DISSIDENT MOVEMENT

Individuals and informal groups opposed to Communist Party rule.

This movement comprised an informal, loosely organized conglomeration of individual and group-based dissidents in the decades following the death of Josef Stalin in March 1953 through the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. They opposed their posttotalitarian regimes, accepting, as punishment, exile, imprisonment, and sometimes even death. The dissidents subjected their fellow citizens to moral triage. By the year 1991, they helped to bring down the regimes in Europe, which, for a number of reasons, had already embarked upon a political modernization and democratization process. Dissidents were less successful in the East and Southeast Asian countries of the communist bloc. It may be ironic that with the reversion to authoritarian practices in such former Soviet republics as the Russian Federation, Belarus, and the Ukraine by the turn of the twenty-first century, dissidents have reappeared in the 2000s as individuals, or, at most, small groups, but not as a movement.

definitions

The most precise historical usage dates from the late 1960s. The term "dissident" (in Russian, inakomysliachii for men or inakomysliachaia for women) was first applied to intellectuals opposing the regime in the Soviet Union. Then, in the late 1970s, it spread to Soviet-dominated East Central and Southeast Europe, which was also known as Eastern Europe. Most broadly, a dissident may be defined as an outspoken political and social noncomformist.

The classic definition of dissent in the East Central European context is that by Vaclav Havel, a leading dissident himself and later president of the Czechoslovak and Czech Republics, from December 1989 until his resignation February 2, 2003. Wrote Havel: "[Dissent] is a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase of the [Communist dictatorship—Y.B.] system it is haunting. It was born at a time, when this system, for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures" (Havel, 1985, p. 23). Havel thus places dissent into the post-Stalinist or posttotalitarian phase of the communist system. The semi-ironic concept of dissent also implies that its practitioners, the dissidents, differed in their thinking from the majority of their fellow citizens and were thus doomed to failure. By making, however, common cause with the party reformers in the governing structures, the dissidents, including Havel, prevailed for good in Eastern Europe, and at least temporarily in the Russian Federation, Belarus, and the Ukraine.

soviet leaders and leading dissidents

The party reformer Nikita Khrushchev, who after Stalin's death headed the Soviet regime from March 1953 to October 1964, was committed to building communism in the Soviet Union, in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe and throughout the world. Paradoxically, he ended by laying the political and legal foundations for the dissident movement. That movement flourished under Khrushchev's long-term successor Leonid Brezhnev (October 1964–November 1982). Being more conservative, Brezhnev wanted to restore Stalinism, but failed, partly because of the opposition from dissidents. After the brief tenure of two interim leaders—the tough reformer Yuri Andropov (November 1982–February 1984) and the conservative Konstantin Chernenko (February 1984–March 1985)—power was assumed by Andropov's young protégé, the ambitious modernizer Mikhail Gorbachev (March 1985–December 1991). Like Khrushchev, Gorbachev both fought and encouraged the dissident movement. Ultimately, he failed all around. By December 1991, the Soviet Union withdrew from its outer empire in Eastern Europe and saw the collapse of its inner empire. It ceased to exist, and Gorbachev resigned from the presidency December 25, 1991.

The most outstanding ideological leaders of the Soviet dissidents were, from the Left to the Right, Roy Medvedev (Medvedev, 1971), Peter Grigorenko (Grigorenko, 1982), Andrei Sakharov (Sakharov, 1968, 1992), and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Solzhenitsyn: 1963, 1974–1978). The more radical Andrei Amalrik (Amalrik, 1970) cannot be easily classified: he dared to forecast the breakup of the Soviet Union, but he also wrote one of the first critical analyses of the movement. Very noteworthy are Edward Kuznetsov (Kuznetsov, 1975), a representative of the Zionist dissent; Yuri Orlov (Alexeyeva, 1985), the political master strategist of the Helsinki Watch Committees; and Tatyana Mamonova (Mamonova, 1984), the leader of Russian feminists.

A Marxist socialist historian leaning toward democracy, Medvedev helped Khrushchev in his attempt to denounce Stalin personally for killing Communist Party members in the 1930s (Medvedev, 1971). Medvedev also provided intellectual underpinning for Khrushchev's drawing of sharp distinctions between a benevolent Vladimir Lenin and a psychopathic Stalin, between a fundamentally sound Leninist party rank-and-file and the excesses of the Stalinists in the secret police and in the party apparatus. This was better politics than history. Major General Peter Grigorenko, who was of Ukrainian peasant origin, shared with Roy Medvedev the initial conviction that Stalin had deviated from true Leninism and with Roy's brother Zhores Medvedev, who had protested against the regime's mistreatment of fellow biologists, the wrongful treatment in Soviet asylums and foreign exile. As a dissident, Grigorenko was more straightforward. As early as 1961, he began to criticize Khrushchev's authoritarian tendencies, and under Brezhnev he became a public advocate of the Crimean Tatars' return to the Crimea. He also joined the elite Sakharov–Yelena Bonner circle within the Helsinki Watch Committees movement, having been a charter member of both the Moscow Group since May 1976 and the Ukrainian Group since November 1976 (Reich, 1979; Grigorenko, 1982). Through his double advocacy of the Crimean Tatars and his fellow Ukrainians, Grigorenko helped to sensitize the liberal Russian leaders in the dissident movement to the importance of a correct nationality policy and also of the restructuring of the Soviet federation.

Academician Sakharov, a nuclear physicist, the "father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb," and an ethnic Russian, was one of the foremost moral and intellectual leaders of the Soviet dissident movement, the other being his antipode, the writer and ethnic Russian Solzhenitsyn. Unlike the Slavophile and Russian conservative Solzhenitsyn, who had expressed nostalgia for the authoritarian Russian past and had been critical of the West, Sakharov belonged to the liberal Westernizing tradition in Russian history and wanted to transform the Soviet Union in accordance with liberal Western ideas (Sakharov 1974, Solzhenitsyn 1974). As a political leader of the dissident movement, Sakharov practiced what he preached, especially after marrying the Armenian-Jewish physician Bonner, whose family had been victimized by the regime. He became active in individual human rights cases or acts of conscience, and thus set examples of civic courage. So long as the dissenter observed nonviolence, Sakharov publicly defended persecuted fellow scientists; Russian poets and politicians; and Crimean Tatars, who wanted to return to their homeland in the Crimea. He even spoke up for persecuted Ukrainian nationalist Valentyn Moroz, whose politics was more rightist than liberal. In 1970, Sakharov had also defended the former Russian-Jewish dissident turned alienated Zionist Kuznetsov, who was initially sentenced to death for attempting to hijack a Soviet plane to emigrate to Israel. To his death in December 1989, Sakharov remained the liberal conscience of Russia.

dissident groups, their actions, and soviet counteractions

As to the different groups and newsletters in the Soviet movement, David Kowalewski has counted and categorized as many as forty-three, of which six were religious. Of the thirty-seven secular groups, eleven were general, or multipurpose defenders of rights, nine were ethnic with all-Union membership or aims, seven were political, three each were socialeconomic and social, and one each was economic, artistic, intellectual, and cultural-religious. The inclusion of more regionally based and oriented groups from the Baltic States, Transcaucasia, and the Ukraine would increase the number of ethnic groups by at least four. According to first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine Volodymyr V. Sherbytsky, on May 16, 1989, there were about fifteen anti-Socialist groupings in Ukraine.

What did the Soviet dissidents actually do? How did the regime react? What did the dissidents accomplish? Almost two thousand dissidents openly signed various appeals before 1968 (Ruben-stein 1985, p. 125) Over time, hundreds took part in public demonstrations during Soviet Constitution Day (December 10), and on special occasions, such as the protest of seven against the USSR-led Warsaw Pact forces marching into Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Poets and writers surreptitiously published their works, which like much of nineteenth-century Russian literature carried a political and social message, in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union (the so-called samizdat, or self-publishing), or even abroad (tamizdat in Russian, meaning literally "published there"). Some of the poems would also be read publicly, in a political demonstration. The documentarists among the dissidents meticulously recorded facts, especially in The Chronicle of Current Events. They worked hand in glove with the legalists, who insisted that the regime observe its own laws and the explicit norms of the Stalin Constitution of 1936. In October 1977, Brezhnev had a more factual constitution passed, but it was too late to defeat the legalists. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews insisted on their right to leave the country altogether, and so did tens of thousands of Soviet Germans. Baltic dissidents protested both the current discriminatory policies of the regime and their countries having been forcibly included in the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. Ukrainian dissidents insisted that the linguistic Russification was unconstitutional and that the regime's policies in economics foreshadowed the abolition of Soviet republics and the merger of the Ukrainian people with the ethnic Russians. The movement was partly self-financed in that professionals donated their services free and the more successful authors of tamizdat such as Solzhenitsyn remitted their earnings to fellow dissidents in the USSR, especially to those that were imprisoned by the regime. Some of the funds were channeled from abroad: They were donations either by private foreign citizens, or by foreign governments.

By a stroke of political genius, in 1976 ethnic Russian Orlov brought the disparate sections of the dissident movement together in the Helsinki Watch Committees. Brezhnev wanted to legitimize his hold over Eastern Europe in the Helsinki accords, and the United States, Canada, and Western Germany insisted on the inclusion of human rights provisions. Taking a leaf from the legalists, Orlov, Bonner, and Sakharov insisted that the regime should be publicly aided in observing its new commitments toward its own citizens. Moreover, Orlov persuaded sympathetic American congresspersons and senators, such as the late Mrs. Millicent Fenwick, that with the support of the U.S. government, the Helsinki Review Process would work. It would advance the global cause of human rights and, on a regional level, would help Yuri Orlov's fellow Soviet citizens and also benefit Mrs. Fenwick's political constituents, who wanted their relatives to be allowed to emigrate to the West and to Israel.

What was the reaction of the Soviet government? At the very least, Brezhnev and his security chief and eventual successor Andropov ordered the disruption of public demonstrations by the dissidents by hiring a brass band or having thugs beat them up. The names of all the petitioners would be recorded and the more persistent letter signers would be talked to by the secret police, stripped of privileges such as foreign travel, and eventually dismissed from their jobs. The next step could be exile from Moscow, such as that of Sakharov from January 1880 to December 1986. Others, as for instance the famous tamizdat authors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, would be formally tried, sentenced to long terms in prison camps, and expelled abroad after serving their sentences. The show trials led to further protests by dissidents and criticisms in the West. Brezhnev and Andropov tightened the screw by placing professionals with an intellectual bent in asylums, where they were given mind-altering drugs, and also by authorizing the killing, whether by medical neglect during incarceration or by hired thugs, of carefully chosen dissidents. The most frightening aspect of the regime's policy was that the individual dissident did not know what fate had been decided for him or her. The post-Stalinist system of power was not fully posttotalitarian in that it retained Stalin's option of unpredictability.

the movement's success or failure

From the perspective of the first years of the twenty-first century, it is not clear whether Gorbachev would have embarked upon reforms and modernization by himself in the expectation that he would be given massive economic aid from the United States and Western Europe, or whether the pro-Western dissidents helped tilt his approach. The Soviet mode of economic and political thinking has been overcome in such East Central European countries as Poland, where after repeated political insurrections in 1956, 1968, 1970, and 1976 the dissidents coalesced in Solidarity in the 1980s (Rupnik 1979, Walesa 1992) in Hungary with its revolution of October 1956 in the Czech and Slovak republics that had benefited from Havel's moral leadership and in all three Baltic states where the dissidents have won political majorities. In the old Soviet Union, within the boundaries of September 1, 1939 (that is, with the probable exception of the Western Ukraine), Soviet attitudes have come back: wholesale in Belarus, where the dissident movement had been weak, and partly in Russia and Ukraine, where the dissidents continue operating as a tolerated political minority within "hybrid" (partly democratic, partly authoritarian) regimes.

In the old Soviet Union, where the citizens had lived under the communist regime for seventy years—as opposed to forty years in East Central Europe—many persons were like walking wounded. The dissident movement submitted their fellow citizens to a moral triage between members of the dissidents and members of the establishment, between the dissidents' foul- and fair-weather friends, between the establishment's decent reformers and its willing executioners. The dissident movement also raised fundamental questions about the future of Russia. Solzhenitsyn wondered whether Russia should return to a humane conservative monarchy, while Sakharov, with the support of U.S. presidents and West European statesmen, chose to work for a liberal democracy and a civic society. Most interesting in view of the resurgence of pro-Soviet thinking in Russia and the Eastern Ukraine in the twenty-first century is the harsh judgment of the Zionist wouldbe emigrant Kuznetsov, who challenged both Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Wrote Kuznetsov December 14, 1970: "The essential characteristics of the structure of the regime are to all intents and purposes immutable, and … the particular political culture of the Russian people may be classed as despotic. There are not many variations in this type of power structure, the framework of which was erected by Ivan the Terrible and by Peter the Great. I think that the Soviet regime is the lawful heir of these widely differing Russian rulers… . It fully answers the heartfelt wishes ofa significant—but alas not the better—part of its population" (Kuznetsov, 1975, p. 63; Rubenstein, 1985, pp. 170–171). Was the dissident movement, therefore, bound to fail in the old Soviet Union? The definitive answer may be given later, a generation after the breakup of the USSR, or roughly by the year 2021.

See also: brezhnev, leonid ilich; grigorenko, peter grigorievich; intelligentsia; khrushchev, nikita sergeyevich; medvedev, roy alexandrovich; nationalism in the soviet union; sakharov, andrei dmitrievich; samizdat; solzhenitsyn, alexander isayevich

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Yaroslav Bilinsky