The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

* It has often been suggested that Zhdanov was a political moderate, a liberal reformer, who lost out to hardliners, such as Malenkov, in Stalin’s ruling clique, as relations with the West deteriorated in 1945–6. According to this view, the hardline cultural policies were in fact imposed by Zhdanov’s rivals in the Party leadership. But the archives show that Zhdanov had no independent political ideas, and that policy positions within the ruling clique were developed in response to various signals from Stalin, who used Zhdanov to impose on all the Soviet arts and sciences a rigid ideological conformity to the Party’s anti-Western stance.