a rather derogatory term meaning something like a "thin layer between two masses", the masses in question being the urban and rural workers.

"Curi­ously, physicists are in the limelight and lyricists are eclipsed..." Sure they were eclipsed - who wanted to hear their bravura lies or piteous whining?

It was all too easy to see that, under Soviet social­ism, the socialist "production relations" were simply waiting to "burst asunder." being, in Marxist terms, "a fetter on the mode of production" (op.cit). The lines from a popular song, Vsyo vokrug kolkhoznoye, vsyo vokrug moyo

The mood I'm describing here is that of shestidesyatniki

The shestidesyatniki matured in ideological battles between the liberal "stout monthly" Novy mir (New World) and the weekly Literaturnaya gazeta (Literary Gazette), on the one hand, and the conservative, or neo-Stalinist "fatty" Oktyabr (October) and the Soviet excuse for a glossy magazine Ogonyok

Novy mir's

After that, in 1974, Novy mir but the Moscow intelligentsia reacted rather hysterically to its subject matter - the heroic deeds of the dreaded SMERSH, an acronym for smert shpionam "death to the spies" designating Soviet wartime counterintelligence units. In terms of social impact, the situation was the mirror likeness of what happened in 1962, when Novy mir

Afterwards, Novy mir,

But the real literary events in that era occurred not on the surface, not in books and magazines, but in the underground, and I do not even primarily mean here the so-calted samizdat In good company, one could spend literally hours listening to guys versed in the art, the so-called anekdotisty.

The other one is a particular favorite of mine. as I helped in the making of it. The Umpteenth Congress of the Communist Party is in progress, and Comrade Brezhnev is mumbling through his speech. In the gal­lery, some people are craning their necks to see the speaker better. One guy asks the man in front, "Could you move slightly to the right? Thanks. Now could you bend forward a bit? Thanks. No, that's too much..." The guy in front asks in irritation, without turning, "Should I give you my field glasses, perhaps?" "No thanks, I've got my telescopic sight!" End of this story, but there's a sequel. The guy in the back row shoots, misses, is duly apprehended and taken to the KGB for interrogation. There follows the regular KGB routine:

ever could.