Khrushchevskaia ottepel´ i obshchestvennye nastroeniia v SSSR v 1953–1964 gg. [The Khrushchev Thaw and Popular Opinion in the USSR, 1953–64], and: Kak eto delalos´ v Leningrade: Tsenzura v gody ottepeli, zastoia i perestroika, 1953–1991 [How It Was Done in Leningrad: Censorship in the Years of the Thaw, Stagnation, and Perestroika, 1953–91] (review)

Observers of the 1950s and 1960s, and today's many scholars of the period, have emphasized both the precarious balance of conservatism and liberalism and the succession of "thaws" and "freezes" that characterized Soviet state and society after Stalin's death.¹ Some recent scholarship on the Khrushchev era has accorded particular importance to continuities with Stalinist practices and mentalities, sometimes even their intensification.² The latter trend is perhaps linked to the recent growth in access to state and party archives, but the influence of the "linguistic turn" has also drawn attention to the utopian and repressive urges of post-Stalinist ideology and policies.³

Two recent Russian-language studies, by Iurii Aksiutin and Arlen Blium, contribute substantial archival and oral history research to this debate on liberalization, and they reach quite different conclusions. Where Aksiutin's exhaustive account of Khrushchev's reforms views the eponymous "Thaw" as a time of hesitant yet pronounced changes to Stalinist totalitarianism, Blium's study argues that in one absolutely crucial respect—access to information and freedom of speech—the post-1953 era was as "totalitarian" as Stalinism (45). Perhaps, however, these arguments represent two sides of the same coin. Some parts of the post-Stalinist party-state were ripe for reform; others were impervious to it, whether by inertia or by intent. In recounting the implementation and reception of multiple policies of the Khrushchev era, Aksiutin's study finds that some reform (or "liberalization") did take place, albeit not of the kind that Khrushchev, not to mention many ordinary Soviet people, wanted (3, 5). By contrast, Blium's focused account of the workings of a single state institution—Glavlit—recounts the story of its survival, not through adaptation but through an innate conservatism, which the Party ultimately shared. For the Soviet censorship, the post-Stalinist turn away from totalitarian controls to authoritarianism naturally represented a threat rather than an opportunity. The Party, while steering its reformist course—and indeed, perhaps because it was at its most vulnerable when trying to reform itself—agreed that censorship, along with many other institutions and principles, was not up for discussion.

Blium's central argument is that censorship has been a more or less constant feature of Russian history, even in the post-Soviet period. Using Leningrad as a case study, partly to compensate for the lack of unionwide archival materials, and partly as an example of a particularly worrying locale for the authorities, he concludes that the "absolute evil" of censorship was a consistent and onerous presence during post-Stalinism (253). His rich account of "censorship interventions" in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev years forcefully confirms that, as in the Stalin era, no text or image was immune from censorship. As before, the censors' main job was to compare every text with the "Talmud" of state secrets, to excise any such details before granting a work's "visa" for publication.

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