Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Did people ever laugh under communism? Ben Lewis proves that they did
- and how - in his book
Hammer & Tickle: A History of Communism Told
Through Communist Jokes
. Brush up on your best NKVD, bread queue
and Brezhnev jokes.
THE RETURN OF PETER
From Dissent to Democracy
Throughout the Soviet period, Moscow kept suspicious eyes trained on Leningrad.
After WWII, Stalin launched the 'Leningrad Affair', a sinister purge of the Hero
City's youthful political and cultural elite, who were falsely accused of trying to cre-
ate a rival capital. Several thousand were arrested, several hundred were executed.
Kremlin apparatchiks were committed to forcing conformity on to the city's free-
thinking intellectuals and keeping closed the window to the West. They ultimately
failed.
Leningrad's culture club was irrepressible. Like in tsarist times, it teased, goaded
and defied its political masters. Stalin terrorised, Khrushchev cajoled and Brezhnev
banished, yet the city still became a centre of dissent. As from Radishchev to Pushkin,
so from Akhmatova to Brodsky. By the 1970s the city hosted a thriving independent
underground of jazz and rock musicians, poets and painters, reformists and radicals.
Like the Neva in spring, these cultural currents overflowed when Mikhail Gorbachev
finally came to power and declared a new policy of openness and reform. The Lenin-
grad democratic movement was unleashed.
Gorbachev forced long-time Leningrad party boss Grigory Romanov (no relation to
the royals) and his communist cronies into retirement. He held elections for local of-
fice that brought to power liberal-minded Anatoly Sobchak, the darling of the pro-
gressive intelligentsia and the first popularly elected mayor in the city's history. Len-
ingrad was at the forefront of democratic change, as the old regime staggered towards
the exit.
Where Gorbachev sought to breathe new life into Soviet socialism, his rival Boris
Yeltsin was intent on killing it. Just two months after Sobchak's historic election, a
last gasp of reactionary hardliners staged a coup. While Yeltsin mollified Moscow, a
