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Week 17: Khrushchev's Thaw

Questions for discussion:

Assess the impact of the Secret Speech on Soviet society and politics. How did ordinary Russian citizens respond to de-Stalinization and the resulting ‘Thaw’? How did the state, in its turn, respond to unofficial trends, such as hooliganism and the developing youth culture?

Set reading (to be prepared for class discussion):

Source: Nikita Khrushchev's 'Secret Speech' to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 25th February 1956. Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2007/apr/26/greatspeeches2

Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, ‘The Thaw as an Event in Russian History’, in Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, eds., The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 18-81. Ebook.

Selected further reading:

Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, N.Y.; London: Cornell University Press, 2009). E-book.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Social Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism,” Cahiers du monde russe 47, nos. 1–2 (January–June 2006): 377–408.

Melanie Ilič and Jeremy Smith, eds., Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev (London ; New York: Routledge, 2009).

Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 (Yale University Press, 2013).

Polly Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London: Routledge, 2006).

Denis Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi Mir: Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2013). E-book.