Few moments, certainly few speeches, in the 20th century so radically
altered the flow of international events and specifically the direction
of Russian history as Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 attack on the cult of
Joseph Stalin. Overnight, a society under the lock and key of ideology
and the eye of a secret police was sprung loose, entering into a period
that has since come to be known as "the Thaw." Suddenly, citizens like
the young Moscow architect, Vladimir Azarov, were free to read banned
Russian writers like Solzhenitsyn, to attend concerts by stars like
Marlene Dietrich, and free to go not only to Berlin but on to Paris.
Azarov has written 26 monologues, each devoted to recollecting sunburst
moments of freedom, moments of awareness when millions of people were
suddenly coming in from the great cold of Stalin's years of terror.