The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Russian and East European Studies) - Softcover

Alexeyeva, Ludmilla; Goldberg, Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822959119 ISBN 13: 9780822959113

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993

Synopsis

The Thaw Generation offers an insider's look at the Soviet dissident movement--the intellectuals who, during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, dared to challenge an oppressive system and demand the rights guaranteed by the Soviet constitution. Fired from their jobs, hunted by the KGB, “tried,” and imprisoned, Alexeyeva and other activists including Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov, Yuli Daniel, and Andrei Sinyavsky, through their dedication and their personal and professional sacrifices, focused international attention on the issue of human rights in the USSR.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Expelled from the Communist Party in 1968 for refusing to testify against a comrade, fired from her job, divorced with two children, Alexeyeva found that being a Soviet dissident meant being an outcast. Writing with journalist Goldberg ( The Final Act ), this member of the Helsinki Watch Group who fled to the U.S. in 1977 offers a luminous, inspirational autobiographical narrative, an insider's account of Soviet repression. Born in 1927, she recalls people disappearing from her Moscow apartment building starting in 1937; a reforming Party activist, she abandoned her faith in "socialism with a human face" as she saw friends arrested and sent to labor camps. Studded with glimpses of such dissidents as Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov and Anatoly Marchenko, this memoir sums up the experiences of a generation of dissenters. Photos.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Alexeyeva, a Russian emigre now living in the United States, has written, with the help of journalist Goldberg, a personal memoir of her evolution from an idealistic young Communist to a Soviet dissident and member of the Helsinki Watch Group. Through her story she gives readers glimpses of famous dissidents such as Yuri Daniel Alexandr Ginsberg and Andrei Sakharov, chronicles Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's war on the intelligentsia in the post-Stalin era, and describes the social fabric of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Because of its primarily personal focus, however, this is a secondary purchase for college and university libraries.
- Kim Tunnicliff, Albion Coll., Mich.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0822959119
• ISBN 13: 9780822959113
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 352