The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era

by Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Paul Goldberg

Overview

The Thaw Generation offers an insider's look at the Soviet dissident movement—the intellectuals who, during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, dared to challenge an oppressive system and demand the rights guaranteed by the Soviet constitution.  Fired from their jobs, hunted by the KGB, “tried,” and imprisoned, Alexeyeva and other activists including Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov, Yuli Daniel, and Andrei Sinyavsky, through their dedication and their personal and professional sacrifices, focused international attention on the issue of human rights in the USSR.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822959113
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	10/12/1993
Series:	Russian and East European Studies , #19
Edition description:	1
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ludmilla Alexeyeva is an advisor to the AFL-CIO, spending three months of each year in Russia.

Editorial Reviews

A deeply personal chronicle that offers a close and often chilling view of the Soviet dissident movement from Stalin's death in 1953 through the ascent of Gorbachev.”
—Kirkus

From the Publisher

Expelled from the Communist Party in 1968 for refusing to testify against a comrade, fired from her job, divorced with two children, Alexeyeva found that being a Soviet dissident meant being an outcast. Writing with journalist Goldberg ( The Final Act ), this member of the Helsinki Watch Group who fled to the U.S. in 1977 offers a luminous, inspirational autobiographical narrative, an insider's account of Soviet repression. Born in 1927, she recalls people disappearing from her Moscow apartment building starting in 1937; a reforming Party activist, she abandoned her faith in ``socialism with a human face'' as she saw friends arrested and sent to labor camps. Studded with glimpses of such dissidents as Andrei Sakharov, Yuri Orlov and Anatoly Marchenko, this memoir sums up the experiences of a generation of dissenters. Photos. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Alexeyeva, a Russian emigre now living in the United States, has written, with the help of journalist Goldberg, a personal memoir of her evolution from an idealistic young Communist to a Soviet dissident and member of the Helsinki Watch Group. Through her story she gives readers glimpses of famous dissidents such as Yuri Daniel Alexandr Ginsberg and Andrei Sakharov, chronicles Khrushchev's and Brezhnev's war on the intelligentsia in the post-Stalin era, and describes the social fabric of the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Because of its primarily personal focus, however, this is a secondary purchase for college and university libraries.-- Kim Tunnicliff, Albion Coll., Mich.

Library Journal

Originally published by Little, Brown in 1990. Offers an insider's look at the Soviet dissident movement. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews