As Dina Fainberg and Artemy Kalinovsky write, "the specter of
Brezhnev's stagnation haunts Russian leadership and its relationship with the world" (xix).
That novel, published during
Brezhnev's stagnation and circulated within Russia as tamizdat, felt both subversive and relevant.
Zhuk examines the entire late Soviet period: his three larger sections move decade by decade from the Khrushchev Thaw of the late 1950s and early 1960s (part 1: The "Beating" 1960s) through
Brezhnev's Stagnation in the late 1960s and 1970s (part 2: The Hard-Rocking 1970s) to the beginning of Perestroika in 1985 (part 3: The "Disco Era").
Nikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization reforms ended with Leonid
Brezhnev's stagnation; Boris Yeltsin's democratization resulted in Putin's authoritarianism.
They learned from Khrushchev's thaw and
Brezhnev's stagnation, where they were among still waters running deep.
Several were extraordinarily successful plays on the late Soviet stage, both in the capital(s) and in the provinces; a couple were quintessential television films of
Brezhnev's stagnation era, in one case garnering an audience of 100,000,000 (no typo!), and then another 20,000,000 once re-released on the big screen in the same year.
The years of
Brezhnev's stagnation or zasto| find expression as a run-down, poorly tended space somewhere between "civilization and barbarity." On this huge, sleepy, and somewhat unkempt canvas Epshtein then begins to point out "details," the equivalent of little towns across the map.
