The Thaw

Name and periodization

The name comes from Ilya Ehrenburg's 1954 novella The Thaw, though the poet Fyodor Tyutchev had already used 'thaw' as a metaphor for liberalization, describing the first years of Alexander II's reign. The starting point was Stalin's death in 1953. The thaw is also taken to include the brief period (1953-1955) when Georgy Malenkov was in the leadership, when major criminal cases such as the Leningrad Affair and the Doctors' plot were closed and an amnesty was granted for minor offences. Yet through 1953-1956 Stalin was still officially honoured as a great leader, often portrayed alongside Lenin.

The end date is disputed. Historians conventionally link it to Khrushchev's removal from all his posts in October 1964, but some researchers argue that individual features of the thaw survived in cultural life until 1968 and that the suppression of the Prague Spring finally ended it.

De-Stalinization and rehabilitation

At the 20th Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev delivered On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences in closed session, criticizing Stalin's personality cult and the purges and proclaiming 'peaceful coexistence' with the capitalist world. Advised by Mikoyan and by Gulag returnees such as Alexei Snegov and Olga Shatunovskaya, he initiated a wave of rehabilitations that restored the reputations of many millions of victims. Commissions to review cases and rehabilitate the dead were set up from 1953, and most of the peoples deported in the 1930s and 1940s were allowed to return home. Finally, on 25 January 1960, order No. 020 of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs disbanded the Gulag. Around the 22nd Party Congress of 1961 Stalin's body was removed from the mausoleum and reburied by the Kremlin wall, arguably Khrushchev's most provocative act of the thaw. Labour law was eased as well: on 25 April 1956 the Supreme Soviet approved a decree abolishing criminal liability for quitting a job without permission, absenteeism and lateness.

Social and economic reform

De-Stalinization went beyond politics and culture. State procurement prices were raised, in 1957 the machine and tractor stations were abolished and equipment sold to the collective farms, ten industrial ministries were replaced by regional councils of the national economy (sovnarkhozes), and a market-oriented reform associated with Kosygin was contemplated, later de facto discontinued by the end of the 1960s. Criminal punishment for abortion was repealed in 1955; tuition fees for the upper school grades and higher education were abolished in 1956, along with a new law on universal pensions; consumer credit was permitted from 1959. Housing construction launched in 1957 raised the housing stock from 640 million to 1,184 million square metres between 1957 and 1963, improving conditions for more than 50 million people. The 1960-1961 monetary reform (one old rouble to ten new kopecks) in practice wiped out many citizens' savings.

Cultural opening

Censorship weakened markedly in literature and cinema, making a more critical treatment of reality possible. Novy Mir under Alexander Tvardovsky published Vladimir Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone in 1956, Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962, the first uncensored publication about the Gulag, and Tvardovsky's own Terkin in the Next World in 1963. Yevtushenko, Voznesensky and Akhmadulina filled stadiums, and Okudzhava's songs circulated alongside samizdat. In July 1957 Moscow hosted the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students with 34,000 participants, and the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 was won by the American pianist Van Cliburn. National exhibitions exchanged with the United States in 1959 let Soviet audiences see abstract painting for the first time, and the Moscow International Film Festival became a regular event from 1959. Television spread into urban homes as the main leisure activity, and rock and roll and jazz leaked in despite official disapproval, producing the stilyagi, the first Soviet youth subculture.

The repressive side

Opening was conditional and coercion continued. In 1962 Khrushchev's forces fired on striking workers at Novocherkassk. In 1961 the currency speculators Rokotov and Faibishenko were shot in violation of legal procedure. Demonstrations in Tbilisi (1956), Grozny (1958), Temirtau (1959), Murom and Alexandrov (1961) and elsewhere were classed as 'mass disorders' and put down by force. An anti-religious campaign resumed in 1959, remembered for his pledge to show the last priest on television by 1980, and about 11,000 of the 20,000 working church buildings standing in 1959 were closed. Samizdat became the main unofficial channel of literature, and the language of rights was stimulated by the 1964 trial of the poet Joseph Brodsky.

Assessment and legacy

Andrei Kolesnikov, reviewing Sergei Chuprinin's three-volume chronicle of the thaw (2020-2023), describes the period as one of 'soft totalitarianism': one no longer had to jeer along with the crowd, but one still could not defend those under attack. He notes the system was not very systematic, though less chaotic and unpredictable than today's repressive machine, and stresses that the period saw oppression and utopia alternate before being ultimately crushed. State coercion survived through the regulation of labour relations and daily life. Some writers sympathetic to the Soviet project read the thaw's peaceful coexistence and cultural exchange as securing international legitimacy for socialism.

The era remains significant for its conflict over the limits of liberalization. It freed eight million Gulag prisoners and markedly widened cultural freedom, while the crushing of the Hungarian revolution and the baiting of Boris Pasternak showed the limits of reform within the socialist camp. Kolesnikov argues that it freed the minds of Soviet people and paved the way intellectually and morally for Gorbachev's reforms, but was too short, too full of compromise and too self-contradictory for a liberal consciousness or democratic institutions to take root: a thaw can precede either a deep freeze or a warmer season.