Dissident writers scorned

last updated 8 January 2015

Moscow

Great Russian novels about Soviet oppression are being dropped from high school reading lists, a group of Russian writers and musicians warned this week. In a letter to the daily Izvestiya, 13 prominent Russians, including poet Andrei Voznesensky, said that “forces of the past” were trying to cover up the evils of communism by steering high schoolers away from classic dissident works, such as Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The Education Ministry denied the allegation, saying that Doctor Zhivago—which chronicles the persecution of intellectuals in the 1930s, and was banned in the Soviet era—has never been required reading.