During the more than half a century covered in this chapter, the Soviet Unionexperienced a bewildering array of changes, up to and including its own demise.The final years of Stalin’s life and rule, when the country had toregenerate itself after the devastation of the Second World War, involved majorcultural repressions amid a climate of isolationism and xenophobia. BetweenStalin’s death in 1953 and the mid-1960s, Soviet officialdom shed its mosttyrannical aspects, and despite frequent reimposition of cultural controls,artistic creativity flourished. Brezhnev’s reign curtailed much of thedynamism characteristic of the Thaw, whose suppressed energies re-emerged duringGorbachev’s five years of perestroika and glasnost’. Finally, after the upheavals that endedGorbachev’s rule, Russia now vies for attention and profit in a worldmarket. In slightly more than half a century, then, the society has gone fromabsolute political centralisation to substantial if jagged decentralisation, fromstate-planned mega-economic structures to market-dependent enterprises, frompower- and prestige-based hierarchies to money-based class structures. Itscreative artists, once tacit partners with the state in a contract based on mutualsupport, must fend for themselves in a difficult and competitive environment.