Moscow Thaw: 1953–1968

Museum of Moscow
2016

Moscow Thaw: 1953−1968 was an exhibition dedicated to an era of profound cultural, artistic, and historical transformation in the Soviet Union. The Thaw marked a shift from the previous era’s isolation to a renewed sense of connection with international cultural processes, as described by Ilya Ehrenburg in his famous novella that gave the decade its name.

Moscow’s parks hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students and international exhibitions, during which Soviet citizens encountered contemporary global culture and opened up themselves to dialogue with the new and the unfamiliar. A surge of new literature appeared—ranging from rediscovered Russian classics to contemporary Western authors, and to young Soviet innovators of poetic language. In visual art and music, new works emerged that resonated with global artistic movements.

The avant-garde — long suppressed — reemerged, both in culture and in science. Articles rehabilitating cybernetics and genetics were published, and within a decade, new computing machines were developed, and the N. I. Vavilov Institute of General Genetics was established. Significant achievements followed in medicine, instrumentation, and urban planning. Most symbolically, the USSR became the pioneer of space exploration.

In keeping with the spirit of the time, the Moscow Thaw exhibition was structured around nine central metaphoric "nodes", each representing a semantic cluster. These metaphorical themes brought together visual art, cinema, music, literature, social life, and scientific breakthroughs of the Thaw. This synthesis formed a coherent aesthetic program—one that defined the modernity and progressiveness of Thaw-era culture.

Curators
Evgenia Kikodze
Aleksandra Selivanova

Curatorial Team
Olga Rozenblyum
Maksim Semyonov
Sergey Nevsky

Exhibition Architecture
Konstantin Larin

Graphic Design
Anastasia Yarullina
Svetlana Dudarchik

Photography
Olga Alexeenko