The liberal changes that started in Soviet Russia after Stalin’s death (5 March 1953) came to be called ‘The Thaw’, after the 1954 novel of this title by Ilia Ehrenburg, in which the writer advocated for the artist’s right to self-expression, criticized the events of recent history, and expressed hope for change. During the ensuing decade, ‘thaws’ and ‘freezes’ alternated with each other; but throughout this period observers could see the seemingly unified, monolithic stratum of Soviet culture that had been shaped and consolidated in the preceding Stalinist period erode rapidly. A special role in these changes was allotted to literature, both documentary and belletristic, thereby affirming the classical postulate about the literature-centredness of Russian culture as a whole. Thaw literature had its own pioneers: the writer and critic Vladimir Pomerantsev is usually considered the main one of the ‘first Thaw’ because of the groundbreaking statements he made in his December 1954 article ‘On Sincerity in Literature’ (‘Ob iskrennosti v literature’) in the literary journal Novyi mir, in which he insisted on the sincerity of a writer’s work as the measure of artistic achievement. His claim that the writer should follow his own creative impulses rather than official party doctrine drew both accolades and harsh criticism; but it broke the silence about the situation in literature and the arts, and vigorous discussions about the state of literature began.

Among the most vulnerable citizens of the new Soviet state in its first decade were its children: abandoned by their families who for various reasons were not able to care for them, displaced from their homes by the Civil War, or simply lost in the constant migrations (the rural population going into big cities in search of a better life, or people leaving the cities for the villages, hoping to find food), these ‘little comrades’ became the first targets of the Soviet project that sought to make the ‘new man’. Two fictional works of Soviet children‘s literature-both of which confirmed the success of revolutionary rebirth-became testaments to the struggle of the street children in the early days of the Revolution: SHKID Republic (Respublika SHKID, 1926), by Grigory Belykh and Leonid Panteleev; and Pedagogical Poem (Pedagogicheskaia Poema, 1933,1936), by Anton Makarenko. The first, written by two former delinquents, describes the rigorous life in the school for young criminal offenders that bore Dostoevsky‘s name (the abbreviation SHKID comes from the Russian shkola imeni Dostoevskogo-‘Dostoevsky School’). It was a highly romanticized picture of life in the ‘republic’ where self-governance and trust were integral parts of human existence, and it celebrated the freedom and creativity of its young citizens.

In his new book Happiness: A History, Darrin McMahon refers to the observation made by Hegel: ‘One may contemplate history from the point of view of happiness, but history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.’ But what are the ‘periods of happiness’ in history, and were there, in fact, such periods in history (even if we allow them to be ‘blank pages’)? Obviously, the yearning for happiness is one of mankind's fundamental needs, and its fulfilment is the basis for a person's creative activity, filling the sphere of his/her imagination. The yearning for happiness is a quite individual need, and this is why drama arises from the historical impossibility of harmonising individual happiness with the overall social project. Without doubt, the Soviet era attempted to achieve just this harmony. It was, however, an era of shortages everywhere. The only thing that it provided in abundance was the historical cataclysms that followed hard upon each other, any one of which might well comprise an entire era in the history of a nation. The Russian revolution was an attempt to fast-forward history. Today, what it produced-the Soviet era-has itself become history.

Marxism, which the Russian revolutionaries invoked, was least of all concerned with the private (or bourgeois) ideal of happiness.