Bellezza , Simone Attilio The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural Study of the âShistdesiatnykyâ (review)

SEER, 98, 4, OCTOBER 2020 786 memoirs to the siege canon (p. 66). While works from both eras more candidly relayed the horrific conditions of the Blockade and criticized city leaders, their presentation of the heroic Soviet people and of the victory as a triumph of Soviet humanism over fascist barbarism remained consistent with wartime accounts (p. 68). In part two, Voronina draws on Hayden White’s Metahistory (Baltimore, MD, 1973) to demonstrate ‘the dependency of historical texts on literary forms’, and delves into historical scholarship from the Soviet and postSoviet eras, which ‘turned out to be written like socialist-realist novels’ (p. 149). Even when new evidence came to light, historians ‘did not attempt to dispute it [the master-narrative] and only added to it with new subject matters’ and evidence (p. 149). For instance, historians framed new forensic data about the death toll (p. 178) as lives willingly, meaningfully sacrificed. The book’s most powerful material appears in part three on siege survivors’ organizations, which have successfully lobbied the Soviet and post-Soviet states for material benefits. Presenting themselves not as civilian victims but as veterans who heroically defended the city, they have leveraged the SocialistRealist elements of the siege story to their advantage (pp. 264–65). ‘Earlier heroism was determined by the usefulness and significance of actions aimed at saving the city’, Voronina observes, but through survivors’ efforts, ‘lawmakers began to understand heroism as the very fact of being in a blockade’ (p. 265). Activists therefore joined professional writers, historians and memoirists to become co-creators of the Blockade myth. This insight is the capstone to a fascinating study about the interplay of personal experience and public discourse in the politics of memory. I only regret that the book’s analysis ends in 2006, leaving readers to wonder about the applicability of Voronina’s argument to the resurgence of the war cult in Russia today. Department of History Alexis Peri Boston University Bellezza, Simone Attilio. The Shore of Expectations: A Cultural Study of the ‘Shistdesiatnyky’. CIUS Press, Edmonton, AL and Toronto, ON, 2019. xxiii + 357 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95: £26.99 (paperback). What we know about the post-Stalinist ‘Thaw’ remains heavily weighted towardsRussiaanditsmetropolitancentres.Increasingly,though,scholarshave turned towards other parts of the Soviet Union, comparing and contrasting the dynamics of Russian cultural liberalization and crackdown with those in Central Asia, the Baltics and other republics. Simone Attilio Bellezza’s study of the shistdesiatnyky — a key post-Stalinist Ukrainian cultural and political movement — is a valuable addition to the scholarship on the Thaw and REVIEWS 787 dissidence, as well as Ukrainian cultural history. Methodical and thorough in its collation and critique of a rich array of sources, from memoirs to party and state security archives, the book presents a linear, chronological account of the rise and fall of the movement. It recounts in detail every major incident in its history from the death of Stalin to the movement’s collapse in the early 1970s, with thorough biographies of its key protagonists along the way, including Lina Kostenko, Ivan Dziuba, Valentyn Moroz and many others. As such, it is the most comprehensive and up-to-date account of the movement in Englishlanguage scholarship, though the vast array of protagonists and publications might prove somewhat disorientating to non-Ukrainianists. The book’s three lengthy chapters are each devoted to a sub-period between 1953 and the mid-1970s. They trace the emergence of the movement out of the post-Stalinist literary renaissance, through to more overtly political samizdat (samvydav in Ukrainian) and public demonstrations, harshly punished by the authorities until the movement collapsed; subsequent Ukrainian dissident groups, surveyed in the epilogue, were of a quite different character. The account of shistdesiatnytstvo is largely descriptive, and at times too detailed, with a tendency to quote sources at excessive length and a structure driven by successive events rather than a consistently clear line of argument. However, it does also persuasively challenge previous views of the movement as nationalist in origin. As demonstrated through nuanced analysis of biography and memoir material, the majority of key participants held sincere Marxist-Leninist views, shaped by Soviet education and Komsomol experience. Most only...

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