Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union

by Vladislav M. Zubok

been accumulating over decades of their creative life. The cumulative effect was powerful. Not all publications had the power of Solzhenitsyn’s pamphlet, yet each presented a fragment of Soviet history and culture that had defied and destroyed its literary canon and imaginative life. The dreary Party discourse was replaced by an effervescent intellectual feast of unexpected ideas, a baffling variety of ways of seeing and speaking. “How many ideas and talents in Russia,” enthused Chernyaev in his diary. “What freedom! This alone is a great achievement that will make history forever, even if nothing comes out of perestroika proper.” Chernyaev, sensitive to the most minute motives of his boss, recorded a similar shift of perspective in Gorbachev. He “has been thinking about it and does not rule out failure,” recorded Chernyaev after Pitsunda. “But he is entirely in a passionate surge . . .”