Vladislav Zubok. Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. 451 S. $35.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-674-03344-3.

Reviewed by Stephen Bittner

Published on H-Soz-u-Kult (October, 2009)

One of the most striking characteristics of re‐ Vladislav Zubok, who has titled his engrossing cent scholarship on postwar Soviet history is the and epic history of the late-Soviet intelligentsia prominence of generational tropes. Nearly two Zhivago’s Children. The title has two meanings. It decades after the Soviet human-rights activist refers narrowly to the hundreds of people who Ludmilla Alexeyeva coined the epithet “thaw gen‐ gathered in the village of Peredelkino on June 2, eration” to describe friends and colleagues who 1960 to attend the funeral of the writer Boris were galvanized by Nikita Khrushchev’s reforms, Pasternak. Because Pasternak had been in ofcial scholars have proposed a number of alternate la‐ disgrace since the controversies surrounding the bels to underscore the important social and cul‐ publication of Doctor Zhivago in Italy in 1957 and tural changes that occurred in the Soviet Union af‐ the Nobel Prize in 1958, and because his death ter 1945: “Sputnik generation,” “Stalin’s last gen‐ had merited little mention in the Soviet media, eration,” and “last Soviet generation,” among oth‐ Zubok calls the public outpouring at his funeral ers. Ludmilla Alexeyeva / Paul Goldberg, The “the frst sizable demonstration of unofcial civic Thaw Generation. Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin solidarity in Soviet Russia” (p. 19). Era, Pittsburgh, 1993; Donald J. Raleigh, Russia’s Zubok also uses the title to refer to a broader Sputnik Generation. Soviet Baby Boomers Talk group: members of the intelligentsia who began, about Their Lives, Bloomington 2006; Juliane in the postwar years, to strive for “intellectual and Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation. Post-War Soviet cultural emancipation” and to identify with “hu‐ Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism, manist individualism” (pp. 19-20). In Zubok’s for‐ Oxford, forthcoming in 2010; and Alexei Yurchak, mulation, Zhivago’s children included the physi‐ Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. cists Andrei Sakharov and Lev Landau; the sociol‐ The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, 2005 ogist Boris Grushin; the journalist Anatoly Agra‐ Perhaps the most elegant contribution to this novsky; the historian (and advisor to Mikhail Gor‐ catalog of generational labels comes from bachev) Anatoly Cherniaev; the poets David H-Net Reviews

Samoilov, Boris Slutsky, and Joseph Brodsky; the sive when describing the less benevolent charac‐ bard Bulat Okudzhava; the cellist Mstislav Ros‐ teristics of the intelligentsia, like the anti- tropovich; the theater directors Yuri Liubimov Semitism and xenophobia espoused by the former and Oleg Yefremov; and many others. émigré professor Alexander Kazem-Bek, the jour‐ By virtue of their birthdates, which ranged nalist Ivan Shvetsov, and the dissident writer and from the fnal years of the tsarist period to the eve Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn. (If of the Second World War, these individuals lacked Zubok’s book promotes a more balanced under‐ formative, intimate contact with the pre-revolu‐ standing of Solzhenitsyn than the near hagio‐ tionary intelligentsia. Yet Zubok argues that they graphic image that predominates in the West, it came to view “themselves as the descendants of will have been well worth the efort.) Ehrenburg the great cultural and moral tradition that Paster‐ and the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (author of nak, his protagonist Yuri Zhivago, and his milieu “Babi Yar”) often denounced anti-Semitism and embodied” (p. 20). Like their forefathers prior to xenophobic Russian nationalism as a betrayal of 1917, Zhivago’s children were bound by “revolu‐ the old ideals of the intelligentsia. Yet anti-Semites tionary-romantic idealism” (p. 356) and by a sense among the intelligentsia had to look no further of duty to spread enlightenment. They were not a than Fyodor Dostoevsky and Ivan Bunin for their chronological generation, but a philosophical co‐ intellectual roots (pp. 226-58). Without question, hort that traced its moral and spiritual ancestry to there were many black sheep in Yuri Zhivago’s ex‐ the pre-Soviet intelligentsia. tended family. As a group, Zhivago’s children embodied one Nevertheless, the central fgures in Zubok’s of the chief myths of the late-Soviet intelligentsia: book were at the opposite end of the cultural and namely, that the violence of revolution and civil political spectrum. They were devotees of Ameri‐ war, the bittersweet refuge of emigration, and the can jazz and fashion. They idolized Van Cliburn terror of Stalinism interrupted the noble intellec‐ and Yves Montand. They read translations of tual and cultural traditions of the past. After Stal‐ Ernest Hemingway and Erich-Maria Remarque. in’s death, it was possible to reconstitute an au‐ And they toted copies of the most daring literary thentic intelligentsia only because its ideals were journal of the 1950s and 60s, Novyi mir (New indestructible, even if the people who bore them World). Politically, they were a mixed bag. Some were not. It also helped that a few members of were western-style liberals who came to despise pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, like the writers all things Soviet. Many others managed to fssion Ilya Ehrenburg and Pasternak, and the scholar their enduring commitment to socialism from Dmitry Likhachev, survived against all odds. They their critical views of Soviet politics. were vessels of an uncorrupted past. Zubok argues that this outward-looking, polit‐ As Zubok notes, there is much that is lacking ically progressive cohort played a central role in in this view of the intelligentsia. Even during the the collapse of communism. After having their 1930s, many cultural fgures found common hopes for a more tolerant political system dashed ground with Soviet power, particularly in the lat‐ by the vicissitudes of Khrushchev’s thaw and ter’s reverence for the classics of Russian litera‐ Brezhnev’s soft repression, Zhivago’s children cast ture, its promotion of conventional artistic forms, their lot with the young reformer Gorbachev. To and its commitment to mass enlightenment help revitalize the Soviet system, Gorbachev through education. And like its pre-revolutionary granted them the “autonomy to create and the counterpart, the postwar intelligentsia was hardly freedom to speak and engage in civic activities” monolithic in outlook. Indeed, Zubok is most inci‐ (p. 357). And with these newfound liberties,

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Zhivago’s children helped destroy both the com‐ munist system and, unwittingly, their own raison d’être. Of course, it does not take a Marxist to see that there was a dialectical quality to the fate of Zhivago’s children. Like the candle that fares up before going out, Zhivago’s children appeared to be ascendant at the moment of their ruin. Para‐ doxically, they perished not because of revolution‐ ary violence or Stalinist terror, but because of the democratization for which they had long pined, and because of the realities of a free-market econ‐ omy about which they were largely ignorant. Zubok’s book thus has all the makings of a tragedy. But it is uncertain whether Zubok sees the demise of the intelligentsia as something to be mourned, or whether he views the intelligentsia as a “historical anachronism” whose very exis‐ tence stemmed from Russia’s political backward‐ ness (p. 360). This debate about the intelligentsia, which has only just begun, will likely persist for a very long time. Scholars of Russia and the Soviet Union – now blessed with the new and elegant generational label, Zhivago's children – will have Zubok's fne book to thank for that.

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Citation: Stephen Bittner. Review of Zubok, Vladislav. Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews. October, 2009.

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=26069

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