The small respite that the Soviet people received after Stalin's rule is associated with the name of N. S. Khrushchev. During the thaw, the Soviet Union managed to become a superpower, master space, solve the housing problem, and create a unique layer of culture.
Despite the metaphorical expression, the thaw reflects a very specific phenomenon in the history of the Soviet state, when, for the first time in several decades, the intelligentsia had the opportunity to express their opinions and realize their creative potential without fear for their fate and the fate of loved ones.
The thaw period is characterized by a sharp leap in science, culture and art, an increase in the social level of the urban and, most importantly, of the rural population, and the strengthening of the position of the Soviet Union in the international arena.
Achievements of the USSR in the field of science and technology
There is no need to remind once again that it was during the reign of Khrushchev that space became Soviet. In the period from 1956 to 1959, more than three thousand scientific institutions were created again. The union began active research in nuclear energy and finally reached military parity with the United States.
Genetic scientists received carte blanche to continue the development. For a long time, the activities of the "Weismanists-Morganists" were regarded as bourgeois reactionary pseudoscience and were persecuted at the state level.
Thaw culture and art
Representatives of culture and art were the first to react to the changes. At this time, such works were created as the novel "Not by bread alone" by V. Dudintsev and the story "One day of Ivan Denisovich" by A. I. Solzhenitsyn. The weakening of censorship allowed artists to show their vision of reality, to give a critical assessment of recent historical events.
The thick magazine Novy Mir, headed by A. Tvardovsky, became the platform for the new galaxy of writers and poets. For the first time, poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky were printed on its pages.
The cinema of the Stalinist era was under the close scrutiny of the leader of the peoples himself, therefore it was subjected to the most captious censorship. "De-Stalinization" gave not only domestic, but also world cinema such names as Marlen Khutsiev, L. Gaidai, E. Ryazanov.
The film by M. Khutsiev and Gennady Shpalikov "Ilyich's Outpost" is still a symbol of the thaw period, not only in terms of conveying the atmosphere of those years, but also in how the partocratic authorities treated him. The film was cut up and down, renamed "I am twenty years old", in this form it was shown to the public and removed to the archives for a long 20 years.
The aspirations of the intelligentsia, which at that time were the main driving force of the thaw, did not come true. Temporary warming gave way to another exacerbation of conflicts in all spheres.
The end of the thaw
It was precisely Khrushchev’s personal relationship with the intelligentsia that put an end to the temporary weakening of reaction. The point that put the end of the era was the Nobel Prize awarded to Boris Pasternak for his novel Doctor Zhivago, published abroad.
Naturally, the main reason for the end of the era of change has deeper roots, which are rooted in a society built on the basis of a command-administrative system.
