Moscow 1956: The Silenced Spring
By Kathleen E. Smith
Harvard. $29.95 (Hardcover) $29.95 (Kindle)
Smith builds her story around Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” in which the new Soviet leader denounced the crimes of Stalinism. The author gives a rigorous, month-by-month account of the events of 1956, revealing the lives of ordinary citizens, former Gulag prisoners, persecuted intellectuals, and idealistic students. Smith shows that Khrushchev’s initiatives – releasing political prisoners and “loosening” the Iron Curtain – sparked important cultural changes in Russian society. This first liberal thaw was short-lived, but the 1956 speech, the author argues, started the chain of events that eventually led to the fall of the USSR 35 years later.