Benjamin Nathans, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia. He is writing a history of the Soviet dissident movement.
In 1957, Boris Shragin, a young art historian, accompanied a group of foreigners on a visit to the Moscow studio of Aleksandr Gerasimov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Arts. Gerasimov had made his name with fawning neoclassical portraits of Stalin and Voroshilov, and used his position to crush ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘formalist’ artists whose work strayed from the...
The dissidents’ questioning of established Soviet truths itself had Soviet roots. Many had come of age in the period after Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ of 1956, when citizen critiques of Soviet...
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