Soviet Dissent - 3

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.

Soviet Dissent - 1
Soviet Dissent - 2

Soviet Dissent - 2

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.

Soviet Dissent -1

Soviet Dissent - 1

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. 

Links

- Alexey Navalny's reflections on Monday's rally, in English.

- Boris Akunin, on how his speech at the rally in which he warned Russia's celebrities not to collaborate with the "police state" was misinterpreted - he was describing a possible future, not the present: 

1. In my speech I repeated several times that I was talking about the situation when Russia will finally turn into a police state.
So far the judicial reprisals have been fragmentary, spasmodic: the Yukos case, Pussy Riot. But now we await a wave of convictions (in the cases of Alexey Navalny and Aksana Panova, and the "May 6" case). And then our authoritarian state will move from a relatively herbivorous phase into one of primary cannibalism People with a name, with a reputation will, as previously, find it impossible to live in such a situation. Otherwise their name will remain, but they will have to say goodbye to their reputation.
2. I am not calling for a boycott of the state and all its institutions, for a rejection of state subsidies, state grants or state salaries. That money is all yours and mine, Putin won't get it out of his own pocket. He has the power, but not the state, which is not equivalent to the presidential administration and the Investigative Committee. A boycott of the state is something else entirely. It's a campaign of civil disobedience, the direct prologue to a revolution. Perhaps one day the situation will come to something like that, but that wasn't what I was talking about. And I was addressing some quite specific people.

- The Times (UK) writes about Boris Berezovsky's will. In The Interpreter, Alexander Goldfarb looks at Berezovsky's death in terms of theatre:

The interrelations inside and among the triangle of Sasha-Volodya-Boris, which ended with the polonium murder of Litvinenko and Berezovsky’s suicide on the banks of the Thames rise to the level of a Shakespearean drama not only because the backdrop includes untold wealth, the fate of the throne and the relations of states but because of the clash of characters and the play of passions; here there are loyalty, and betrayal, and revenge.

-  RFE/RL's Berlin correspondent Yury Veksler on the continuing topicality of Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda:

Nonetheless, Joseph Goebbels is probably the only one of the Nazi leaders whose legacy, alas, is still relevant today. Almost every authoritarian regime, in building up its propaganda system, voluntarily or involuntarily bases itself on the techniques and methods that were once developed and tested by Goebbels's ministry. It is fortunately true that since then the level of skill - and fanaticism - of most of the propagandists has clearly diminished. It is hard, for example, to imagine Joseph Goebbels saying the following: "I'm not really a liberal, but I don't know whether I'm a conservative either. I try not to attach myself anywhere: for the most part it doesn't matter, because I'm a member of the presidential administration, working for the head of state, and my convictions are my own business " These are the words of Vladislav Surkov, who enjoys the reputation of the main propagandist of the current Russian regime. Propaganda that is not much believed even by its own creators is unlikely to be truly effective. Here Dr. Goebbels might have a lot to tell.

Update: Surkov has been fired. Or did he resign of his own volition?