Sheila Fitzpatrick writes:

Coming to maturity in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, Vladislav Zubok was in time for the collapse and disillusionment that followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 but not for the heady excitement that had preceded it, when reform-minded Soviet intellectuals looked forward to a Moscow Spring to match the Prague one. That cohort of Soviet intellectuals – ‘Zhivago’s children’, as he calls them – were his parents’ generation, not his; and this book, which he describes as ‘not just a scholarly project’, is his affectionate, often nostalgic tribute to them . . . These were people who had been students in the immediate postwar period, had hoped for much from the Thaw and de-Stalinisation in the 1950s, believed in socialism with a human face in the 1960s, read the reform-minded journal Novy Mir, had a passionate respect for high culture, and listened to the songs of the balladeers Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky on their tape recorders.

(LRB 10 September 2009)

Harvard | hardback 453 pp. |ISBN: 9780674033443