The years from the death of Stalin until the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 saw several “thaws” separated by “freezes.” Ilya Ehrenburg's novel Ottepel (1954; The Thaw) provided this term for a period of relative liberalism. In 1956 Khrushchev delivered a famous speech denouncing certain Stalinist crimes. From that time on, it was possible for Russians to perceive orthodox communists as people of the past and to regard dissidents not as holdovers from before the Revolution but as progressives.
Yury Trifonov wrote about what he called “the ordeal of ordinary life” in Dom na naberezhnoy (1976; The House on the Embankment)
