The Soviet Cold War Literary Imagination

The chapter focuses on the evolution of the main genres (political poetry, detective political novel, ideological novel, plays on international themes) and topics (the Soviet struggle for peace, the Western conspiracy against the USSR, the struggle of the progressive Westerners and communists against the supporters of war with the Soviet Union) during three key stages of the history of Soviet literature during the Cold War era: Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. In the Stalin period, the poetry of the struggle for peace (Konstantin Simonov, Nikolai Tikhonov, Alexei Surkov) and the spy political novel (Ilya Ehrenburg, Nikolai Shpanov, Orest Maltsev, Dmitry Eremin) dominated. The period of Khrushchev's thaw, an ideological novel appears (Ivan Shevtsov, Vsevolod Kochetov), as well as extensive anti-Semitic journalism, which developed the themes of the Jewish conspiracy. In the Brezhnev era, a political novel dominates (Yuri Bondarev, Alexander Prokhanov). In parallel, other genres are developing, which will be discussed in this chapter.