Stephen V. Bittner
Associate Professor of History
Research
Research
The subject of my first book, The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw (Cornell University Press, 2008), is Moscow's Arbat neighborhood, a Soviet version of Saint-Germain des Prés in Paris or Greenwich Village in New York. During the 1950s and 60s, the writers Bulat Okudzhava and Anatolii Rybakov honed through their works a myth of the Arbat. The myth located an intellectual and cultural utopia in the Arbat of the 1920s. It held that the present-day neighborhood was a shadow of its former self. And it captured the often contradictory ways the intelligentsia experienced the thaw of the Khrushchev years, when Soviet citizens of all stripes were counting the victims of Stalinism.
In addition to my work on the Arbat, I am the editor of the memoirs of Dmitrii Shepilov, The Kremlin's Scholar (Yale University Press, 2007). Shepilov, a high-ranking official in the Soviet Communist Party, was implicated in an unsuccessful coup against Nikita Khrushchev in 1957, and later spent forty years in obscurity nurturing a grudge against his old nemesis.
Finally, I am at the beginning stages of a new project on the history of winemaking along the Black Sea littoral, particularly in Georgia and Crimea. I would be grateful for any advice or comments on this project. Rare bottles of Saperavi are also welcome.