Thaw period

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thaw period (Russian: хрущёвская оттепель , IPA : [xruˈʃʲʃʲɔˑfskəjə ˈɔˑtʲtʲɪpʲɪlʲ] , "Khrushchev's thaw") is a period from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the disempowerment of his successor Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 at the latest when his successor Nikita Khrushchev was disempowered and the inner culture of 1964 Soviet Union and the states of the Eastern Bloc , as well as beginning efforts to relax the East-West conflict . The name goes back to Ilja Ehrenburg's novel “ Thaw ”.

The trigger for the end of the "Ice Age" and the beginning of the thaw was the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953. After a hesitant beginning, Nikita Khrushchev became a reformer of the Stalinist system (" de-Stalinization ") when he followed the XX . The party congress of the CPSU held the secret speech about the personality cult and its consequences . In it he expressed massive criticism of the personality cult around Stalin and of the Stalinist crimes of the 1930s. The thaw period also led to the course of " peaceful coexistence " in Soviet foreign policy. So Khrushchev went on a rapprochement with Tito in Yugoslavia .

background

The background to the Soviet change of course was that until Stalin's death even the highest party functionaries , if they fell out of favor, had to fear for their lives; The secret police in particular served as a terrorist instrument for Stalin . Therefore, the thaw policy was initially in the best interests of the party officials. A second motive for the policy of détente was the high administrative and military costs caused by totalitarian control over the satellite states. Khrushchev also increasingly used his image as a reformer in the power struggle with conservative internal party opponents, whom he branded as backward and dangerous. He was all the better able to keep quiet about his own involvement in the crimes of the Stalin era.

Characteristics

During this phase of de-Stalinization, censorship weakened noticeably, and there was more open discussion, especially in literature, art and film. The most important platform for representatives of the thaw was the literary magazine Nowy Mir . Some works of this period became more popular in the West, including Vladimir Dudinzew's “Man Does Not Live on Bread Alone” and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel “ A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich ”, which Khrushchev personally released for publication. Other important representatives of the thaw period were the writers Evgeni Alexandrovich Evtuschenko , Viktor Petrovich Astafiev , Vladimir Fyodorovich Tendryakov , Bella Achatovna Akhmadulina , Robert Ivanovich Roshdestvensky , Andrei Andreevich Vosnesensky and Anna Andreevich Vosnesensky .

In September 1955, the then German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer traveled to Moscow to get the last German prisoners of war to return from Soviet camps. At that time, just under 10,000 former soldiers of the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS and around 20,000 politically imprisoned civilians were still in Soviet captivity (for more details, see Homecoming of the Ten Thousand ); they were allowed to return home from October 7, 1955.

Many political prisoners in the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries were released after 1956 and some of them were rehabilitated. Several peoples deported under Stalin were rehabilitated in 1957, the Karachay , Kalmyks , Balkars , Ingush , Chechens , and the autonomy of the republics in the North Caucasus, in which they originally lived, was restored. The Volga Germans and the Crimean Tatars were excluded ; they were not even mentioned in the resolution of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR . They had to stay in Siberia and Kazakhstan , their autonomous republics were not restored. The Crimea no longer belonged to the RSFSR ; it was joined to the Ukraine in 1954.

In some countries, comparatively liberal prime ministers came to power, in Hungary for example Imre Nagy . On May 15, 1955, the Austrian State Treaty between the four occupying powers (USSR, USA, Great Britain, France) and Austria was signed and the occupation ended. Following these first signals of a new attitude, the 1955 Geneva summit conference took place between US President Eisenhower , Khrushchev and the heads of government of Great Britain, France and Bulgaria.

End and aftermath

The thaw did not last long. With the suppression of the popular uprising in Hungary in November 1956, many people buried hopes of further opening up. Khrushchev's smear campaign against Boris Pasternak , who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 (Pasternak did not dare to receive it personally), clearly showed the Russian artists the limits of liberalization. The Soviet leadership increasingly wavered between liberal approaches and the fear of losing control as a result. In the early 1960s, at the latest with the disempowerment of Khrushchev by Leonid Brezhnev (October 1964), the thaw period ended. The fact that Khrushchev was allowed to live on unmolested after his dismissal and died as a pensioner would have been unthinkable without the thaw and the end of the terror.

After the thaw, documents critical of the Soviet Union could only be distributed via non-official channels ( samizdat ). The thaw period ultimately became the forerunner of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms from 1985, which also resumed de-Stalinization ( glasnost and perestroika ).

literature

Web links

Wiktionary: Thaw  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Footnotes

  1. ^ Wolfgang Leonhard: Kremlin without Stalin, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 4th edition 1963, Cologne, Berlin, pp. 188f.
  2. ^ The Second October Revolution . After the Moscow judgment of the broken glass: pile of broken glass in the Eastern Bloc. in: Die Zeit , No. 44, of October 30, 1964
  3. ↑ Reading sample
  4. ↑ Review