ABSTRACT
Il’ia Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw (Ottepel’) contains a significant scene, in which the chief engineer Egorov is asked by his colleague Brainin about the fate of their director Zhuravlev, called to Moscow a week earlier. Egorov replies, ‘They dismissed him, no doubt. I heard that was long overdue, they were only looking for somebody to replace him’.2 Zhuravlev and his friends in the local party committee belonged to a generation of ‘formalist’ and ‘cagey’ bureaucrats who did not welcome changes in the production process. Rather than introducing new inventions in production, they would start smear campaigns against their engineers, criticizing their proposals as ‘dangerous adventures’.3 As a contrast to these ‘Zhuravlevs’, Ehrenburg presented the young engineers, who believed in truth, love, justice and technical progress.
