Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia by Vladislav Zubok (review)

Like Alexei Yurchak’s soliloquy to the “last Soviet generation,” Vladislav Zubok’s Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia is an expansive and sober sociological analysis of the late Soviet era. Seeking to understand the intellectual and cultural elite that emerged at the demise of Stalinism, Zubok offers vivid and often intimate personal accounts of the lives of the penultimate Soviet generation with their precarious balance of idealism and moderation as well as their hopeful aspirations to change a socialist society destined to fail.

The generation of Soviet intellectuals who came of age in the new openness of the 1960s claim allegiance to a larger group of shestidesiatniki. According to V. P. Danilov, “The shestidesiatniki have suffered two defeats: one, at the end of the 1960s; the other in 1990–1991”.¹ Echoing their travails, Stephen Kotkin has written in Armageddon Averted that the shestidesiatniki were misguided in their attempts to reform the Soviet Union.²

Zubok provides a more nuanced view of the first post-Stalinist generation who were forged by the devastation of World War II. He sees education as a critical criterion; he is particularly interested in “the generation that entered the universities of Moscow and Leningrad after the war” (P. 21). In Zubok’s mind, their education culminated with “the first sizable demonstration of unofficial civic solidarity in Soviet Russia” during the June 2, 1960, funeral of Boris Pasternak in Peredelkino (P. 19). Pasternak was best known abroad for winning the Nobel Prize in literature for his novel Doctor Zhivago. At home, however, his unfavorable critique of the revolution’s excesses and the demise of the Russian imperial intelligentsia brought censure from the Stalinist regime. In Zubok’s view, the 500 mourners at his funeral represented a turning point and a new “spiritual and civic community emerged in the popular mind” (P. 20).

Despite the emphasis on “Russians” throughout his work, Zubok’s protagonists were multiethnic, of varied backgrounds, and had differing views on the merits of socialism: Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Aleksandr Tvardovskii, Oleg Yefremov, Bulat Okudzhava, and Mstislav Rostropovich to name a few. In Zubok’s mind, they were all “descendents of the great cultural and moral tradition that Pasternak, his protagonist Yuri Zhivago, and his milieu embodied” (P. 20). Zubok’s heroes “preferred the muse to the risk of political radicalism” (P. 327). Yet like their predecessors, they found that the lure of politics was difficult to escape.

Mention of an “intelligentsia” is destined to raise important questions about intellectuals, the Russian and Soviet states, and their relationships to each other. Scholars separate the intelligentsia of the Russian imperial era from members of the “Soviet intelligentsia,” workers who toiled with their minds to build the Soviet dream in official discourse. Zubok proposes yet another categorization of the intelligentsia.

Zubok defines his intelligentsia as those who sought a “Moscow Spring” akin to the Prague unrest of 1968. In his epilogue Zubok declares, “I came of age in Moscow after Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague Spring, thus reinstating the Iron Curtain and demolishing the idealistic project of socialism with a human face. In those years the word ‘intelligentsia’ was often on the lips of my parents and their friends” (P. 437). The 1968 protests destroyed “the myth of a socially engaged and morally potent intelligentsia” (P. 293). And as Vladimir Lakshin lamented in his diary in 1969, “Only tasteless clowns remain. Frightening thought” (P. 333).

Zubok explains, “The reaction to Khrushchev’s bombshell reactivated the traditional alienation between the ‘thinking’ segment of the younger generation and the ruling class. This kind of tension had given rise to the Russian intelligentsia a century earlier. Moreover, the questions of who was to blame and what was to be done were the same ‘accursed’ questions that had tormented and fragmented educated circles in Russia earlier” (P. 66). Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, this generation of intellectuals gave...