Vladislav Zubok, who teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia, has written a meticulously researched and perceptive study of the generations succeeding Zhivago, showing how desperately they tried, against the worst efforts of successive leaderships from 1945 to 1985, to retain values that they regarded as vital to their own and their society’s moral survival. The record shows a jagged graph of comparative freedoms and stern reprisals, but their struggles are inspirational. After the war, for example, educated people packed large halls to hear readings by poets such as Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova. Outright political discussion was impossible, but debates over science, literature and music countered the official teaching that Stalin knew best. When disquieting events such as ‘The Doctors’ Plot’ could not be ignored, high culture and science became loci of escape; smuggled American films, which attained iconic status, were another.

Khrushchev’s partial dismantling of the Stalinist cult in 1956 created a crisis for many students and intellectuals, unsure whether to feel relieved or shocked. Evgeny Yevtushenko overheard a conversation in which a younger poet proclaimed, ‘The Revolution is dead and its corpse is stinking’, only to be corrected: ‘The Revolution isn’t dead but sick, and we must help it’; both speakers were confused by their hunger for personal freedom and their sincere belief in collectivism. The Soviet invasion of Hungary later that year sharpened perceptions irrevocably; Khrushchev, with neither ‘the vision or the intellectual ability’ to consolidate full de-Stalinisation, used a writers’ revolt, coupled with a KGB report that the revolution in Budapest had begun in a writers’ club, to crack down on all forms of ‘cultural liberalisation’.

Although that freeze was replaced by a new policy of ‘cultural diplomacy’, double-think remained. The gradual replacement of old communal flats by private apartments only increased the social space available to students and professionals, promoting a more vibrant, and worrying, exchange of ideas; foreign students newly let into the USSR for study purposes were conscious of more than just the absence of fees, and did not universally extol the Soviet education system. Yet the new young editor appointed to Izvestia, the official daily paper second only to Pravda, told his journalists that a newspaper should not tell its readers what to think, but should engage them in a conversation, and also that they should make sure that all articles were supported by reliable evidence. Public opinion, suppressed under Stalin, appeared to have received a new lease of life; but editorials and Op-Ed articles were still dictated by party leaders, and the young editor continued to carve out his career within the party. Like many intellectuals, including Mikhail Gorbachev, his intention was to reform the Soviet system, not destroy it.

In the early 1960s, television, assigned the goal of bringing ‘art to households’, replaced radio and film as the primary vehicle for the dissemination of high culture; however, party and state officials seriously underestimated its liberalising potential. (The inevitable screening of Swan Lake in any political crisis fooled no one.) To stick to Zubok’s metaphor, Zhivago’s younger children began to respond to ‘a revival of the idea of an intelligentsia, of a civic community that could become a moral and cultural vanguard for society’. The 1960s generation tried to revitalise the values of high culture while taking care not to offend the authorities. In 1962 the legendary editor of the journal Novy Mir, Alexander Tvardovsky, boldly published Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich while remaining a member of the party’s Central Committee, his private torments kept to himself. Axiomatically, Russian literature and his journal were necessary vehicles for moral and social revival; who could be better placed than a party apparatchik to help achieve that goal?

Writers without party credentials devised an alternative network. Samizdat or self-publication snowballed in private apartments where clandestine works were multi-copied (six sheets of carbon paper to every typewriter) and later passed from hand to hand. Whispered poems and secret diaries contributed to a broad reading culture. In this way, Dr Zhivago, already translated and published abroad, circulated at last in Russia, as did the Writers Union document demanding that its author be expelled. Unfortunately, as Zubok says, ‘Faith in the power of high culture and their own pivotal role in healing Russian society from the Stalinist legacy led creative leaders and the idealists of the sixties to stray far beyond realistic possibilities.’ The Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis meant that artists and intellectuals had to heed a new show of force, especially when poets were capable of attracting crowds of up to 14,000, as Yevtushenko and others demonstrated in the autumn of 1962. In the same year, Khrushchev suppressed an exhibition of modern ‘dog shit, arse-hole art’ (his own description). By March 1963 he was pounding the table and yelling, ‘The Thaw is over’. In 1965 Andrei Siniavsky, who had sent abroad and published under another name satiric, ironic and fantastical stories, was, with Yuri Daniel, scandalously tried and sent to the gulag.

Novy Mir, whose readership hovered between three and five million, also came under attack and was slowly but deliberately suffocated. Yet, in a climate where paradox ruled, conformist artists, scientists and intellectuals continued to live well in subsidised housing and in receipt of perks commensurate to their position. The true intelligentsia made a virtue even of this situation; it helped maintain their sense of non-materialistic, anti-bourgeois superiority.

The excitement caused by the Prague Spring and the Paris revolts of 1968 inspired many intellectuals to hope for a ‘Moscow Spring’ as well.  Andrei Sakharov became world-famous for his essay ‘Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom’ (in Russia circulated in samizdat), and optimists claimed that the wellsprings of the Revolution were again crystal clear, no longer muddied by Stalinism. But when the politburo, under its new leader, Leonid Brezhnev, sent in the tanks to suppress the Czech revolt, Zhivago’s children, horrified and profoundly disappointed, simply hunkered down. The naïve dream of socialism with a human face had been dispelled by nightmare, and the word ‘reform’, according to Zubok’s sources, was to become taboo for nearly two decades.

The decline lasted until 1985, when the septuagenarian rulers lost their grip on the Kremlin and Mikhail Gorbachev, educated and well read, became general secretary of the Communist Party. His promulgation of glasnost (freedom of public speech) seemed to promise the intelligentsia what it had always yearned for. However, a long-sighted journalist wearily wrote, ‘A new cycle of Russian illusions is about to begin’. Although Gorbachev’s personal ousting is another story, once he was replaced by Boris Yeltsin in 1991 it was simply the case that materialism, market forces and rampant capitalism dashed the last dreams and hopes of Zhivago’s youngest children. The struggle to maintain an imagined community imbued with moral and cultural vitality disappeared, as if those in power had banned everyone’s right cerebral hemispheres.

Zubok’s detailed book is a highly rewarding and unusual foray into a fascinating national situation, but its implications are universal. Any country too busy doing business to support the values kept alive by idealistic artists, writers and critics will visit moral bankruptcy on its own children.