ABSTRACT
In all the artistic organizations of Soviet society, the "liberals" have been in the vanguard of the support for glasnost', Mikhail Gorbachev, and perestroyka. They have tended to seek a loosening of the existing strictures on freedom of expression. Liberals have generally wished to examine the entire Stalin period, while conservatives often try to exempt Stalin's war-time role, because of a reluctance to destroy people's memory, real or fictitious, of what was virtually the only unifying event in Soviet history. Liberals tend to support the fullest possible disclosures about the past, and the widest rehabilitation of both artistic and historical figures; conservatives tend to urge a more "balanced," that is, less negative analysis of Soviet history. In the Soviet Russian cultural world, "conservative" does suggest the disposition to maintain existing institutions. It almost always encompasses a regard—and sometimes nostalgia—for traditional culture, architecture, life-styles, religious values and artifacts, and a profound concern with ecological devastation and cultural damage.
