The energy of the mid-1980s and the sense of renewal were sustained by the release of a vast body of art and literature that had been created over the previous seventy years and kept under lock and key. It was an archival revolution: the previously banned works of Boris Pasternak, Vasily Grossman and Anna Akhmatova were published over a period of some four or five years in literary journals whose circulation soared to the levels of Western tabloid newspapers. By the late 1980s the sales of Novy Mir, which published Doctor Zhivago and Gulag Archipelago for the first time in the Soviet Union,
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