Saving Russian Patriotism: Dmitry Likhachev and the Struggle of Identity in Soviet Intelligentsia

Russian intelligentsia vanished during the Soviet times, but not quite. It turned out that one of the last Mohicans of this vanishing tribe, Dmitry Likhachev, lived long enough to have an impact on Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Likhachev, survivor of the first Soviet labor camp in the 1920s, is the world’s best authority on old Russian literature and language, often considered to be Russia’s conscience during the perestroika period. Professor Zubok is the author of A Failed Empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007), and Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (2009).
This lecture is sponsored by the Department of History, the Department of Political Science, and the Center of Cold War Studies and International History.

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