The drama of the Soviet 1960s: a lost reform

Whole Earth Review, May, 1985 by Robert Fuller

ROBERT FULLER: The most interesting book I have read on the Soviet Union in many years is The Drama of the Soviet 1960s by Alexander Yanov, just published by the University of California Press. I read it on the train in Siberia. Yanov lived in the Soviet Union until 1974 when he was forced into exile.

He claims to be the only person to have published articles in Pravda, Izvestia, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. This book is about Soviet agricultural reforms undertaken in the '60s, reforms which offered great promise and even recorded very significant results, but which died with Khrushchev's ouster essentially because they involved a loss of political control by party officials. When I mentioned the book at lunch in the U.S. Embassy it precipitated a mock fight between a Foreign Service Office agricultural specialist and a reporter for the New York Times over who would get to read it first. After them it goes to the Washington Post correspondents, and from there it goes to the Soviet press corps, I hope.