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The thaw (the real one, that is) was at its height in Moscow last week. Ice floes were in full flight down the river. At last the Kremlin's onion domes were bare of snow. In Sokolniki Park, small boys whooped after model planes and grownups silently drank up the sun. It was the time when, Chekhov wrote, "spring is ready to enter the soul.''
Ten snows have melted since Joseph Stalin's death in March 1953. In the political and social thaw that has followed the tyrant's end, regimentation persists but the cruder kinds of terror have vanished almost as completely as the snow. To the 100 million Russians who are under 25 today, and who make up nearly a half of the Soviet Union's entire population, Stalinism is little more than a bad childhood memory. They have not been broken by the fear that haunts their fathers nor infected with the blind faith that guided some of their Bolshevik grandfathers. These youngsters have been called a lost generation. They could more fairly be called a seeking generation.
Soviet Russia is still a Sparta, not an Athens. It has no freedom in the Western sense, but dissatisfaction is becoming overt in a way that it never dared be before.
Engineers of Souls. Though incomparably better off than their elders, young Russians today ask far more of their life and are more critical of its shortcomings than any previous generation. Youth is reaching out beyond Mother Russia for its styles and slang. "Decadent" tastes that were taboo under Stalin are now status symbols. Young educated Russians are hungry for abstract art, passionately addicted to jazz, universally smitten with Ernest Hemingway and J. D. Salinger (they can read these authors in translation, but see no newspapers except Communist ones). Soviet movies such as The Cranes Are Flying sympathetically explore their conflicts and misgivings. Even the Communist Party's official youth publications discuss sins and shortcomings of the system; this would have been heresy ten years ago.
The new generation's doughtiest champions have been authors and poets, the very types who were the most closely indentured servants of Stalinism. Perhaps no other tyrant in history has ever imposed so rigorous a system of thought control as that of Joseph Stalin; his most powerful and systematic weapon was the doctrine called "socialist realism,'' by which artists became "engineers of souls." whose only function was to mass-produce Communist propaganda. Literature started up again soon after Stalin's death. In the six years since Nikita Khrushchev demolished Stalin's godhead at the 20th Party Congress, Soviet writers have proclaimed, even if they have not always been free to practice, a new "literature of truth."