Zhdanovshchina

English

Etymology

After Andrei Zhdanov, who was in charge of the "Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign" under Stalin

Proper noun

Zhdanovshchina

1. (historical) The ideological repression of artists and intellectuals in the Soviet Union during the 1940s and 1950s.
   • 1972, Linden M. Renner, Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov: A Political-career Sketch, page 81:

     The Zhdanovshchina thesis about the party spirit of literature was based on the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of society and of forms of social ideology.

   • 2001, Serhy Yekelchyk, “Celebrating the Soviet Present: The Zhdanovshchina campaign in Ukrainian Literature and the Arts”, in Donald J. Raleigh, editor, Provincial Landscapes: Local Dimensions of Soviet Power, 1917-1953, page 256:

     Traditional accounts portray the Zhdanovshchina as a return to the prewar strident party line, the reassertion of ideological control over culture, and the purging of literature and the arts of Western influences.

   • 2018, Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939-1953, page 98:

     The commencement of the Zhdanovshchina can be dated to the founding of a newspaper that would be the voice of the Central Committee's cultural apparatus until 1950, when the focus on ideology was supplanted by greater attention to personnel issues.