Exploring reform: De-Stalinization in Moscow's Arbat District, 1953--1968 (Russia).

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The primary intent of this dissertation is to examine the impact of the de-Stalinization reforms upon those who lived and worked in Moscow's Arbat district during the Khrushchev and early-Brezhnev periods. Located less than a mile west of the Kremlin, the Arbat was home to many of the artistic and academic institutions which figured prominently in the cultural “Thaw” of the 1950s and 60s, and was at the center of a series of urban-planning and development initiatives which were closely associated with the reform politics of Stalin's successors. While these phenomena were by no means fully representative of the broad scope of de-Stalinization, they do shed light on the types of controversies which political reform elicited at the local level in the years following Stalin's death, and the way these controversies affected the overall course of reform. In particular, the experience of the Arbat suggests that the meaning and pace of de Stalinization was not simply decreed from above, but constantly contested by residents of the neighborhood, by local-level officials, and by those farther up the party/state hierarchy. The ensuing conflicts marked those points where top-level legislation encountered local-level constraints, and were indicative of one of the most ubiquitous and unforeseen offshoots of de-Stalinization: in countless everyday affairs, Soviet citizens struggled to mold the broad imperatives of reform to their individual hopes and needs. Within the Arbat, this ongoing process of negotiation and exploration proved central to the process of de-Stalinization.