodsky famously defended the role of the poet as a moral guide, not a servant of the state

• The state punished him by sending him to the Serbsky Institute and treated as if he suffered from mental illness

  • Brodsky was later forced into exile in 1972

  • He went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987

The Sinyavsky–Daniel Trial (September 1965)

• Writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel secretly wrote satirical stories

  • They used pseudonyms to publish their work in the West

  • Their works criticised the hypocrisy and spiritual emptiness of Soviet life under Khrushchev and Brezhnev

• They were arrested by the KGB and accused of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”

• The trial was essentially a Show trial

• They received five and seven years in labour camps

  • This shocked many in the USSR and abroad

The Moscow Conceptualists (1970s–1980s)

• The Moscow Conceptualists were a loose group of artists

  • They used irony and parody to expose the truth about everyday Soviet life

• Artists such as Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov created works that looked like official propaganda

• Their art was often displayed illegally in apartments or unofficial exhibitions

  • For example, the 1974 'Bulldozer Exhibition'

    • The name comes from the exhibit being destroyed by police using bulldozers and water hoses