Zhivago's Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia

Vladislav Zubok is Associate Professor of History at Temple University.

For Vladislav Zubok, the author of "Zhivago's Children", Khrushchev's Thaw inaugurated a period of tremendous optimism, a Soviet-style New Deal following the deep freeze of postwar Stalinism. Surveying a vast array of published and unpublished sources with an exquisite eye for telling detail, Zubok shows how the optimism of the era drew deeply on the classical inheritance of Marxism-Leninism. Contrary to assessments by foreign observers eager for signs of anticommunist ferment, the '60s intellectuals of the USSR were inspired by the dream of fulfilling, not transcending, the ideals of 1917...Vladislav Zubok began his academic career in Moscow as a specialist in American political history, only to move to the United States in the mid-1980s, where he became an internationally renowned scholar of Soviet cold war foreign policy. With "Zhivago's Children Zubok" has reinvented himself yet again, this time as an accomplished cultural historian of his native land. His book is an elegiac account of the final chapter in the history of the Russian intelligentsia, a group that survived revolution, civil war, Nazi onslaught and Stalinist repression, only to succumb to the supreme solvent of its life-ways: the free market.--Benjamin Nathans"The Nation" (09/06/2011)