Authors

Raphaëlle Auclert¹;  ¹ ICES (Catholic Institute of Higher Studies), France

Discussion

Khrushchev's Carnival: Overcoming Fear Through a Political Ritual
From an ideological point of view, the era of the Thaw is usually described as the time of the condemnation of the Stalinist regime and self-denial of the communist project by its own leader. The famous speech of Nikita Khrushchev at the XXth Party Congress is widely considered the beginning of liberalization in the Soviet Union, in fact the very doctrinal spring that set in motion the mechanism finally led to the collapse of the country thirty years later. This article, however, is an attempt to show the Khrushchev Thaw more as a political ritual, the role of which was to overcome, compensate and indeed sublimate the four previous decades of the state violence which has governed over the life of the Soviet people since the Bolshevik revolution 1917. Khrushchev's rule strikingly resembles a political carnival: the narrowing of space, the aestheticization of closeness and intimacy; the unity of time, which becomes reflexive; flipping values; burst of energy and collective jubilation; the presence of outfits and masks whose role is assigned to literature. Using various materials from literature and cinema, political speeches, social surveys, etc., I will try to take a fresh look at the evolution and essence of this ambivalent time expressed primarily in the language of human emotions.