BOOK MARK : The Soviet intelligentsia flourished after Stalin’s death, creating an atmosphere of enlightenment and a desire for reform long before <i> glasnost. </i> An excerpt from “The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era.”

On March 5, 1953, before dawn, I was awakened by the sounds of the allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Josef Stalin was dead.

It wasn’t my love for Stalin that made me cry. It was fear. I thought of the faceless functionaries who stood with him on the mausoleum during parades, people I couldn’t distinguish from one another.

Now one of them would become the Great Leader.

God help us all.

On March 7, my friend Mira Samoylovna Malkina and I went to say farewell to Comrade Stalin, whose body lay in state. I had to be out there, in the streets. I wanted to see it, to be able to tell my children and grandchildren about it. But I was four months pregnant with my second child, and I should have recognized the danger of being in a crowd that size.

As we came closer to Pushkin Square, the crowd grew bigger. The space around me was getting tighter. Now the crowd was carrying me toward a wrought-iron fence on Tverskoy Boulevard. I felt pressed against the fence. Then I heard Samoylovna’s voice: “Help her! She is pregnant!” She was screaming to a mounted militiaman.

The next thing I felt was a militiaman lifting me out of the crowd.

“So why are you here, you fool?” he said, setting me down on the other side of the fence. . . .

Five decades ago, future Soviet leaders and future Soviet dissidents sat in the same schoolrooms, listening to the same teachers impart the same, standard wisdom. Even the photograph in those classrooms was the same: Comrade Stalin holding a little girl and an enormous bouquet. The little, round-faced girl, wearing a sailor suit, looked like one of the flowers; and Comrade Stalin looked, well, fatherly.

I was born in 1927, three years after he came to power. In 1937, when I was 10, people began to vanish from our Moscow apartment building. I saw nothing wrong with the disappearances and asked no questions. I knew no other life.

Landmark events that defined stages in my generation’s development can be pinpointed to the day, sometimes even to the minute. The first occurred on June 22, 1941, at exactly 4 a.m., the start of the German invasion. At school, we had been told that our armed forces were invincible. Now the army was retreating toward Moscow, losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The retreat gave us an inkling of doubt about our teachers. Could they have been lying to us?

The end of the war did not put our doubts to rest. And it did nothing to ease the nebulous sense that something was missing. I was not happy, and I didn’t know anyone who was. If the Revolution of 1917 was made in the name of our happy future, then where was that future? Could there have been some defect in the system, or in our leaders, or in me personally? Why was I having such thoughts, which could not be shared with others?

On March 5, 1953, when the radio broadcast the news of Stalin’s death, most of us broke into tears because we were helpless; we cried because we had no rational way of predicting what would happen to us now; we cried because we sensed that, for better or for worse, an era had passed.

Since we knew no other life, we were not prepared to picture what came next: a period of liberalization that was subsequently named “the thaw,” after a second-rate novella by Ilya Ehrenburg.

On Feb. 25, 1956, when I was nearing 30, Nikita Khrushchev shocked the entire nation with the revelation that the deceased Great Leader was actually a criminal. That put an end to our lonely questioning of the Soviet system. Young men and women began to lose their fear of sharing views, knowledge, beliefs, questions. Every night, we gathered in cramped apartments to recite poetry, read “unofficial” prose, and swap stories that, taken together, yielded a realistic picture of what was going on in our country.

That was the time of our awakening.

We had no leaders and no teachers. All we could do was learn from each other. Eager to shed the Stalinist doctrine of collectivism, we realized that each of us had a right to privacy. There is no word for “privacy” in the Russian language, but we stumbled upon the concept the word defines: we ceased to be cogs in the machine of state; we ceased to be faceless members of the “collective”; each of us was unique, and all of us had a right to uniqueness. Without asking permission from the party or the government, we asserted that writers had a right to write what they wanted; that readers had a right to choose what they read, and that each of us had a right to say what he thought.

We did not invent this pursuit of liberty; we reinvented it for ourselves and our country. Thanks to the efforts of our Father and Genius, we were ignorant about the West, where such ideas had been around for centuries. We also knew little about any political philosophy other than the Bolshevik brand of communism.

In 1968, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, strangling reforms and simultaneously helping to install a new communist orthodoxy at home. The invasion marked the end of the thaw. Now each of us had to choose between three options: the first was to toe the party line and be allowed to advance professionally; the second was to put a career on hold and wait for another thaw; the third was to stay the course of the thaw and accept the consequences--an aborted career and the life of a pariah. Only a few intellectuals chose the third option.

A Soviet dissident quickly became a pariah even among people who privately shared his views. He served as a silent, or not so silent, reminder that some people in Soviet society had chosen to act as citizens. By just being there, a dissident could induce guilt. The easiest way out would be to dismiss him as a wild-eyed fighter for justice with a penchant for heroic poses and drastic pronouncements.

Isolated from society, we lived in what amounted to a ghetto. Our ghetto had its own traditions, literature, celebrations, etiquette, even institutions. While the rest of the country celebrated May 1, “the day of solidarity of the working masses,” and Nov. 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, we celebrated March 5, the day Stalin died.

When our friends spent their birthdays in prison, we celebrated with their relatives. Whenever you learned that a friend had been arrested, you pinned his picture on the wall, in solidarity. Whenever you found out that a friend’s apartment was being searched, you went there and demanded to be allowed in. In later years, some of us developed the gall to file suits against the KGB after searches or attacks in newspapers.

At first, in the late 1960s, public opinion was with the dissidents, but year after year that support weakened. By the mid-1980s, when most dissidents were either in prisons or in exile, we were simply forgotten. Society had rejected us.

In 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev took power, no one could have predicted that his policies in the Kremlin would reflect the ideas of our younger days. The opposite seemed more likely. He could have succumbed to the stultifying effect of the decades of serving as a functionary in the party apparatus.

But since Gorbachev’s ascendancy, a number of his functionaries have come out in support of reforms reminiscent of Prague Spring. The general secretary has also found backing among the intellectuals who fell silent for two decades after the invasion of Czechoslovakia--those who stayed neutral, waiting for their hour to come. But no dissident has joined his team--too great is the schism between the pariahs and the Establishment. Our spiritual differences may be irreconcilable.

At this writing, he has taken the hammer to virtually all of the pillars of the Soviet system. At times, he borrows our slogans and draws on our ideas. We take no offense at Gorbachev and his associates for not citing us as sources. We are happy that our ideas have acquired a new life.

Besides, now we know that such ideas are commonplace in the West and have been known to be heard in Russia’s past. We lit a tiny flame of freedom and kept it burning for the two decades of the Brezhnev period. Now, my contemporaries who have not rotted away in their hide-outs have joined in perestroika. I wish them success. All of us shared the bitterness of the Stalin era, and that shared experience gives us hope that the current warming will be more than a thaw in the midst of winter.

Copyright 1990 by Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown & Co. Inc.

BOOK REVIEW: A review of “The Thaw Generation” appears on Page 2 of the Book Review section.