The spring of 1956 — when, throughout the country, Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ report was being read to hundreds of thousands of listeners — was a time of questions, hopes and illusions. Hopes rose sharply and the public’s expectations quickly clashed with the plans of the leadership. For Khrushchev’s group at the top, the Twentieth Congress marked the conclusion, as it seemed to them, of the necessary process of liberalization. For those who heard the ‘secret’ report it marked the beginning of that process. The hopes and expectations of the intellectuals could not be approved and they consequently became undesirable in the eyes of the statocracy, for there was danger that further demands would be put forward. And that was what happened. During the stormy discussion of Khrushchev’s report in the Writers’ Union such proposals were advanced as a freer system of election, a public investigation of Stalin’s doings, and so on. As before, the left-wing intellectuals looked for fresh steps towards liberalization to be taken by the ruling statocracy themselves, but even so they did not want to linger and stand still. R. Orlova said:
The days we are now living through remind me of the days right after October — there is the same mass-meeting type of democracy. Everybody wants to speak. Those who have long held their tongues. And those who long spoke nothing but lies. And those who sincerely believed and who are now being told they believed in lies. People are coming to an accounting with their own consciences… But we can’t allow ourselves the luxury of resting at this stage.67
The criticism of the past — begun very cautiously and inconsistently at the top, as Pomerantsev also thought — met with active support from below which was not welcomed by the men at the top. The ‘Movement of Solidarity’ with the Twentieth Congress, the appearance of the writings of Pomerantsev and Dudintsev, the verses of Yevtushenko, Okudzhava and others, came as a surprise — an unpleasant one — to Khrushchev. As Roy Medvedev writes, he ‘was not yet ready to lend his active support to the thaw.’68
A feeling of rejection determined the mood of the intelligentsia. ‘Rejection of what has been or is being outlived’, wrote the critic V. Kardin, ‘is natural, healthy and, above all, necessary. It frightens only those who are being rejected.’69 The rebellious youths in Viktor Rozov’s plays really were ‘typical representatives’ of a new generation and a new epoch. These ‘rebellious youths’ soon became a serious political problem. In 1956 an oppositionist student movement began to take shape which could no longer express itself within the bounds of ‘permitted criticism’. The exposures at the Twentieth Congress produced in wide circles of the population, as Roy Medvedev acknowledges, ‘confusion, bewilderment and disillusionment’.70 For those who had known at least part of the hidden truth, the Congress was proof that the ruling group might give up lying and become sincere, while for those who had known nothing previously the Congress revealed, on the contrary, that the rulers were dishonourable and capable of lying. This resulted in distrust of the upper circles by the lower orders, a feeling which found expression mainly in political apathy. Whereas for the intelligentsia the ‘secret report’ signified hope for change, for millions of workers and peasants who, earlier, had blindly believed the official propaganda, it was a shock. The students, being an intermediate stratum between the intellectual ‘elite’ and the working masses, were gripped by the intelligentsia’s enthusiasm, yet at the same time, like the lower orders, felt acute disappointment with the system that had deceived them. Consequently, they set about forming oppositionist organizations with a revolutionary tendency. David Burg writes:
