“Thaw metaphors” or similar metaphors have accompanied the entire Russian history since the beginning of the 19th century (1801, 1855, 1880, 1904, 1954, 1986, 2008). The cold winter served as an allegory for an extremely authoritarian or dictatorial regime, the thaw meant a harbinger of more liberal times. These metaphors are usually ambiguous: a thaw may herald spring, but there is also a winter thaw. F.I. Tyutchev, who first used the word “thaw” in its later meaning (1855), apparently did not mean signs of internal political liberalization, but the beginning of the “thawing” of society after a long political winter. The key word of the Russian press of the late 1850s was still not “thaw”, but “transparency” (“glasnost”), and then the word “reforms”. The concept of “thaw” in relation to the beginning of the reign of Alexander II was finally established under the influence of Soviet word usage, dating back to Ehrenburg’s story “The Thaw” (1954). Thaw metaphors were also encountered in connection with the political situation of 1880–1881. (“dictatorship of the heart” by M.T. Loris-Melikov) and the autumn of 1904 (the so-called “spring dreams”). In the West, the “thaw” usually served as a synonym for de-Stalinization in the broad sense; in the USSR this concept related primarily to the sphere of cultural life. In the Soviet press it was used only as a “foreign word”, since party ideologists, not unreasonably, saw in it “an ambiguous term.” Since the late 1950s the word “thaw” was often found as a synonym for “detente”, i.e. warming relations with Western countries. The international and domestic “thaws” were to some extent interrelated phenomena.
political language; cultural policy; era of Great Reforms; de-Stalinization; F.I. Tyutchev; I. Erenburg; N.S. Khrushchev.