ABSTRACT
The 1968 Paris student revolution which came so close to toppling the mighty De Gaulle inspired a well-known French writer to hail it as the dawn of a new age. The Communist world was too much involved in its own troubles to pay much attention to the intellectual fashions in the West. The Soviet system itself was losing its ruthlessness, which much as it was desirable from the humanitarian point of view was loosening the grip of the authoritarian oligarchy on its society. For Soviet society at large the change at the top in 1964 meant the tightening of discipline. Dissident literature kept dwelling on the Stalinist past, and on the Stalinist features persisting in the Soviet system. In 1960, the poet Alexander Tvardovsky, the unofficial poet laureate of the post-war Soviet Union, sought the sense of the terrible pre-1953 past.
