Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

I INTRODUCTION

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik), the original Communist dictatorship, the West’s principal adversary in the post-1945 hostility of the Cold War, and a dominant force in international affairs until its collapse in 1991. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was commonly known as the Soviet Union (Sovetsky Soyuz). Occupying most of the far-flung lands of the former Russian Empire in Eastern Europe and Asia, it had its capital in Moscow, the ancestral seat of the Russian emperors, or tsars. Its title alluded to the soviets, or workers’ councils, of the Russian Revolution of 1917 that catapulted Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks (later renamed Communists) to power. The first state the Bolsheviks established bore the name Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR). It was the largest of the many political entities of the former Russian Empire that proliferated during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921). The Soviet Union was formed in December 1922 as a federal union of the RSFSR and those neighboring areas under its military occupation or ruled by branches of the communist movement. Initially it consisted of four Soviet states, or union republics: the RSFSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR; also known as Ukraine), and the Belorussian SSR (Belorussia). The number of union republics and exact boundaries of the USSR shifted over time. The Turkmen and Uzbek republics (Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) were carved out of the Central Asian part of the RSFSR in late 1924. In this same region, the Tajik republic (Tajikistan) was demarcated from Uzbek territory in 1929, and the Kazakh and Kirgiz republics (Kazakhstan and Kirgizia) were likewise formed from RSFSR territory in 1936. Also that year the Transcaucasian republic was dissolved, and its three constituent republics—Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—each became union republics of the USSR. The westward extension of Soviet borders in 1939 and 1940 enlarged Ukraine and Belorussia and annexed five areas as distinct republics: the three Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania; Moldavia, most of which was taken from Romania; and the Karelo-Finnish republic, which included territory taken from Finland. The defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II (1939-1945) allowed the Soviet Union to solidify and round out its European conquests, although not all were recognized by Western countries, and to adjust its Pacific frontiers at the expense of Japan. The Soviet government transferred the Karelo-Finnish republic to the RSFSR in 1956, paring the number of union republics to 15. In geographic extent, the Soviet Union was by far the largest country in the world. Its gross area in its post-1945 limits, counting island possessions and inland seas, was 22,402,000 sq km (8,649,500 sq mi), or nearly one-sixth of the earth’s land surface. Three-quarters of Soviet territory was in the RSFSR (two-thirds of that in Siberia and the Russian Far East) and 12 percent in Kazakhstan. From its westernmost point on the Baltic Sea to its easternmost island in the Bering Strait, the Soviet Union spanned more than 10,000 km (6200 mi) and 11 time zones; the maximum distance from Central Asia in the south to the Arctic Ocean in the north was almost 5000 km (3110 mi). The Soviet Union bordered 12 countries, more than any other. The bulk of it consisted of flat plains broken only by the low-slung Ural Mountains, the dividing line between Europe and Asia, and drained by large rivers flowing north to south or south to north. Chains of rugged mountains ringed it in the south and east. Lenin and the zealots who founded the Soviet system saw it as a political and economic prototype other countries would soon copy. As prospects for world revolution dimmed in the 1920s, Lenin’s lieutenant and successor, Joseph Stalin, governed in an increasingly tyrannical manner. His three decades in power were memorable for the development of the Soviet Union’s state-owned economy, for its emergence as a nuclear-armed superpower, and for its acquisition of satellite states in Eastern Europe. They were known also for the regimentation of society, the deprivations of World War II, and the bruising political purges and repressions that killed or imprisoned millions of people. Nikita Khrushchev, the main leader from 1953 to 1964, and his successor, Leonid Brezhnev (1964-1982), blunted the Stalinist terror but shied away from fundamental reforms. While its military strength and accomplishments in outer space and athletics won the Soviet Union world attention, domestic institutions stagnated and the economy stumbled under the competing demands of the army, industrial investment, and the consumer. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, loosened political controls in the 1980s and touched off freewheeling debate about the scale and pace of change. Conflict over constitutional and economic issues brought the Soviet Union to the brink of civil war and prompted its disintegration into 15 volatile successor states in 1991.

 II THE PEOPLE OF THE SOVIET UNION

The Soviet Union’s total population as of its final census, in January 1989, was 286,717,000, making it the third most populous country in the world, after China and India. Its population increased between 1959 and 1989 by about 78 million, or 37 percent. The Russian Empire in early 1917 was overwhelmingly rural, with only 18 percent of its subjects residing in urban settlements. Urbanization surged in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, as state-directed industry burgeoned in the cities and peasants fled villages despoiled by the forced collectivization of agriculture and the ensuing famine. The population was 33 percent urbanized in 1940, 48 percent in 1959, 56 percent in 1970, and 66 percent in 1989. The Soviet population was distributed unevenly across republics and regions. Fifty-one percent of the total population (147 million people) lived in the RSFSR, and 18 percent (52 million people) lived in Ukraine in 1989. No other union republic held more than 10 percent of the population. The least populous republic, Estonia, contained only 1.6 million people, or less than 1 percent of the total. Population density, which was 13 persons per sq km (33 per sq mi) for the USSR as a whole in 1989, ranged from 6 persons per sq km (16 per sq mi) in Kazakhstan to 129 persons per sq km (334 per sq mi) in Moldavia. The RSFSR ranked 13th in population density among the republics. Topography and arduous climate left immense sections of the Soviet Union sparsely settled. In the northern provinces of European Russia, in Siberia and the Far East, and in the deserts of Central Asia, densities often fell below 1 person per sq km (below 3 per sq mi). More than two-thirds of the Soviet Union had less than 5 persons per sq km (less than 13 per sq mi). Twenty-three Soviet cities exceeded 1 million in population in 1989, and 35 had between 500,000 and 1 million people. Moscow, with about 9 million inhabitants, was not only the governmental headquarters of the USSR and the RSFSR, but also an important industrial site and the focal point for Soviet science and engineering, mass communications, and cultural activities. Second in size, at 5 million, was Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), which under the name of Saint Petersburg and then Petrograd had been capital of the Russian Empire from 1712 to 1917; the city was a prominent seaport and industrial center after the Bolsheviks moved the seat of government to Moscow in 1918. Other large cities were the republic capitals of Kiev (now Kyiv), in Ukraine; Toshkent, in Uzbekistan; Baku, in Azerbaijan ; and Minsk, in Belorussia. A Way of Life The Soviet regime’s proclaimed goal was to forge the classless, communist society that German political theorist Karl Marx had sketched in the 19th century. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) pledged in its 1961 program to attain full-fledged communism within a generation. The target proved unrealizable. CPSU theory classified the Soviet Union as a socialist society in which three main groups—the working class (proletariat), peasantry, and white-collar intelligentsia—coexisted harmoniously and selflessly laid the foundations of the coming communist utopia. In reality, social structure was more complicated than the theory allowed, and the ruling party worried more about perpetuating its power and privileges than about advancing popular well-being or preparing for the future. Many personal freedoms were drastically curtailed in the Soviet Union. In the Stalin era, employees needed the permission of management to change jobs and could face criminal prosecution for tardiness or absenteeism. These cruel penalties were abandoned in the 1950s; most other restrictions were not. Soviet citizens continued to be subject to surveillance and interference by the political police. They could join only associations approved by the CPSU. They could not set up businesses or sell their individual services, save for a few minor fields such as tutoring and baby-sitting. State-imposed regulations on personal mobility required residents to carry internal passports and to have them stamped by the police before changing locale; travel abroad was possible only with special authorization. Military service was compulsory and graduates from higher education had to accept work assignments, sometimes in undesirable locations, the first few years after acquiring their diplomas. Able-bodied adults who did not hold a job were condemned as “social parasites”, and evicted from the big cities. Average living conditions deteriorated between the 1917 revolution and Stalin’s death in 1953, depressed by social upheaval, warfare, and planners’ bias toward military and industrial spending. Progress at last came about under Khrushchev and Brezhnev in boosting the supply of foodstuffs, consumer goods, and housing. Even at that, the standard of living lagged far behind the affluent West. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated Soviet national output in 1991 to be about $9100 per capita, compared with $15,000 per capita in the United Kingdom and $21,800 in the United States. In the neglected consumer realm, Soviet backwardness was greater than overall figures might suggest. Some Western and Russian experts judged per capita purchasing power to be about one-quarter to one-third of the U.S. norm in the 1980s. In the housing realm, for example, 15 percent of families lived in a single room in 1989 and 47 percent in two rooms. Waiting times for government-funded apartments, which rented for tiny sums once allocated, were ten or more years long in some cities. Sixty-three percent of Soviet households did not have a telephone. Housing construction fell far short of demand after the mid-1970s, as only six or seven apartments were built for every ten new households formed. Home appliances and other consumer durables were widespread, yet quality was shabby, assortment limited, and repair facilities scarce. Chronic shortages forced people to spend hours in line at state stores and to hoard items, thereby aggravating the shortages. Disparities between official and black-market prices bred corruption among sales personnel. The regime’s egalitarian ideals often clashed with its desire to spur productivity and loyalty by differentiating the rewards people received. Inequality of income and social status was pervasive under Stalin and persevered afterward, despite efforts to improve the lot of the poorest segments of the population. Average earnings of the best-paid 10 percent of the labor force were more than three times those of the worst-paid 10 percent in 1976. Members of the CPSU apparatus, senior economic managers, and other favored groups enjoyed not only higher salaries but also more comfortable apartments, better recreational opportunities, access to luxury goods, and foreign travel. Public services to some degree offset low incomes. A point of pride was the government’s free provision of health care, education, and social-security benefits. Even here, though, problems of quality, availability, and equity simmered beneath the surface. Hospital treatment may have been without charge, but it was revealed in the 1980s that only every second hospital had an X-ray machine and only 20 percent of rural hospitals and clinics had hot running water. The sick often had to purchase therapy and medication through illegal gratuities. The Soviet elite, by contrast, received superior medical care in secret facilities closed to the masses. Underfunding of welfare programs, growing stress and alcohol consumption, and a worsening of environmental pollution caused a noticeable deterioration in health indicators in the late Soviet era. The infant mortality rate, which had plunged from 80.7 per 1000 live births in 1950 to 22.9 per 1000 in 1971, rose to 27.3 per 1000 in 1980, dropping somewhat to 25.4 per 1000 in 1987. Life expectancy for men, 66 years in the mid-1960s, sagged to 62 years by the early 1980s. B Ethnic Groups The Soviet Union, as heir to the former territory of the Russian Empire, was exceptionally diverse in its national composition. Its 1989 census identified 113 ethnic communities, or “nationalities” (Russian natsional’nosti), having populations of 1000 or more, as well as several dozen groups numbering in the hundreds. Almost all had their own languages, customs, and religious traditions, although in many cases national consciousness was weak until the 20th century. Twenty-two Soviet nationalities had at least 1 million members. The 145.2 million ethnic Russians, the largest nationality by a lopsided margin, came to a bare majority (50.8 percent) of the entire population. Their fellow Eastern Slavs, the Ukrainians and Belorussians, came second and fourth in size, with 44.2 million people (15.5 percent) and 10 million people (3.5 percent), respectively, and several smaller Slavic nationalities were also represented. Ethnic groups of Turkic extraction, based primarily in Central Asia, the Azerbaijan republic, and the middle Volga River valley of the RSFSR, accounted for about 17 percent of the population. Of them, the 16.7 million Uzbeks were the third largest Soviet nationality, the 8.1 million Kazakhs fifth, the 6.8 million Azerbaijanis sixth, and the 6.6 million Tatars seventh. In eighth, ninth, and tenth place were the Armenians (4.6 million), in Transcaucasia; the Tajiks (4.2 million), in Central Asia; and the Georgians (4 million), also in Transcaucasia. Soviet nationality policy had two defining and at times discordant aspects. On the one hand, it singled out the Russians as the foremost ethnic group and placed the Soviet Union firmly in the line of Russian states going back to the Russian Empire and to the medieval principality of Muscovy. All heads of the Communist Party except Stalin, a Georgian, were of Russian descent. On the other hand, the state acknowledged the worth of the minority nationalities and demarcated a territorial homeland for most of the largest of them. The area’s government and party committee were normally headed by persons from the titular ethnic group. For 15 of the 22 biggest nationalities (Russians, Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Belorussians, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Tajiks, Georgians, Moldavians, Lithuanians, Turkmen, Kirgiz, Latvians, and Estonians) the homeland was a union republic, or SSR. Several dozen smaller groups were assigned lesser units labeled, depending on their size and location, autonomous soviet socialist republics (ASSRs), autonomous oblasts (regions), or autonomous okrugs (areas). Twenty autonomous republics (all but four of them in the RSFSR), eight autonomous oblasts, and ten autonomous okrugs existed in 1989. Three nationalities with more than 1 million members each—the 2 million Germans, 1.4 million Jews, and 1.1 million Poles—had no localized territorial base. The borders of the union republics invariably encompassed groups other than the titular nationality, and migration, especially of Russians out from the RSFSR, also heightened their ethnic pluralism. The titular groups were the largest community in all union republics in 1989, but there was much variation. At one pole, the indigenous Armenians constituted 93.3 percent of the population of the Armenian republic; at the other, Kazakhs were only 39.7 percent of the population of their republic. There was one union republic (Kazakhstan) in which the titular people made up less than 50 percent of the population, two republics (Latvia and Kirgizia) where the titular people barely cleared 50 percent, and three (Estonia, Moldavia, and Tajikistan) where they composed between 60 and 65 percent. In the capital cities of seven of the 14 non-Russian republics, the titular nationality was less than 50 percent of the population, and in two it was 51 percent. Ethnic Russians, 81.5 percent of the population of the RSFSR, were second to the titular group in all union republics except Armenia, Georgia, and Moldavia. The orienting principles of Soviet nationality policy were applied in different ways in different periods. In the early years, the emphasis was on the cultural autonomy of the minorities. A more rigidly pro-Russian approach was introduced in the mid-1930s, followed by arrests of the political and cultural leaders of most non-Russian republics, and by the wholesale deportation during World War II of several groups—the Germans of Ukraine and the Volga basin, the Chechens, and the Crimean Tatars among them—unjustly accused of pro-Nazi sympathies. After 1953 the CPSU allowed most of the banished peoples to return and moderated its stance, although it did not hesitate to use force against open critics of the system. Rhetoric about the long-term “fusion” of the Soviet peoples aside, efforts to assimilate the non-Russians focused on education, linguistic integration, migration, and intermarriage. Ethnic relations became more strained in the 1970s and 1980s. One reason was the perception among some Russians that the Soviet Union catered too much to other nationalities and that higher birthrates among non-Russians were about to deprive Russians of their slim demographic majority. At the same time, dissent and impatience with Moscow’s domination picked up pace on the non-Russian side, especially in the Baltic republics and Ukraine. Many Soviet Jews, deprived of a territorial unit, alienated by frequent occurrences of anti-Semitism, and frustrated by the lack of economic opportunity, sought to emigrate to Israel or other destinations. Bowing to Western pressure, the Soviet government grudgingly allowed several hundred thousand to leave. Ethnic Germans also departed in large numbers. C Language Article 36 of the Soviet constitution of 1977 enshrined citizens’ right to use their mother tongues “and the languages of the other peoples of the USSR.” In fact, the Russian language was advantaged, though not to the exclusion of others. The Soviet Union had no official state language, but Russian was the preferred language of government and economics, the sole language of military command, and the medium of communication within the CPSU. It was taught in all elementary and secondary schools, together with indigenous languages in most minority areas, and it was the language of instruction in higher education in all the republics except Georgia, Latvia, and parts of Ukraine. The hundreds of languages and dialects of the Soviet Union fell within several language groupings: the Altaic family of languages, which includes several branches of the Turkic languages (spoken in Azerbaijan, certain regions of the RSFSR, and the republics of Central Asia except Tajikistan); the Caucasian languages, a geographical group of about three dozen languages spoken in parts of Caucasia (including Georgian, a unique, non-Indo-European and non-Turkic language); several branches of the Uralic family of languages (spoken in Estonia and northern regions of the RSFSR); and the Indo-European family of languages, including the distinct Armenian language, the subfamily of Baltic languages (spoken in Latvia and Lithuania), the subfamily of Slavic languages (primarily the East Slavic branch consisting of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian), and the branch of Persian languages (spoken in Tajikistan). Few non-Russians went so far as to contract a Russian identity or to feel Russian to be their native language. In only two of the non-Russian union republics did the 1989 census reveal more than 10 percent of the titular group to speak Russian as their native language: Ukraine (12 percent) and Belorussia (20 percent). Bilingualism was much more common. Majorities in the titular nationality spoke fluent Russian in five of the union republics: Belorussia (80 percent), Ukraine (72 percent), Latvia (68 percent), Kazakhstan (64 percent), and Moldavia (58 percent). Russian fluency was between 30 and 50 percent for the titular group in seven republics and was less than 30 percent only in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Among urban dwellers, majorities of the titular nationality were bilingual in seven union republics and in no republic was the proportion less than 40 percent. To some extent, bilingualism was aided by the state-imposed transfer of many languages to the Cyrillic alphabet, used for the Russian language. The Turkic and Tajik languages, originally developed in the Arabic script, were transcribed first into Latin and eventually into Cyrillic scripts under a program instituted in the 1930s. Some exceptions were made for languages proving too difficult to convert, notably the Armenian, Georgian, Yiddish, and three Baltic languages. For some minor languages, such as those of the native peoples inhabiting the far northern regions, the Cyrillic script was often the first to be used. D Religion Karl Marx, who believed history was driven by purely material considerations, took a dim view of religious faith, calling it “the opium of the masses” in his writings. The Soviet regime’s Marxist roots and its antipathy toward all social associations and belief systems not under its direct control made it openly opposed to religion from the outset. Shortly after 1917 it impounded the property of the Russian Orthodox Church, forbade religious instruction, instituted antireligious propaganda, and persecuted priests. Atheistic fervor, having abated in the 1920s, reached a crescendo after 1929, when thousands of churches were shut down and razed, only to ebb in the late 1930s and to yield during World War II to pragmatic concessions to believers. The crusade against religion was revived by Khrushchev, then toned down under Brezhnev and Gorbachev. From the 1930s onward, Soviet policy was more antagonistic toward non-Orthodox denominations than toward Orthodoxy, which had been the established church under the tsars and was linked with Russian patriotism. The government sought out collaborators in the Orthodox hierarchy but dealt harshly with the activist groups that emerged as part of the dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The main arm of antireligious education was the Society for the Dissemination of Political and Scientific Knowledge, the successor to the League of Militant Atheists founded in 1925. Within the state apparatus, the Council on Religious Affairs kept tabs on the clergy, working hand in hand with the political police. The incidence of religious belief is difficult to assess because the government did not publish statistics on it and harassment drove many religious practices underground. Approximately 50 million Soviet citizens identified themselves to some degree with Russian Orthodoxy or with the somewhat autonomous branches of Eastern Orthodoxy in the Georgian and Armenian republics. There were perhaps 8 million Roman and Greek Catholics, chiefly in the Ukrainian and Lithuanian republics, and about 1 million Protestants and about the same number of Jews. Up to 50 million Soviet citizens had some tie to Islam, but often more on the cultural than on the religious plane. E Education The Soviet rulers saw comprehensive public education as necessary for purposes of economic and social modernization and political indoctrination. In 1918 they took over all private and parochial schools and colleges, abolished fees, and determined that all children ages 8 to 15 were to attend school full time. Compulsory study was gradually lengthened, so that by the 1980s most children remained in the classroom from ages 7 to 17. The nine-year common curriculum in elementary and secondary schools stressed language and literature, mathematics, military and physical training, history, manual skills, and natural sciences. The gifted or the sons and daughters of the politically well-connected sometimes studied in special schools dedicated to foreign languages, music, ballet, or art. Outside the school walls, all were exhorted to join youth organizations sanctioned by the CPSU. These included the Young Octobrists for children ages 6 to 9, the Pioneers for ages 10 to 15, and the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) for ages 14 to 28. Pupils were streamed after ninth grade into one of three programs. Students bound for higher education received two years of advanced secondary courses; those bound for industrial trades took “vocational-technical” courses; and those bound for semiprofessional work were sent into “specialized secondary” schooling. The Soviet Union screened schoolchildren to find talented athletes at an early age, sometimes as young as five or six; those selected for competitive sports were sometimes sent to special schools for that purpose. Higher education followed two channels in the Soviet Union: universities, teaching the pure sciences and humanities, and specialized institutes with a direct connection to a branch of the economy, usually funded by an industrial ministry. Of the 904 institutions of higher learning in 1989, only 69—with 630,000 out of 5.2 million enrolled students—were universities. The most prestigious were in Moscow, Leningrad, Kazan’, and other large RSFSR cities, and in the capitals of the other union republics. Soviet education did a good job of inculcating basic knowledge. The literacy rate, which was 44 percent in 1920, climbed to 87 percent by 1939 and to 99.7 percent by 1970. Of the population aged 15 or older in 1989, 49 percent had graduated from a secondary or vocational school and 11 percent had completed a higher education. The narrow proficiency typically acquired, however, dampened creativity and was often out of step with the labor market.

III ARTS AND SCIENCES

A State Control The Soviet regime at first encouraged experimentation and, where possible, Marxist-inclined work in the arts and sciences. It expelled several hundred independent-minded intellectuals in 1922, but tolerated organizational and stylistic diversity until the early 1930s. The inauguration of Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan in 1928 led to tightened political controls over cultural activity; calling for a “literary front” to assist in the struggle to fulfill the economic plan, the regime expected writers to glorify its goals. In 1932 the government ordered the creation in each cultural field of a unified association devoted to “the mobilization of Soviet writers and artists around the problems of building socialism.” An official Union of Writers, controlled by the Communist Party, held its first congress in 1934; analogous “creative unions” then appeared for architects, cinematographers, composers, visual artists, and journalists. In 1936 all work contracts for most artists came under state control. The sciences were likewise expected to bolster state interests, and the party required scientists to move away from theoretical research to more utilitarian projects. Government thought highly enough of the fine arts and sciences to give them generous funding. Yet the money came with many strings attached. Artists after 1932 were bound to the dogma of socialist realism, whereby (in the words of the Union of Writers’ charter) they were to engender “a true and historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development” and assist in “educating the workers in the spirit of communism.” Adherence to this state-mandated cultural movement was enforced primarily through the oversight of the artists’ unions. In science, where there was no tidy formula for political correctness, researchers took their work assignments from above and were expected to trim their opinions to the prevailing line. Stalin’s purges of artists and intellectuals in the 1930s and the stifling pressure for conformity administered after World War II took an appalling toll on cultural development. Several so-called thaws occurred under Khrushchev, alternating capriciously with campaigns against deviance. Brezhnev-period policy was stringent in the arts and relatively lenient in science. The Gorbachev era brought an unprecedented relaxation in controls. B The Arts Much early Soviet art, unimpeded for the most part by governmental edicts, was lively and cosmopolitan. Literary stars included the poets Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Boris Pasternak. Prominent novelists included Yevgeny Zamyatin, Boris Pilniak, Isaak Babel, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Socialist realism after 1932 shunned global culture and prescribed literal rather than abstract portrayals and an upbeat approach to Soviet problems. Errant writers were condemned and restricted from having their work published. One measure of the difficulty in adapting to the limitations was the unhappy fate of many Soviet writers. Mayakovsky, who was at first a proponent of Bolshevism, became profoundly disillusioned with the Soviet system and committed suicide in 1930. Zamyatin was one of the few allowed to go abroad in voluntary emigration, while others, such as Mandelstam and Babel, were arrested for opposing the regime and executed or imprisoned. Even the “proletarian novelist” Maksim Gorky, who returned from foreign exile in 1929 and became the first chairman of the Union of Writers, was severely criticized before his death in 1936. Some new voices after 1953 addressed social and historical themes (including Vladimir Dudintsev, Yuri Trifonov, and those of the “village prose” school), while others took a more lyrical and intimate approach (such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Vasily Aksenov). Political controversy haunted the best and the brightest. Pasternak, having won a Nobel Prize for his masterpiece Doctor Zhivago, first published in Italy in 1957, was expelled from the Union of Writers and died a broken man in 1960. The 1970 Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, author of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and other anti-Stalinist works, was deported in 1974 (seeRussian Literature: The 20th Century). Trends were similar in other artistic disciplines. Noteworthy contributions were made in music by composers Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, and Aram Khachaturian and in drama by directors Vsevolod Meyerhold, Oleg Yefremov, and Yuri Lyubimov. The classical traditions of Russian ballet were kept alive by the Kirov company in Leningrad and the Bolshoi company in Moscow (see Kirov-Mariinsky Ballet; Bolshoi Ballet). Sergey Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Andrey Tarkovsky were but several of many outstanding Soviet-era film makers. In painting, graphic arts, and sculpture, the radicals of the 1920s (among others, Kasimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Aleksandr Rodchenko) were among the most illustrious in the worldwide avant-garde movement; the works of Aleksandr Gerasimov, Tair Salakhov, and Ilya Glazunov illustrate the contradictions of later decades. C Science and Technology The Soviet government made development of science a national priority and showered top scientists with honors. Although day-to-day supervision was less oppressive than in the arts, there were countless episodes of arbitrary suppression of ideas. In the most notorious, the Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Lysenko rejected the chromosome theory of heredity generally accepted by modern genetics. Claiming his theories corresponded to Marxism, he convinced Stalin in 1948 to outlaw population genetics and several related fields of biological research; the decision was not reversed until the mid-1960s. Concern with freedom of inquiry and expression drew some scientists into the political realm. The best example is Andrey Sakharov, the nuclear physicist w