The collection of materials of the conference held at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences reflects some of the results of studies of the least studied aspects of relations between power and society in the USSR and Eastern European countries at the stage of de-Stalinization and the search for new ways of development. The focus of the authors - historians, political scientists, literary critics and culturologists - is a complex palette of public sentiments in the USSR and the countries of the "socialist camp," their role in the processes of liberalization and transformation of political regimes in the 50s and 60s. XX century For historians, social scientists and everyone interested in the political and cultural history of the XX century.