ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to shed light on the origins of post-Soviet attitudes toward Soviet and Russian territory by discussing representations of geographical space in the post-Stalin period of the late 1950s and early 1960s. This period characterized by the liberalization of Khrushchev's 'thaw' shaped the worldviews of those Russians who in midlife, at the height of their careers and personal lives, were faced with the fall of the socialist system and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The 1960s was a period when the 'one-sixth' offered a multiethnic and multicultural space for Soviet tourists, travellers, and prospectors to explore. The chapter examines representations of Soviet geographical space in the context of ideological production and outside it. It analyzes journalistic writing in the popular monthly Around the World writing controlled by official Soviet cultural institutions. The chapter discusses literary texts by Russian-language metropolitan writers who were affiliated with dissenting cultural practices and often vacillated between official and unofficial cultural practices.
