Superpower: Thaw, Sputnik and Stagnation
After Stalin, the Soviet Union becomes a nuclear superpower, puts the first man in space and settles into the stable, shabby "stagnation" years many older Russians remember fondly.
- Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation — Alexei Yurchak, Princeton University Press (2006)
- Russian History: A Very Short Introduction — Geoffrey Hosking, Oxford University Press (2012)
- Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 — Stephen Kotkin, Oxford University Press (2001)
Nikita Khrushchev’s “Thaw” released millions from the Gulag, eased censorship (Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in 1962) and built millions of small flats, the khrushchevki, that still house much of Russia. The USSR launched Sputnik in 1957 and on 12 April 1961 sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit, the first human in space. It also crushed the Hungarian revolution in 1956 and brought the world close to nuclear war over Cuba in 1962.
- Russian History: A Very Short Introduction — Geoffrey Hosking, Oxford University Press (2012)
- Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 — Stephen Kotkin, Oxford University Press (2001)
Under Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82) life became predictable: jobs for life, shortages and queues, a thriving black market and kitchen-table conversations that mocked the official slogans everyone repeated in public. The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak called this the world of the “last Soviet generation”, which believed the system would last for ever until it suddenly didn’t. Tanks crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, dissidents such as Andrei Sakharov were persecuted, and the war in Afghanistan from 1979 killed about 15,000 Soviet soldiers.
- Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation — Alexei Yurchak, Princeton University Press (2006)
- Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 — Stephen Kotkin, Oxford University Press (2001)
- Russian History: A Very Short Introduction — Geoffrey Hosking, Oxford University Press (2012)
Why it matters today
For many Russians over fifty, the late Soviet decades mean security, free education and healthcare, cheap holidays and national pride, Gagarin above all. Nostalgia for this era, more than for Stalin, shapes how older Russians judge the present and their sense that the country deserves to be treated as a great power.