ABSTRACT
The late 1960s were characterised by a perseverance of the reactionary politics that had begun already under Khrushchev with the campaign against “parasites”, and which had led to the arrest of the Leningrad poet Iosif Brodsky in 1964. In 1965 Andrey Sinyavsky and Yuly Daniel were arrested for publishing their works abroad under the pseudonyms Abram Terts and Nikolay Arzhak. During the XXIII Congress in 1966, several critical and controversial productions were banned. Lyubimov's The Fallen and the Living was permitted only after numerous viewings and the support of a Politburo member. Tvardovsky's Terkin in the Other World was removed from the repertoire of the Satire Theatre for the duration of the Congress; Tvardovsky himself had to resign as editor of Novyi mir in 1970. Eduard Radzinsky's play A Film is Being Shot with explicit sexual references and comments on censorship in the cinema was excluded from the repertoire of the Theatre of the Lenin Komsomol. In 1967 Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter against censorship to the IV Congress of the Writers' Union and was ousted from the Union. Fedor Burlatsky and Len Karpinsky, editors of Komsomolskaya pravda, published an article in which they favoured a liberalisation of cultural politics with regard to the theatre; 1 they were dismissed from the editorial board of the paper. Yury Rybakov was removed from his post as editor of the magazine Teatr in 1969 for his liberal editorial policies; he had printed largely positive reviews of the controversial productions removed from the repertoire between 1966 and 1968. The liberally orientated writers Evgeny Evtushenko, Viktor Rozov and Vasily Aksenov were dismissed from the editorial board of the journal Yunost. This wave of reaction in the cultural sphere ran parallel to the crushing of any liberalisation in politics by the intervention of Soviet troops in Prague in August 1968. Pessimism and resignation pervaded the entire Soviet intelligentsia.
