From Soviet dissent to Bolotnaya protest

1.

In order to understand the present situation in Russia with regard to social protest, human rights, the growing censorship of media and the steady increase in violent repression by the authorities, I believe it is necessary to look at the history of the Soviet dissident movement and its post-1991 evolution. In a series of recent posts I attempted to summarize Ludmila Alexeyeva's history of the movement as it appears in a section of her important book История инакомыслия в СССР (1983). What emerges from her carefully documented account is an enormous panoply of groups and individuals, many with widely differing views, yet united in their opposition to the cynicism and amorality of the Soviet regime, and their determination to hold it to the legal standards it professed on paper yet ignored in practice. Above all, Alexeyeva's history provides the basis of a proper explanation of why in the post-Soviet period so few figures in the dissident movement took positions of influence in the new governments that were established after the fall of Communism, and why in Russia no process of "lustration" - the government process regulating the participation of former security police agents in successor positions - took place, as it did the ex-satellite countries of Eastern Europe.

In their published correspondence entitled What Became of the Soviet Dissidents? (2002) Keith and Masha Gessen have discussed some of the attributes and circumstances of the dissident movement in a way that exposes one of its central features: its location in two separate geographical and ideological/cultural regions, commonly called "East" and "West". While the Soviet dissidents were cultural and social non-conformists, in political terms they had little in common with their counterparts in the West, the radicals of the 1960s and 70s. While Western radicals conceived their protest as a political act, for the Soviet dissidents resistance to the prevailing order took an essentially moral form. In this there was a fundamental clash, for while among the youth of the West political action was greatly valued, enjoying a high degree of respect, in the East it was viewed by most people with mistrust, as the language and practice of repression. In the West, on the other hand, the concept of morality had come to be equated with "bourgeois morality", which was rejected in favor of new cultural and social norms. So there was little room for mutual understanding in these two important areas. While the political protesters of the West were eagerly exploited for propaganda purposes by the Soviet authorities, in the West the dissidents were championed mainly by right-wing politicians. In his remarkable essay Exiles on Main Street, which forms the starting-point for the correspondence, Keith Gessen explains some of the tensions and the sense of incongruity:

...to have a man dressed in an aging checkered sweater, over whose chair hangs a beige corduroy jacket with brown leather patches at the elbows, who is constantly smoking (Benson & Hedges), whose face radiates intelligence and skepticism and tolerance in the greatest tradition of the Left – to have such a man tell you he supported Reagan is remarkable! And then again, not so remarkable. Reagan was just entering office when we came over, and for the entire generation that arrived in the late seventies and eighties he will forever symbolize the welcoming arms that met us, the astounding difference of this new world. While the liberals shucked, shawed, and prattled on about universal health care in the USSR, Reagan believed us! Not only that, he was willing to act on this belief: he so hated the evil empire (how evil, we well knew) that he would plunge the country into debt, ship arms behind the back of Congress, bring us to brink of armed conflict to beat them!

This strange yet logical disparity, this almost surrealistic juxtaposition of two entirely different assessments of reality, is probably at the root of much of the bewilderment that is still felt both by radicals in the West  and by oppositionists in Russia today when seeking to understand the protests of the past and present day on either side. For the Soviet dissidents were not, as is commonly believed in the West, a few courageous voices in the wilderness crying out in isolation - they were only the most audible voices, the tip of a very large iceberg, a social and cultural stratum that underlay almost the whole of Soviet society, from bottom to top, and was instrumental in the Soviet system's downfall.  The leaders, like Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Yesenin-Volpin, Brodsky and others, were not political figures in any accepted sense - indeed, their work went far beyond political activism and involved social, historical, literary, intellectual, biographical and cultural factors that are often hard to pin down. Yet in spite of all the internal divisions, the apolitical arena and the frequent displays of personal rancour, the strength of the movement's resistance remained.

(to be continued)

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The remainder of Ludmila Alexeyeva's discussion of the rights movement shows that 1977 was a kind of watershed for it. After the metro bombing the repression by the authorities became systematic and all-embracing: while the number of arrests and harsh sentences increased markedly, the exile of Andrei Sakharov to Gorky and the conditions of house arrest under which he was held there meant that the movement was deprived of one of its most cogent, moderate and internationally respected adherents. The demographics of the movement itself began to change: in place of the literary, philosophical, humanities-based background of many of the earlier pravozashchitniki, the context of the new generation was predominantly a scientific and technical one, and lacked the bohemian flair of the 60s intelligentsia. Thew author's account ends in late 1982-early 1983. By then the post-Stalin Soviet state had entered what was probably its darkest period - the illusions of détente were giving way to a general deterioration of relations between the USSR and the United States, the U.S. plans to deploy Pershing missiles in Western Europe in response to the Soviet SS-20s met with aggressive hostility on the part of Moscow, and it was at this period that Ronald Reagan coined the phrase "the evil empire".

In retrospect it is possible to see that the darkness was to some extent manufactured - a tactical maneuver by the Soviet government and its special services. After Andropov's death in 1983 the blackout persisted for a year or so during the retrograde Brezhnev-like presidency of Chernenko, and then began to show the odd flicker of light as the cracks in the system became more apparent, even to a few observers in the West. But the dissident movement continued its underground action, for even in the first year of Gorbachev's presidency a figure like the poet Irina Ratushinskaya was still being held in a Soviet labour camp, and was not released until 1986.

With the collapse of the USSR in 1989, the situation of the rights movement changed - but the precise nature of the change has yet to be defined. In a future post I will try to outline what I see as the differences between the protest movements of the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, and also the features that to some extent unite them.

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As Alexeyeva continues to chronicle and analyze the various phases of the protest movement, she encounters from time to time an uncertainty that is reflected in the three words "инакомыслящий", "диссидент" and "правозащитник". In her account, "инакомыслщий" is mainly a general term that can be used of anyone whose opinions differ from those of official policy - thus even nineteenth century authors like Pushkin and Dostoevsky could be called "инакомыслящие", while "диссидент" is a more modern term, applied mainly to the individual writers, thinkers and publicists who set themselves in opposition to Soviet power. "Правозащитник" refers to the rights defenders, those who have studied the Soviet penal and legal code and use their knowledge of it in order, among other things, to hold the authorities to account.

In the sections that follow the book discusses the development of the Chronicle of Current Events, and its role in tracking and documenting the legal cases before the Soviet courts, in providing material, personal and financial support for sentenced and convicted rights defenders and in shaping the public protest actions that gradually became more numerous both in Moscow and Leningrad, and beyond. A section is devoted to the establishment of the Moscow Helsinki monitoring group, and there is a pointed discussion of the momentous tamizdat publication of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. Already evident here are the divisions that opened up between different wings of the movement, the national-patriotic views of Solzhenitsyn clashing, for example, with the internationalism of the Sakharovs. However, Alexeyeva is at pains to emphasize the essential unity of the protest, and keeps the activities and writings of the nationalists separate, in a special chapter.

The Kremlin authorities tried by every means in their power to discredit the growing opposition movement. A significant moment was reached on January 8, 1977, with the Moscow metro bombing*. That blast, like the others that occurred in the capital that day, was eventually blamed on Armenian nationalists. But as Andrei Sakharov pointed out, there were suspicions that the explosions might have been the work of someone else  Without directly charging the KGB with responsibility for the attacks, Sakharov wrote:

"I have serious grounds for concern. There is the provocative article in the London Evening News by Victor Louis. There are the arrests and interrogations of people who are clearly not related to the bombings. There are the murders of recent months, probably committed by the KGB. which were not investigated. It is enough to mention only two of them: the murder of the poet Konstantin Bogatyrev and the murder of the lawyer Evgeni Brunov."

*On a topical note: some commentators have noted that the explosive device in the 1977 metro bombing was of a homemade type (manufactured from a cooking utensil and black powder) similar to the ones that were used in the Boston attacks of April 15, 2013.

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Underlining the literary nature of the rights defending movement, in 1965-66 the authors Andrei Sinyavsky (Abram Tertz) and Yuli Daniel (Nikolai Arzhak) were tried and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment  for works of fiction - short stories and novellas - they had written and then published in the West. The charges related to "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda", though the prosecution had difficulty in proving intent to do harm, and after the trial additional clauses had to be added to the penal code. Alexeyeva points out that while the rights defending movement had hitherto been largely the concern of the young, this trial drew the attention of a much wider cross-section of Soviet society, including the middle-aged, middle-class technological sector.  

Another feature of the trial was the letter-writing campaign begun by Yuli Daniel's wife, Larisa Bogoraz. Initially the letters  to representatives of the authorities, in particular the public prosecutor, were private and signed by her alone, like the letters that had earlier been written by others in support of Pasternak and Brodsky. As time went on, however, more signatories joined her, until the public "open letter" was born. After the harsh sentences passed on dissidents like Alexander Ginzburg, Yuri Galanskov, Vera Lashkova, Alexander Dobrovolsky, Vladimir Bukovsky, Viktor Khaustov and others, such letters were signed by as many as 700 people, most of whom fell victim to repression of various kinds: exclusion from the Communist Party and expulsion from university followed by loss of employment.

The rights defenders began to adopt other methods of exerting pressure on the authorities, including the circulation of petitions. Alexeyeva comments that the petitions against re-Stalinization and repressive judicial decisions were an indication that the USSR was beginning a transition from a totalitarian state to an authoritarian one - the petition had been an instrument used by the pre-1917 opposition in Russia, and its reintroduction suggested a return to earlier methods of democratic resistance.

The protests against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 developed the rights movement even further - Alexeyeva likens it to the growth of mushrooms. In Andrei Amalrik the movement acquired its first "specialist" in making contacts with supporters in the West: the institution of tamizdat was born, not only bringing in previously unavailable foreign texts but also books by Russian-language authors: Alexeyeva lists works by Sakharov and Amalrik, Anatoly Marchenko's My Testimony, Vasily Grossman's Forever Flowing, Lidiya Chukovskaya's Moscow to the End of the Line, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and The First Circle, and poetry by Iosif Brodsky, among others.  
 
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In her discussion of the Soviet dissident movement Alexeyeva places an initial emphasis on two central points:

1) The movement is properly defined as a правозащитное движение - literally, "rights (or law) defending movement". This name was entirely new and original: Alexeyeva notes that it came neither from the Russian traditions of constitutional democracy as practiced by the pre-1917 KD (Kadets), nor from the international human rights movement - instead, it described the experience and aspirations of  people who had spent their lives in conditions of "lawless actions (беззаконий), cruelty and the trampling of the individual in the 'interests of the collective', or for the sake of 'the bright future of all mankind'." The situation and actions of the rights defenders were characterized by Andrei Amalrik as the expression of "something brilliantly simple: they began to behave as free people in  a country that was not free and by doing so to change the moral atmosphere and the tradition that governed the country." [my tr.] Thus, the rights defending movement was not a political movement, but a moral one. This enabled it to encompass national, ethnic, social, economic and religious borders and to reach out across them to the USSR as a whole and to the world beyond.

2) The movement had its roots in Russian and Soviet literature: the work of authors like Vladimir Dudintsev, Ilya Ehrenburg, Alexander Tvardovsky and Boris Pasternak created the moral and aesthetic context for much of the writing that appeared in the journal Novy Mir throughout 1960s, including the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Of primary importance, however, were the home-produced, clandestine publications of samizdat, which embraced not only civic texts but also many literary works, both Russian and foreign, that were banned from official circulation. The output of samizdat contained  a strong component of  poetry, which took its inspiration from an earlier twentieth century tradition of инакомыслие centering on poets who included Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetayeva and Osip Mandelstam. While figures like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky dominated the official poetry scene, with occasional nods to the dissidents, the work of Iosif Brodsky was perhaps the best-known part of an enormous underground proliferation of  poems by many different and often anonymous authors. Because of the relative conciseness of the medium of poetry, these texts could easily be committed to memory, thus bypassing the need for typing and printing. The poems were also frequently set to music and sung to the accompaniment of a guitar, which extended their availability and popularity. This literary work was able to express and convey the ideals of the rights defenders in a form that was far more attractive than the texts of civic documents.

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Alexeyeva's book is essentially divided into three equal parts, which deal with the Soviet national movements, the religious movements and the human rights movement, with the addition of chapters on the socialists, the social-economic protest and the Russian national movement. Of the three main parts, it is the section on the human rights movement which most closely corresponds to a history of what in the West has come to be known as the "Soviet dissident movement".

It's significant that the word  диссидентство (dissidence) doesn't figure in the book's title, which opts for the more general term инакомыслие (literally "heterodoxy"), rendered by the English translators as "dissent" (несогласие). This leaves the way open for discussion of movements which less related to human rights and more to freedom of thought and belief, such as the religious ones.

The methods of chronicling and historical analysis adopted in the book are for the most part strictly factual and statistical. The author's personal view of the events and crises that are described and listed, though present, is not prominent, and the principal focus is on accuracy and detail, with the inclusion of as many movements, groups, societies and individuals as possible, giving rise to an extensive work that runs to nearly 400 pages in the Russian edition, and more than 500 in the English one.

The first third of the book is devoted to a history of the ethnic-national protest movements in the republics of the USSR, including Ukraine, the Baltics, Armenia, Georgia and Crimea, the Jewish refuseniks, the ethnic Meskhetians, and the Soviet Germans. The section that follows deals with religious movements - Baptists, Pentecostalists, Seventh Day Adventists and Russian Orthodox - and it is not until page 205 that we arrive at a historical account of the dissidents most familiar to Western readers: figures such as Brodsky, Sinyavsky, Daniel, Gorbanevskaya, Amalrik, Bukovsky and so on.

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During a recent discussion of the Bolotnaya Square May 6 rally and the difficulty of determining the precise nature and composition of the various Russian opposition groups, I was reminded of similar debates about the Soviet dissident movement several decades ago. As many observers have pointed out, that movement, too, was not a coherent, united one, and could not be likened to a political party with a unifying ideology, program and strategy. The problems for historians trying to map out the structure and internal dynamics of the dissident movement are formidable, and it’s perhaps not surprising that Ludmila Alexeyeva’s История инакомыслия в СССP (published in English in 1985 as Soviet Dissent) still remains the only major study of the subject, though it stops at 1983, and the English edition is now out of print. The Russian text can be accessed online at several locations, including this one.

In future posts I'm going to discuss this book, and consider how its historical account of the dissident movement may be relevant to present-day conditions in the Russian Federation.