Dissent - Dissent in the Soviet Union

Under Stalin, Soviet society was effectively atomized by the application over two decades of mass terror. In an important if paradoxical sense, it was depoliticized. 2 Since his death in 1953 a...

...also A Chronicle of Human Rights in the U.S.S.R., no...

...Issues 4-7 have appeared in English as booklets, published by the Lithuanian Roman Catholic Priests' League, 64-14 56th Road, Maspeth, Long Island, New York 11378, and further booklets are due...

...and listened to by millions of people...

...Liberals and Humanitarians THE SECOND TREND in the mainstream, and much the most important, can be described as liberal and humanitarian...

...The blossoming of this society, whose membership reached 3 million in a year and 7 million by 1972, suggested that the new party leadership hoped to gain popular support by making concessions to national feelings...

...Even more has this been true of the broader political, economic, and social reforms for which various dissenters have pressed...

...However, detente has worried some dissenters, notably Sakharov ' 22 because, while they support it fully in principle, they DISSENT IN THE SOVIET UNION 141 fear that the regime will succeed in conducting it on its own selfish terms and in exploiting what they see as Western opportunism and naivete...

...As the regime apparently forbids their return home for strategic reasons, the problem they pose will presumably fester until such time as emigration is allowed...

...Mainstream Dissent and Its Prospects BUT HOWEVER MUCH impact the dissenters have or have not made, in late 1971 it became too much for the regime to continue tolerating them at the then existing level...

...See note 4. For several points in this section I am indebted to John Dunlop's article in Frontier, London, vol...

...This position tended to injure those Russian as well as Ukrainian (and other) national feelings that had been developing during the gradual de-atomization of society in the 1950s...

...The Dissent of National Minorities without Their Own Republics ATTENTION will now be turned to a different source of national dissent, those peoples who wish, in large numbers, to emigrate from the U.S.S.R...

...0 154 PETER REDDAWAY...

...Khrushchev's partial attempts—than "clinging on...

...41 It was still impossible to gauge the strength of the support in regime circles for either this tendency or the Veche tendencies...

...3. A party, we may note, that claims to know the full truth about the past, the present, and the future, and proclaims in its 1961 Program the goals of rearing citizens "who will harmoniously combine spiritual wealth, moral purity and a perfect physique" and of producing a society in which observance of the rules of Communism "will become an organic need and habit with everyone...

...Nonetheless, many networks continued to function, funneling information and documents to the outside world in as large quantities as before, partly perhaps in response to the founding of a "substitute" publication, A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, in New York...

...Also, their causes have often been taken up by mainstream dissenters, and some of the latter belong to a church or faith and act as link men...

...This said, though, it is worth noting the view (however debatable) of A. M. Ivanov, writing under his pen-name "A...

...In a period when, in reaction to the prolonged tensions of the Cold War, some Western opinion has felt inclined to take Soviet assurances and intentions at face value, this role could not have been filled as effectively by anyone else...

...31 In 1974, however, success on the key issue had still eluded them, even though from 1970 on they had begun demanding that if the authorities would not let them return home they should allow them to emigrate to their brothers and fellow Muslims in Turkey...

...Broadly, 136 though, opposition implies an aspiration to rule in place of the existing rulers, whereas dissent implies no such aspiration, just an objection to certain of the rulers' actions or policies and a determination to "articulate demands" not only through approved, but also through nonapproved channels...

...27 See A Chronicle of Current Events, 21-23...

...Nearly 100 such documents have been published in Radio Liberty's Samizdat Archive series...

...This attitude of "Never again...

...When the Chronicle was silenced in late 1972, the journal A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, V. Chalidze, P. Litvinov, E. Kline and P. Reddaway, eds., began to be published in early 1973 by Khronika Press, New York, operating on lines very similar to those of the Moscow Chronicle...

...But 1967-68 also saw, in response to the Galanskov-Ginzburg case, an acceleration of podpisantstvo [the signing of collective protests] and the natural extension of this into the human rights movement and the production of the Chronicle...

...But it constitutes a big and largely separate subject, and therefore falls outside the bounds of this essay...

...The word "liberal" implies, in this context, not a commitment to classical political liberalism and a multiparty system, but rather a desire for a liberalized, benevolently authoritarian regime incorporating the best traditions of the Russian nation, and also a liberal attitude on issues such as political censorship, anti-Semitism, the right of minority republics to secession, and the permissibility of publicly criticizing the Orthodox Patriarch and the hierarchy...

...But most of their human rights proposals and demands have failed to produce even a tacit dialogue with the authorities, let alone any satisfaction...

...See his books On Socialist Democracy (London, 1975), and Let History Judge (London, 1972...

...The Soviet Germans THE SOVIET GERMANS, at present almost 2 million in number, were deported by Stalin after the Nazi invasion of 1941 and simultaneously lost their Autonomous Republic on the 146 PETER REDDAWAY Volga...

...32 At first the authorities resisted...

...also documents 1705, 1706, 1787, 1790-93 and 1845 in the Samizdat Archive series...

...Also, of course, Jews need to be granted concessions, but not Meskhetians or Crimean Tartars: these peoples have no foreign lobby at all, let alone one in a position to influence matters affecting the Soviet economy...

...and how vigorously it (or he) is likely to practice self-defense...

...The evidence suggests that significant and growing currents of opinion in a number of the Union republics feel that their nations did not achieve after 1917• (or 1944) the liberation from Russification and Russian imperialism the Bolsheviks appeared to promise them and now justified by their growing national consciousness (similar to that of many other peoples in the world's disintegrating empires...

...Yet it should be stressed at this point that the Criminal Code, in defining different types of political offense, does make a distinction between dissent and opposition, even though not in those terms...

...However, the evidence easily available on the whole subject is as yet of low quality, and so only very tentative speculations can be advanced...

...With a mass of detailed information from these men the KGB eventually succeeded in silencing the Chronicle, driving some of their associates into emigration under threat of long-term imprisonment, jailing others, and intimidating yet others...

...However, as a number of Veche collaborators, including several of the Leningrad Social-Christians, had remained unbroken by their camp-terms, and as one of these, Leonid Borodin, started another new publication, Moscow Almanac [Moskovskiy sbornik] in September 1974, it seemed doubtful whether the KGB would achieve any easy Gleichschaltung...

...This stimulated dissent in literary and other circles, but, although several groups were arrested each year and their members sentenced, in a few cases to death, little suppression of socially more established dissenters occurred until 1965...

...Soviet Law and KGB Practice in the Area of Dissent THE TRADITIONAL Soviet tendency has been to see, or pretend to see, actual or potential opposition in almost all forms of persistent dissent...

...At the same time the regime can be expected to detain various Jewish scientists and other economically valuable people for considerable periods before letting them go...

...it has made'no reporting errors of substance...

...42 The Pattern of the Decade LET US NOW PULL the different threads of the discussion together and see what pattern emerges from the decade since Khrushchev's fall...

...He has friends among the liberals, but strongly supports Solzhenitsyn's political position, and has consistently propagated in Veche the virtues of the 19th-century Slavophiles, whom Solzhenitsyn also admires...

...Article 190/1, by contrast, in practice concerns dissent...

...It was now important, therefore, to impress on the Western-oriented dissenters from the start that detente would mean a tightening, not a loosening of political controls...

...Definitions of Dissent and Opposition THIS BRING Us to the problem of defining dissent and opposition...

...ss 148 PETER REDDAWAY All this suggests that in late 1974 the regime was trying, by neutralizing the most independent figures, to bring the dissenting Russian nationalists as closely into line as possible, but, by largely avoiding arrests, to keep their alienation to a minimum...

...than most Westerners realize and carries a much stronger emotional charge to it than the majority of Western dissent...

...No charges were preferred against them, and in the mid-1950s the punitive regime imposed on those who survived the deportation was lifted...

...In Georgia documentary samizdat evidence of national dissent began to appear only in 1973...

...The first detailed, high-level rebuttal of this line had reportedly been barred by them from publication for nearly a year, prior to its appearance in late 1972, 40 and shortly thereafter its author, A. Yakovlev, acting head of the Propaganda department of the Central Committee, was removed from his post and "exiled" to Canada as ambassador...

...It should be noted that a much expanded version of Let History Judge, dated Match 1973 and 1136 pages long, was published in Russian in 1974 by Knopf, New York, under the title K sudu istorii: genezis i posledstviya stalinizma...

...also a forthcoming study by John Dunlop, The New Russian Revolutionaries (Nordland Press, Mass...

...But although the Armenian example might prove infectious, the contribution of the church revolt to the national stirrings is likely to be limited, as the Church is in general much weaker in Georgia than in Armenia, let alone than in Lithuania or in the Western Ukraine...

...and with Western opinion passive—the situation had apparently been brought more or less under control...

...7, 10 (1974), and for an important document of 1965 see Politicheskiy dnevnik (Amsterdam, 1972), pp...

...The Meskhetians THE MESKHETIANS are a small Turkic people, of probably less than 200,000, from the south Georgian border with Turkey...

...The drive against the Chronicle's creators continued in 1973, but, with the Chronicle silent, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn virtually replaced it by their increasingly frequent public statements and interviews...

...They therefore felt that the 1965 arrests, coming as they did at the same time as the tightening of the censorship and the banning of public discussion of Stalinism, might well signal a regeneration of Stalinism and that they must resist at once before it was too late...

...It avoided value judgments, it reported factually and objectively on events connected with human or national rights, and it summarized new works circulating in samizdat...

...By late 1974, 11 large issues of the Chronicle had come out, edited in a more militant style than most other samizdat journals and calling repeatedly for support from the Vatican and from Christians abroad...

...In spring 1968 the KGB moved against this trend rather cautiously, limiting itself largely to expelling key figures from the party and getting others dismissed from their jobs...

...cit., Chronicle, 31...

...also, for the text of one of Osipov's sharpest statements, concerning the confiscation of Veche, no...

...But their persecution naturally tends to alienate them from the regime...

...This trend is not particularly strong or influential, but the presence in it of one man, Solzhenitsyn, however uncomfortably he fits, suggests that it may become stronger...

...National dissent in the republics has opposed, mainly, two separate but interconnected policies: first, the camouflaged but persistent policy of Russification, which manifests itself in the promotion of things Russian and in discrimination against minority languages, traditions, literatures, cultures, and religions, and also in the officially sponsored settlement of Russians (or other Slays) in minority areas...

...Similarly, the KGB has to consider carefully, in some cases, whether it has enough evidence to prosecute under, say, article 70 or whether it must content itself with article 190 /1...

...The movement spread quickly from Kiev, Moscow, and the Baltic to Georgia, Leningrad, Kharkov, Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk and Central Asia...

...The KGB is, then, subject to certain political and legal restraints in its handling of dissent...

...In this way an ideological vacuum has been created in society and even, potentially, within the apparat...

...44 But 1970 also witnessed the rapid aggravation of a new problem, the Jewish emigration movement...

...46 Other drives, as noted earlier, were aimed at the Russian nationalists and the Germans...

...The mainstream dissenters have scored some marginal, but usually reversible gains, such as an apparent reduction in the use of police psychiatry against dissent, and, especially in Moscow, a slight reduction in the arbitrariness of legal procedures in political cases...

...It remains to be seen how strong support for his position will be in the future, and also whether the KGB will ultimately regard the liberal or the right-wing nationalists as more dangerous...

...P. Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, chap...

...When Osipov, who described himself in 1974 as "a liberal patriot," then started Zemlya (The Earth), his arrest, as noted above, swiftly followed...

...8. On the Khrushchev period see especially the documentary collections of Hugh McLean and Walter Vickery, eds., The Year of Protest, 1956 (New York, 1961), and Priscilla Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962-64 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 9. The most useful books on the mainstream in the second half of the 1960s are: the collection edited by Max Hayward and Leopold Labedz on the SinyavskyDaniel trial, On Trial (London, 1967...

...7, from his typist, A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR, no...

...See excerpts in Survey, London, no...

...The Chronicle began to report regularly on Lithuanian developments in late 1970 (and onward...

...The strength or weakness of their inhibitions in any particular case depends on many factors: are they operating in Moscow (under- the eyes of activists and foreigners), or in the provinces (where arbitrariness knows fewer restraints...

...DISSENT IN THE SOVIET UNION 139 The "mainstream" dissent movement, as opposed to the related but largely separate national and religious movements, has so far been supported at various times by only some 2,000 people whose names we know...

...Trade Agreement of 1972...

...In November Molodaya gvardiya's chief editor, Anatoly Nikonov, was dismissed and replaced by a Central Committee apparatchik, and a few months later one of his neo-Slavophile contributors, Yury D. Ivanov, was sacked from his post at Moscow University...

...In 1955 the punitive exile regime imposed on them was lifted, but not until 1964 were they legally exculpated of their alleged crime of having helped the Nazi invaders en masse...

...These considerations have, taken together, meant that Solzhenitsyn can be dealt with least cost by deportation, as adverse foreign literary opinion does not affect the economy...

...The new group put out a tenth issue, denounced Osipov for alleged personal misdemeanors, and, while showing some signs of a shift "to the right," asserted its intention to continue the established line...

...See also Solzhenitsyn's interview and essay in Index, London, no...

...A high-level 142 PETER REDDAWAY decision was taken to suppress the Chronicle and other major samizdat activities at all costs...

...DISSENT IN THE SOVIET UNION 143 Such currents of opinion have been strongest in those republics and areas that the U.S.S.R...

...For nearly a year after October 1964 no clear line on dissent was visible...

...7 Mainstream Dissent Outside the Apparat MANIFESTATIONS OF "mainstream" dissent first appeared in the mid-1950s...

...See also the extract from V. Kapshitser's samizdat work, The Trojan Horse of Fascism, in Midstream, New York, April 1973...

...On the 1974 developments see Chronicle 32, and A Chronicle of Human Rights, no...

...First, their writings and their example have probably had a considerable effect in persuading Western opinion of the continuingly authoritarian nature of the Soviet system...

...Why is this so...

...In particular, the silence of the Nixon-Kissinger administration on these issues probably enabled the KGB to be considerably more repressive than the Politbureau would otherwise have permitted...

...Their more politically minded friends would probably not reject the Western labels liberal, liberal socialist, or, in the case of the Orthodox layman Anatoly Levitin, Christian socialist...

...Apart from the Chronicle's extensive materials, the most important sources on the contemporary forced labor camps are A. Marchenko, My Testimony (London, 1969), and Edward Kuznetsov, Prison Diaries (London, 1975...

...If, though, as may be surmised, the humanitarian mainstream is too Western-oriented, too apolitical, and too rational ever to develop widespread support in the U.S.S.R., then, if the politicization of society should gather speed, more politically minded dissenters may divert an increasing amount of their energies elsewhere...

...Indeed, from the early 1970s a growing number of them decided that the struggle was hopeless and that in any case the Jewish movement had been setting a very persuasive example...

...But official tolerance declined in 1970...

...45 Meanwhile, the pressure on Sakharov and the Chronicle circles had eased somewhat, and the KGB had turned some of its attention to the organizing of sudden waves of searches, interrogations and arrests in Lithuania (November 19-21, 1973) and also in Armenia (November 19...

...They are, on the contrary, scattered in many parts of the country, especially in its large cities, where some of them occupy important positions in the economy, the arts, higher education, research, and the professions...

...Even more unclear was how much this support was based on any belief in the ideas themselves, and how much on the view that they might prove a useful instrument in intraparty struggles, in the way that antiSemitism was used in the Polish leadership struggles of the late 1960s...

...On the mental hospitals see United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abuse of Psychiatry for Political Repression in the Soviet Union (New York, 1973), and R. and Z. Medvedev, A Question of Madness (London, 1971...

...If they continue not to relent, the Tatars, too, may be driven to demand emigration to Turkey, their traditional haven for over two centuries when times have been bad in Russia...

...And, probably of greater significance, the Russian nationalist dissenters outside the apparat clearly enjoy high-level protection, as they have been virtually immune from arrest...

...But in July this group, too, closed Veche down under pressure of the KGB's investigation...

...On the former see P. Reddaway, Uncensored Russia (London, 1972), pp...

...First, perhaps because the post-Khrushchev leadership has systematically This article is reprinted, with the publishers' permission, from The Soviet Union Since the Fall of Krushchev, a collection edited by Archie Brown and Michael Kaser...

...In the late 1960s the still extant traces of the Russian Zionism of 40 years earlier received a boost from, first, the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War, and second, the emerging human rights movement, in which many Jews were participating...

...10 The most important prerequisite for this achievement by the dissenters—and also for all others—was the breaking of a series of social and political taboos, which were several decades old, and the creation of a certain atmosphere among a small section of the intelligentsia in various large cities...

...29 The most determined KGB drive against it was launched in November 1973 with a large wave of searches and interrogations, and some arrests, in various cities and villages...

...5 in Volnoe slovo: Samizdat: Izbrannoe, Frankfurt, no...

...Two useful and similar collections have appeared in English: J. Kolasky, ed., Report from the Beria DISSENT IN THE SOVIET UNION 153 Reserve (Toronto, 1974), and Y. Bihun, ed., Boomerang: The Works of Valentyn Moroz, Smoloskyp, P.O...

...The latter, however, reacted by developing over the next two years the new techniques of collecting signatures on mass appeals and gaining publicity for them through samizdat and the foreign news media...

...Solzhenitsyn, a writer-teacher and prophet in the manner of Tolstoi (but with a different message), in some ways comes into this category too...

...Already one can infer that certain sorts of unorthodox ideas attract at any rate small sections of the apparat...

...Conclusion DISSENT IN ITS MANY different forms is, we may conclude, deeper rooted in the U.S.S.R...

...The "Russian Patriots" document of 1970, "Message to the Nation," is strongly Christian and Orthodox but still belongs to this fascistic genre...

...This was the area of activity of the Human Rights Committee, founded in 1970 by Dr...

...See Grigorenko's collection of writings, Mysli sumasshedshego (Thoughts of a Madman), Herzen Foundation, Amsterdam, 1973, due soon for publication in English by C. Hurst, London, in 1976...

...7. The most penetrating discussion of most of the issues raised in this section is to be found in Valery Chalidze, To Defend These Rights: Human Rights and the Soviet Union (New York, 1974...

...In this atmosphere people dared to think and act independently of the authorities, to create formal and semiformal associations, to intercede for persecuted individuals and groups, to send information and texts of intercessions to the editors of the Chronicle in Moscow, to give similar material to foreign journalists, tourists, and diplomats, to listen systematically to foreign radio stations and then circulate the information obtained, to turn samizdat into a large-scale cottage industry, to stage demonstrations, to propose to the authorities carefully drafted proposals for law reform," and so on...

...Also, there is the ambiguous phenomenon of those writings—like some of Sakharov's and Roy Medvedev's—which virtually amount to oppositional programs, but whose authors show little or no inclination to court arrest by participating in oppositional (rather than dissenting) activity...

...Skillfully using his semiprotected position as a famous scientist, he has sought more than anyone else to legitimize in practice the constitutional right to communicate truthful information at home and abroad...

...See 7, 9, 19-22...

...E.g., the groups of Saratov and Ryazan students and the Leningrad group of Yury I. Fyodorov, all of whose cases are described in A Chronicle of Current Events...

...They have also found sympathy on occasion from the local party leaders, whose loyalty to the center— particularly over economic exploitation by Moscow—has apparently sometimes become weaker than their loyalty to their nation...

...29, 30 (London: Amnesty International Publications, 1975...

...To put thousands of Jews in camps was impossible for reasons of foreign policy, and was anyway no longer, for a fully bureaucratized KGB, an easy task...

...For his book Chornovil served 18 months in a labor camp, but with this and one other exception there were no arrests of well-known people in the Ukraine from 1966 until December 1971...

...Among its informal leaders are a high percentage of people from research institutes, including a disproportionately high number of mathematicians and physicists...

...By mid-1971 the guidelines were established: jail those Jews who form underground groups or plan hijacks, but create a safety valve by allowing emigration on a significant (and, we should note, unprecedented) scale...

...At present these groups have reached a stage at which they represent dissent rather than political opposition...

...24, p. 139, and no...

...More than this, ever since the arrest of Berta, the reduction of his empire, and this empire's subordination to close party control, the regime has taken pains to bureaucratize the KGB and thus to ensure that it can never again be used to destroy the party leadership as it did in the 1930s...

...Its economic position was not stated, but its overall attitudes showed clearly enough in the atmosphere of enthusiasm (then mourning) for the "Czechoslovak Spring" that some of its pages reflected...

...And presumably the problems of this notably DISSENT IN THE SOVIET UNION 147 united people of nearly 500,000 will continue to generate dissent until the authorities relent...

...Today the leadership of the apparat possesses enormous power, but probably decreasing authority (at any rate at home...

...Broadly speaking, Veche may be said to have represented all the main Christian tendencies—liberal, centrist, and rightist— within dissenting Russian nationalism, with its editorial position more on the liberal side...

...and A. Brumberg's anthology, In Quest of Justice (London, 1970...

...See the latter's Sakharov Speaks (London, 1974), an important collection of writings and documents with an autobiographical essay...

...The Ukraine UKRAINIAN DISSENT has a long and complex history but stems, in its contemporary form, mainly from Khrushchev's policy of increased Russification, introduced at the end of the 1950s...

...This is the trend that has produced the Chronicle of Current Events and includes such people as Pavel Litvinov, Larissa Bogoraz, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Victor Nekrasov, and Andrei Sakharov...

...The Crimean Tatars THE RECENT HISTORY of the Crimean Tatars has certain similarities to that of the Meskhetians...

...But the mere demand, as noted about the Meskhetians, may not change anything...

...18 The absorbing Political Diary , 19 produced in his circles, shows in some detail how the apparat reacted over the years 1964-70 to this political trend and how it moved against it with increased decisiveness after seeing what a similar (if much stronger) trend could produce in Czechoslovakia in 1968...

...This tendency is more often atheistic or pagan, it glorifies strong leaders like Stalin and even (for his Jewish policy) Hitler, and it has a world view permeated by belief in a world Jewish conspiracy as set forth in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion...

...9 In this year 138 PETER REDDAWAY the Chronicle of Current Events began to appear, every two months, and to act as a forum and "information center" for all the main groups...

...Talman Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60629...

...1 (1975), and to the article on the press debate about neo-Slavophilism by Vladimir Pavloff in Grani, Frankfurt, no...

...Here the interlocked national and Catholic traditions, reminiscent of Poland, and the relatively small number of non-Lithuanians in the population of 3 million have facilitated the growth of a movement that the KGB seems powerless to stop...

...16 People such as the late writer Alexei Kosterin and ex-Major General Pyotr Grigorenko have tried to promote a return to Leninist ideals within the party, but have found little response and been expelled...

...At this moment, however, when, ironically, mainstream dissent was in considerable confusion, Western opinion at last spoke up...

...The question of why it regarded Solzhenitsyn as more dangerous than any other dissenter, and therefore deported him abroad by force, is much clearer...

...The regime clearly fears this, partly because a link-up of that sort was a critical factor in the growth of opposition in the period 1900-17, and so it has tried hard over the last decade to raise steadily the real incomes of the working class...

...1-6, whose style is similar to the Chronicle's...

...At once they began a campaign to be allowed to return home, organizing "congresses of the people" at which, in the mid-1960s, 6,000 delegates elected campaign committees...

...These two republics are not united around a single national religion, and they have a higher proportion of Russian settlers...

...5. The nature of this intellectual opposition of course vanes greatly, being colored by each author's temperament and view of his own role...

...These easings of their position were closely connected with the evolution of SovietWest German relations...

...Skuratov" in Veche no...

...Issues 16-27 have been published as individual booklets by Amnesty International Publications, London, 1971-73, and issues 28-31, published in 1975, as two books, from the same publishers...

...The Jews THE BEST KNOWN of these peoples are the Jews, whose national movement has received wide publicity since 1969-70...

...Today's leadership cannot, however, try to increase its authority by adopting a new ideology or seriously atoning for the past, as such a course appears to it much more riskycf...

...The humanitarian trend believes in the liberal principle of helping any individuals or groups persecuted for their beliefs...

...The national dissenters have based their protests and demands on the law and the constitution...

...Nor have the numerous Crimean Tatar appeals to the U.N...

...Money and clothing are collected from well-off sympathizers and distributed to those in need...

...But much is now known of its methods of compilation...

...Kosterin died in 1968, and Grigorenko was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital.' 7 The historian Roy Medvedev has pursued a similar line in a very different and less idealistic style, but also with little apparent success...

...From that point on a powerful and democratically organized campaign to return home was launched, with similar features to that of the Meskhetians...

...As discussed above, they try to take full advantage of the more liberal laws...

...I am grateful to the Commission for permission to print the material in its revised form...

...A similar situation existed, we might note in passing, in the last decades of the Czarist period...

...the activities of the censorship, 13 and a few other oppressive institutions...

...This episode did, however, see a certain breakthrough in nongovernmental, liberal opinion in the West, and this opinion, by its interventions, succeeded in acting as an at least temporary brake on KGB repression...

...7 and 8 are edited in a markedly more militant and underground style than no...

...21 But his "Open Letter to the Soviet Leaders," published in 1974, clarifies matters and puts him indisputably among the liberal nationalists...

...To some extent their fears may, so far, have proved justified...

...37 But soon the 1972 campaign against the Chronicle and the Ukrainian Herald took precedence, and only in 1973 did the KGB go beyond harassment of Veche...

...Alexander Solzhenitsyn...

...In 1974, however (following the Moscow Chronicle), it reemerged 26 Nonetheless, Ukrainian dissent sustained in 1972 the heaviest single KGB assault since 1953 of any dissenting group, and so it remains to be seen how quickly it will recover...

...Few Germans appear to have gone to East Germany...

...In 1965 no organized dissent existed on any significant scale, except among the Crimean Tartars, Meskhetians, Germans, and Baptists...

...3 (1973), p. 48...

...Money also comes from Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, who have set up funds abroad out of income from their publications and from literary and humanitarian prizes...

...The media involved—samizdat and foreign publications and radio stations—have been either semilegitimate or illegitimate: the regime has not, even occasionally, allowed access to its own media...

...The most prominent cities over the years have been Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Lvov, Vilna, Kaunas, Riga, Tallin, Gorky, Novosibirsk, and Tashkent...

...The most useful book on this subject is M. Dewhirst and R. Farrell, eds., The Soviet Censorship (Metuchen...

...In Armenia national and religious traditions are intertwined, as in Lithuania, but memories of the Turkish massacres appear to have acted as a brake on the growth of the national movement...

...An important lead was given by a statement of America's National Academy of Sciences in defense of Sakharov, and much liberal opinion— in the press and in organizations like the International PEN Club, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amnesty International, and so on—followed suit...

...1-10 have been published in the Samizdat Archive series of Radio Liberty, and an abbreviated text of no...

...They also, with equal skill, use the weapon of publicity through samizdat, foreign news media, and Western radio stations broadcasting to the U.S.S.R...

...And such people are usually regarded as expressing dissent [inakomyslie], either in their writings or by their "actions in defense of human (or national) rights...

...Extracts in English are in Religion in Communist Lands, Keston College, Heathfield, Road, Chislehurst, Kent, no...

...literary and musical themes...

...The fact that "deliberate fabrications," rather than "views objectionable to the state," are specified in article 190/1 can presumably be explained by an official desire not to contradict too blatantly the constitutional guarantee of freedom of conscience...

...The process was encouraged in various deliberate and nondeliberate ways by Khrushchev, but has developed much faster under his successors...

...the relevance of its (or his) foreign support to the Soviet economy...

...Major arrests and trials of dissenters occurred in 1968-70, 30 and 1973-74...

...Soon, though, a different Veche faction, accused by Osipov and his supporters of unsavory collaboration with the authorities, revived it...

...20 Sakharov, one of the more politically minded adherents of the trend, regards himself as having moved since the mid-1960s from neo-Marxism to liberal socialism to liberalism...

...Opposition within the apparat is, of course, when it occurs, the only significant and fully political opposition that can exist in the contemporary Soviet Union...

...Two useful collections of their writings and documents are George Saunders, ed., Sami;dat: Voices of the Soviet Opposition (New York, 1974), and Samizdat I (Paris, 1969), Both books should be used with caution as regards their editorial interpretations, which wrongly suggest that Trotsky and Trotskyism are popular among dissenters and also give an exaggerated impression of the level of organized workingclass dissent in the U.S.S.R...

...has no wish to change its ways either of its own free will or, still less, by making concessions to anyone or anything...

...Their cases were documented in The Chornovil Papers (New York, 1968), the compilation of a young Lvov journalist, Vyacheslav Chornovil...

...Mainstream Dissenters and the West THE VALUES of the dominant trend in the mainstream dissent movement are, broadly speaking, similar to Western democratic ideals...

...Not surprisingly, therefore, the Soviet leaders continue firmly to reject the idea of "ideological coexistence" (as opposed to "peaceful coexistence"), as such coexistence would tend to facilitate and, even worse, legitimize the growth of domestic dissent and opposition...

...The Chronicle's editors were, and still are, anonymous, as are the news items and articles, but not usually the documents that it carries...

...London, 1968) and 2nd rev...

...38 When this attempt foundered on the Orthodoxy, which apparently united the producers of Veche, the KGB opened a criminal investigation against Veche and its numerous supporters...

...In this way, they fear, the West may be lulled into a false and dangerous sense of security, and the regime may be able both to postpone reform (especially economic) at home and to suppress more easily the growth of democratic trends...

...Their exact strength is still difficult to gauge, as too few documents are yet available...

...the severe conditions in the labor camps and mental hospitals used to imprison dissenters...

...In 1969 the KGB set up a new chief directorate to coordinate and direct all activities dealing with the types of dissent discussed in this chapter...

...By 1971 it had published material from most of the major population centers of the European and Central Asian parts of the Soviet Union, and from a few labor camps and cities in Siberia...

...The latter seems to have developed at the end of the 1960s...

...On these episodes see Chronicle, 32...

...Most important have probably been, first, the contribution of Western radio stations (especially Radio Liberty, which devotes up to a quarter of its broadcast time to transmitting samizdat texts) and,, second, the determination of some governments and newspapers to try to defend the limited rights of Western journalists in the U.S.S.R...

...Those at hand suggest that the Lithuanian example may have started to infect Latvia and Estonia, where small dissenting groups have been arrested, but if so the results are unlikely to be as dramatic as in Lithuania...

...the two collections edited by Pavel Litvinov, The Demonstration in Pushkin Square (London, 1969), and The Trial of the Four (London, 1972...

...In others, however, the well-documented pleas of defendants that they have propagated no fabrications, let alone deliberate ones, are simply ignored by the courts (acting on party or police instructions), which sentence them regardless...

...In any autocracy where such activities are illegitimate, or only semilegitimate, and where the true aims of the dissenters and oppositionists are often therefore disguised, this problem is difficult...

...But to tolerate the status quo, in which the Jews were with virtual impunity providing an example of militancy to many other oppressed groups in various cities, and in which publicity was building up abroad, was also impossible...

...In 1971 the groundwork was laid for the policy of detente with the U.S.A., and plans made for President Nixon to visit Moscow the next year...

...So the gates were unlocked and by 1974 the 100,000th Jew had pushed through them...

...The regime is simply growing old and can no longer suppress everyone and everything with the same strength and vigor as before...

...The other exception was the historian Valentyn Moroz, who served four years in 1965-69, and who in 1970 was resentenced to 14 years of prison and exile for his writings...

...This was the period when First Party Secretary Petro Shelest tried to establish a modus vivendi with the Ukrainian intelligentsia...

...These minds had also been pondering for some years the phenomenon of Stalinism and drawing the lesson that unless one resists tyranny firmly from the start, the tyrant will soon eliminate the chance of any resistance at all...

...Earlier, nearly half of them had died as a result of the deportation to Central Asia and elsewhere, and the survivors had undergone a punitive exile regime until 1956...

...In time it may indeed grow and link up in certain ways with the mainstream...

...the importance of it (or him) to the economy...

...Dissent Among the National Minorities IT IS QUESTIONABLE whether the KGB has become more concerned over the last decade about mainstream dissent or nationalities' dissent...

...By the end of 1969, with people like General Grigorenko and Anatoly Marchenko, a good proportion of the Initiative Group of the Defense of Human Rights, ten Crimean Tartar leaders, and a dozen Armenian nationalists all either arrested or sentenced...

...1-7 have appeared as a book in the original Lithuanian, Lietuvos Kataliku Baznycios Kronika, LKRSR, 6825 So...

...with Solzhenitsyn expelled from the Writers' Union...

...It was only the publication in Paris of The Gulag Archipelago two months later—the timing being partly fortuitous—that caused a new press campaign against its author to flare up...

...But a second generation had begun to appear, and it seemed to be heartened by the increased vigor and cooperation of a wide range of dissenting groups outside the mainstream...

...whereas similar treatment of Sakharov might seriously affect Soviet-American scientific and even trade agreements and must therefore be eschewed...

...Thus it maintains links with a wide variety of national, religious, and cultural groups, studies their problems, transmits their petitions, journals, and appeals abroad, gives these documents to foreign visitors and journalists, and publishes them in full or in summary in the Chronicle...

...In Moldavia national stirrings favor, as might be expected, the return of the republic to the Rumanian motherland, which, with its militant nationalism, has not refrained from hinting that it would favor the same thing...

...152 PETER REDDAWAY 6. E.g., R. Conquest, Power and Policy in the USSR (London, 1961), and Carl Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957-64 (Baltimore, 1966...

...Imitating the methods of the mainstream dissenters, it produced a samizdat journal, Exodus, adopted the juridical approach in appeals to the authorities, staged demonstrations and sit-ins, and passed its news and other materials to foreign journalists and tourists...

...New York.' suppressed the issue of the mass crimes of Stalin, which involved, among other things, the death of some 20 million Soviet citizens through shooting, concentration camps, deportations, and artificial famine in the period 1930-53...

...But the 2,000-odd documents and books of samizdat that have reached the West in the last decade from extrasystemic sources contain very few references to any "opposition" in the U.S.S.R...

...Further evidence of benevolent tolerance, or even support, in high places were the thinly disguised neo-Slavophile writings that appeared in a leading Komsomol organ, Molodaya gvardiya, in 1967-70, discreetly propagating disapproval of industrialism and proletarian internationalism, and approval of various traditions and qualities associated with the Orthodox Church and the Russian nation...

...Almost at once, from the summer of 1971 on, the KGB reacted by threatening Osipov with arrest and harassing him and his wife...

...It would now be possible, however, systematically to interview working-class Jewish and German emigrants of recent years and to compare the results with what can be gleaned from the Soviet press...

...its past record of mass crimes and now widely discredited ideology...

...See M. Agursky's samizdat article, "The Increase in the Neo-Nazi Danger in the Soviet Union" and the attached anonymous document, "Critical Notes of a Russian about the Russian Patriotic Journal Veche," published as documents 1858 and 1858b in the Samizdat Archive series...

...A. Sakharov, V. Chalidze, and A. Tverdokhlebov...

...191-99, complete text in the Samizdat Archive, no...

...The label distinguishes it from more chauvinistic varieties, which will be discussed later in a broader review of recent forms of dissenting Russian nationalism...

...It appears six times a year in separate but identical Russian and English editions...

...One could also perhaps say that in the absence of a return to mass terror such a process has been inevitable...

...But since 1970 he has been typical of the trend in his tactics and his values...

...On the Crimean Tatars see Sheehy, op...

...The other options were presumably unacceptable...

...But it has also not been willing, or able, to practice oppression severe enough to curtail the newly won freedom...

...But the process of the pluralization and repoliticization of society is likely to continue, and possibly accelerate, whatever the KGB does, just as the authority of the Communist party is likely to decline...

...Socially, the movement is overwhelmingly middle-class...

...15 Some of these have formed groups with names like "True Communists," which the KGB has usually broken up without much difficulty...

...When dissent nonetheless appears they often label it subversion, as will be seen below...

...Many people in it might call themselves apolitical supporters of ordinary human decency...

...The movement's development is of special interest and importance, as the Jews are not tucked away in some corner of the Soviet Union like all the peoples described above except the Ukrainians...

...In any case, the right-wing fascistic tendency is relatively weakly expressed in Veche...

...And thus, not surprisingly, they have had much in common, and important contacts, with the mainstream dissenters...

...The exact degree of oppression of any particular group or individual has depended on many factors, including: the amount of support it (or he) has in the U.S.S.R...

...The Chronicle's subject matter, apart from the samizdat summaries, can be categorized as information on: the judicial or extrajudicial persecution of individuals for expression of their views...

...It penalizes the possession or propagation (in written or oral form) of "deliberate fabrications which discredit the Soviet political and social system...

...To have the demands satisfied is another...

...But their long campaign for permission to return to their homeland and to have their Autonomous Republic restored had still, in 1974, been unsuccessful...

...Less rough estimates than this would, incidentally, involve not only great labor but also severe problems in defining the precise criteria for distinguishing a "mainstream" dissenter from other categories of dissent, and in obtaining enough information about certain people to be able to apply the criteria to them with confidence...

...the collection edited by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Red Square at Noon (London, 1972...

...The regime has achieved this partly through introducing (in the 1950s) laws to limit the KGB's powers, and partly through appointing men from the party apparatus to head the organization, to follow Politbureau guidelines, and to prevent the reemergence of any tendencies to autonomy...

...The first volume appeared in 1972 and the second, with a foreword by one of its compilers, Zhores Medvedev, in 1975...

...Throughout its first two or three years the Chronicle steadily expanded its geographical coverage and its size...

...A contributory factor in the decision, many dissenters believe, was an assurance allegedly given by the Nixon administration, as it laid the groundwork for detente, that it would not make a public issue, or even protest, about the Soviet suppression of dissent...

...It should be noted, though, that Nash sovremennik soon began to act as a forum for rather similar views and writers...

...In this way the KGB forced Osipov at last, in March 1974, to close it down after nine book-length issues...

...In the years 1971-74 some 13,000 Germans reached West Germany, and the rate rose steadily to some 4,000 per year by 1973...

...Yet we have seen the danger that the regime ascribes to Solzhenitsyn's writings, and the Politbureau must often have taken the dissenters into account when deciding, for example, how much to rehabilitate Stalin, how far it could afford to tighten political control, whether to make the censorship more severe (which would divert still more works into samizdat), whether to continue its internment of dissenters in mental hospitals (a convenient device internally, but politically embarrassing abroad), whether to ease its emigration policy, and so on...

...Nonetheless, Medvedev has so far been allowed to keep the small flame of liberal Communism alight in the U.S.S.R., perhaps because elements in the apparat believe that the regime might one day need to turn in that direction...

...See Dokumenty Komiteta pray cheloveka: Proceedings of the Moscow Human Rights Committee, International League for the Rights of Man, 777 U.N...

...At the same time the patrons of the Molodaya gvardiya line of 1967-70, whoever they may have been, had clearly retained some power since 1970...

...It occurs on particular issues and groups of issues, but, as with the "anti-Party group" in the mid-1950s, it can quickly develop and embrace broad trends of policy...

...4-5 (1973) and no...

...Impact of Mainstream Dissent on the Regime THE DISSENTERS have not claimed that they constitute a powerful pressure group, nor that they make a continuous impact on the regime's policies...

...At this point, with Shelest's political position slipping fast and Shcherbytsky replacing him in May, the KGB arrested at least 50 dissenters and had them sentenced to an average of nearly ten years of prison and exile each...

...Their books and protests, and the Chronicle, have been systematically sent abroad and then broadcast back to the U.S.S.R...

...Its emergence at that time was probably provoked in part by Khrushchev's orthodox Marxist-Leninist position on the nationalities and religious questions as embodied, for example, in the new party program of 1961...

...19, for a vivid account...

...See Chronicle 22, p. 43 of the Amnesty edition, no...

...Second, the dissenters have, by breaking out of "the inertia of fear," provided a powerful example to other oppressed groups in Soviet society of how to act...

...Thus they could easily make contact with the dissenters in a way that most of the latter would welcome...

...published by the Macmillan Press Ltd., London, and the Free Press, New York, a division of the Macmillan Publishing Co...

...Political arrests now became a regular occurrence...

...See several items in ibid., 32...

...Belorussia and, even more, Azerbaijan, it should be noted, show little signs even of stirrings...

...The leadership is therefore widely, if often subconsciously, linked with those crimes and with all the personal, social, and economic suffering that accompanied them, some of which persists to this day...

...It also runs an unofficial "Red Cross" system of welfare and support for political prisoners and their families...

...They also sent emissaries to Moscow to lobby both officials and, to greater effect, the circles which produced the Chronicle...

...43 Then later in the year, as noted above, a similar takeover brought the excessively nationalist Molodaya gvardiya into line...

...These alarmed the more critical minds among the professional classes, which had become accustomed since 1953 to a significant degree of security and stability in their lives, to an at least embryonic rule of law...

...28 Since then the situation has remained tense, with the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church appearing regularly, and with occasional arrests and trials...

...and it has corrected most of its minor errors in subsequent issues...

...2 Since his death in 1953 a process of incipient repoliticization has begun, affecting both the apparat that rules the country and many groups outside it...

...That it would lose much of this unity if the regime were one day to liberalize and to ease the pressures on it is certain...

...However, by late October the unprecedented foreign campaign in their defense had forced the KGB on to the retreat...

...q Notes 1. This article is a much revised version of a paper written for the Commission on Critical Choices for Americans, but the conclusions are my own...

...Box 6066, Patterson Station, Baltimore, Md...

...And what are the operational guidelines of the moment from their political masters...

...In any case, most of the groups outside the apparat have developed increasingly dissenting features, a trend that seems sure to continue...

...By late 1974 only a few documents of this tendency were as yet available, although some had, in disguised form, achieved official publication...

...Possev: 4-yy spetsialnyy vypusk (Frankfurt, June 1970...

...The breakthrough came late in the year, when two well-known Moscow dissenters, Pyotr Yakir and Victor Krasin, began to collaborate with the investigators after several months in prison...

...But even in these cases it was (apart from a few successful Baptist efforts) completely unpublicized...

...In 1974 close links were established with the mainstream dissenters, demonstrations were staged in Moscow and Tallin, and a samizdat journal, Re Patria, began to appear...

...1, dated January 1974 and 110 pages long, has been published as document AS 1776 in Radio Liberty's Samizdat Archive series, which had registered by late 1974 nearly 2,000 items...

...When it does so, it will probably be the stronger for its roll call of new martyrs and will have more chance of extending its roots from the intelligentsia down into the working 144 PETER REDDAWAY class, which may, especially in the West Ukraine, prove to be more fertile soil than can at present be demonstrated from documents...

...Plaza, New York, N.Y...

...Is the defendant skillful in his own defense and would he be able effectively to expose evidence they might fabricate...

...Thus, in a political system as potentially brittle as the Soviet one, where the ideological vacuum in public life seems likely to produce increasing tensions, the regime could easily in the future mishandle dissenting groups and provoke sudden crises...

...Above all, perhaps, the mainstream dissenters have had an impact on the regime in two indirect but powerful ways...

...The penalties are correspondingly severe...

...Lithuania FOR WHATEVER the potential strength of Ukrainian dissent, it has at no stage (since the 1940s) been a mass movement...

...Anti-Russian nationalism and pan-Islamicism clearly exist, but they have not yet progressed, apparently, beyond moods and attitudes and what dissenting scholars can convey between the lines of their writings...

...His Gulag Archipelago, in particular, undermines the regime in passionate language at what, as noted earlier, are probably two of its most vulnerable points...

...On the episodes in this paragraph see Chronicle, 30, 32...

...The movement has only been organized in the loosest sense, through personal contacts and a feeling of common purpose in difficult and often dangerous circumstances...

...The dissenters have therefore, with one or two exceptions, expected that the Western democracies will support them, and have sent a continuous stream of appeals to them to do so...

...And second, this dissent has opposed the policy in practice—despite the facade of a federal structure that enshrines the sovereignty of the national republics—of dictating all important political and economic policies from Moscow...

...Thus, we might note, the situation of the late Czarist period may have been recreated...

...also Sheehy, op...

...As there are in fact only two other chief directorates, this move reflected clearly the KGB's growing concern...

...2. I.e., if one views the nature of politics as does Bernard Crick in his In Defense of Politics (London, 1962...

...The Moscow dissenters, led by Kosterin and Grigorenko, took up the Tatars' cause with vigor, but to no avail...

...But the invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968 changed the situation, especially when the Red Square demonstrators had been arrested four days later and sentenced...

...These powerfully written essays are concerned with human and national individuality and especially with the rebuilding of Ukrainian nationhood...

...Another catalyst was a revolt by laymen and priests against profound corruption in the hierarchy of the Georgian Orthodox Church...

...In this atmosphere the Chronicle could appear and, with luck, survive...

...New York, 1970), p. 30...

...It is different in character from extrasystemic opposition, being, despite the party's ban on factionalism, less illegitimate and also more shifting and fluid...

...In any case, in January 1972, as preparations were being made for Nixon's first visit to Moscow as president, the KGB struck at the Chronicle and its Ukrainian equivalent, the Ukrainian Herald...

...At that time equivalent opinion was strongly critical of the autocracy, while Western governments generally held their fire, not apparently realizing sufficiently that the noble causes of constitutional government and international stability would not be served if the autocracy reformed itself too little and too late...

...Nonetheless, Soviet dissent should still be viewed as a seedbed for opposition, and some of the dissenters as proto-oppositionists...

...and reactions to the dissenters' situation in the outside world...

...The most useful book on the Jewish movement up to 1973 is Leonard Schroeter, The Last Exodus (New York, 1974...

...As with the Jews, though, Soviet policy has been two-pronged: some 40 Zionist Jews were, in late 1974, in labor camps, along with about 25 activists of the German movement...

...24 In his long introduction, written in early 1966, Chornovil skillfully deployed the juridical approach developed in subsequent years by the mainstream dissenters...

...So far the Turkish government has shown no public readiness to accept them, and apparently none of them have received exit permits...

...The first 11 issues of the Chronicle appear in full in P. Reddaway, Uncensored Russia: the Human Rights Movement in the Soviet Union (London, 1972...

...Naturally, though, the KGB's guidelines could be changed in future, to obviate this dilemma...

...the first 32 issues contain nearly 4,000 different names (about half belonging to dissenters and a third to officials and their collaborators...

...In November 1944 they were deported by Stalin to Central Asia, evidently to clear possible opposition from the path of a planned Soviet advance into Turkey...

...For extensive detail on the cases against the Chronicle and the Ukrainian Herald see Chronicle, 24-30...

...The notably defensive tone of his article made this development less surprising than it would otherwise have been...

...This led to his deportation in February 1974 and the persecution of some of his friends, especially in Leningrad...

...The current process of "widening the area of freedom" could be more aptly described as the growing decrepitude of the regime...

...12 the persecution of minority nationalities and religious believers...

...The de facto freedom of expression of a steadily increasing number of groups has increased from virtually nil to a DISSENT IN THE SOVIET UNION 151 very significant level...

...1909 in the series...

...Waldheim to intervene and bring religious persecution to an end...

...31 One catalyst appears to have been the removal in 1972 of First Party Secretary Mzhavanadze and the drive of his successor, Shevardnadze, against corruption...

...20231 (Baltimore, 1974...

...Sakharov a humanitarian and truth-seeker...

...10 that Veche's supporters completely share the basic position of Solzhenitsyn as expressed in his "Open Letter to the Soviet Leaders...

...Indeed, the movement as such sank to a low ebb, as the Chronicle had, in effect, been its principal collective expression...

...In the underground conditions of its compilation and editing, clearly unusual care has been needed to attain this level of accuracy...

...Under an autocracy with totalitarian goals, like that of the CPSU, 3 it is especially difficult...

...The Chronicle also has reported on it extensively from no...

...So the Chronicle, which had obstinately survived the KGB's salami tactics for nearly four years, became from January 1972 on the object of an intensive investigation, to which, by the end of the year, it had succumbed...

...Thus a German emigration movement emerged, using the same militant tactics as the Jews...

...or to return from their places of internal exile to their homelands inside the U.S.S.R...

...A. Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984...

...The trend appeared, in fact, to be somewhat liberal, as certain authors and editors took advantage of the general uncertainty to get "liberal" writings into print, and as young, mostly bohemian writers and artists in Moscow became more active...

...Issues 1-4, 6-8 have been published in Ukrainian as five books by Smoloskyp (see previous note) and PIUF (3 rue du Sabot, Paris 6...

...In 1971 the arrest of two priests stimulated the unrest, and although they received only one-year sentences, 27 in early 1972 the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church began to appear in samizdat and 17,000 signatures were collected on an appeal to Dr...

...Medvedev is above all a political animal...

...and the collapse of moral standards, genuine culture, and self-respect in the Russian nation...

...But in 1970, as the Jewish lobby in the West began to operate, and as the thwarted would-be emigrants resorted to increasingly militant methods, including the planned hijack of a plane, the KGB had little choice but to yield...

...The movement began in the late 1960s among groups of Catholic priests, who protested against the restrictions on the printing of Bibles and religious literature, on the admission of students to seminaries, and on the freedom of action of the hierarchy...

...annexed during the Second World War: here the brutality of the annexations ensured that there were fewer illusions about Soviet intentions...

...It may well become more so in the future, and focus on wages and conditions—a development that would please the mainstream dissenters...

...The two volumes total some 1,500 pages...

...Here the record of the last decade is very different...

...The major limiting factor in future, as regards the volume of Jewish emigration, may prove to be the capacity of Israel and the West to absorb it...

...Solzhenitsyn belongs in part, in fact, in the previous category, to which many of his friends also belong, as humanitarianism and human rights (especially opposition to censorship) figure strongly among his preoccupations, alongside his predominant concern for the moral regeneration of the Russian nation and the rebirth of Russian culture...

...Opposition is punishable under, notably, articles 70 and 72, which concern "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" and "anti-Soviet organization," DISSENT IN THE SOVIET UNION 137 both conducted with the aim of weakening or overthrowing the Soviet system as a whole...

...For the latter might eventually, as Amalrik has predicted, lead to the fragmentation of Russia's border lands, as happened in 1917-21...

...Perhaps, in the decade to come, the regime will discover in itself a hidden capacity for change, renewal, and constructive dialogue with dissenting groups...

...and Tashkentskiy protsess, Herzen Foundation, Amsterdam, due in 1976, the first large collection of documents on the subject...

...In late August 1965, however, the arrests began in the Ukraine, and two weeks later extended to Sinyaysky and Daniel in Moscow: this was a clear signal to the "creative intelligentsia" as a whole...

...Their authors use most frequently about themselves and their colleagues the word dissenters [inakomyslyashchie...

...This phenomenon could, perhaps, be called intellectual opposition.' Opposition within the Regime ALTHOUGH THE REGIME'S greatest weakness is its own inflexibility and the inflexibility of its apparat (terror no longer being available to cut through the various powerful vested interests), opposition can and does, as Conquest and others have shown,' exist at the higher levels...

...On the latter see the trials of Davydov, Petrov, Bolonkin, and Balakirev in A Chronicle of Current Events, no...

...Material for inclusion has been passed to these few people along chains that have developed on the basis of personal friendship and trust...

...See Sakharov Speaks, pp...

...Russian Nationalist Dissent RUSSIAN nationalist dissent of the variety less liberal than Solzhenitsyn's or Osipov's is an important, but still little studied sector in the spectrum of dissent...

...As a result, over the next few months the KGB presumably received new guidelines from the Politbureau, the remaining dissenters took courage, a new coordinated network gradually took shape, and in May 1974 the Chronicle reemerged with four large issues to fill in most of the backlog since its suppression...

...stimulated by further political arrests in 1967 and the trial of the young intellectuals Galanskov and Ginzburg—brought the human rights movement to maturity in 1968...

...Religious Dissent RELIGIOUS DISSENT has a somewhat marginal political element to it, as most religious dissenters— of whom there are many varieties— simply want greater freedom for religion and are not concerned much about politics (except where religion is intertwined with it, as in Lithuania, the western Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia, and, incipiently, Russia itself...

...See M. Agursky's essay on Yury S. Ivanov's book, Caution, Zionism!, in New York Review of Books, Nov...

...Since 1972 a weekly bulletin of documents and information has been published, Jews in the USSR, Contemporary Jewish Library, 31 Percy Street, London W 1. 33 No...

...A radical change in emigration policy had been forced on the regime, a change which the Jackson Amendment had capitalized on, but in no way initiated, and which may prove to be little affected by the Soviet renunciation in January 1975 of the U.S.A.-U.S.S.R...

...Only the Jews and the Germans have received much satisfaction, and that has been over emigration, not any reform of internal Soviet structures...

...and other bodies abroad helped them much as yet...

...The only republic whose national movement has achieved this status so far is Lithuania...

...In May 1972 riots broke out in Kaunas, Lithuania's second city, after a student had burned himself to death in protest against the persecution of religion and national traditions...

...In this way the Ukrainian Herald, which had published six large issues in samizdat over two years, was soon suppressed, and with it, for a period, articulate national dissent...

...This very rough estimate is made up of about 1,000 such people named in the Chronicle, 1 -32, plus several hundred more who appear in P. Litvinov, The Trial of the Four, but not in the Chronicle, plus the balance who do not appear in either of these sources but in the hundreds of other available samizdat documents and books that concern "mainstream" dissent...

...Now it was important to weed out heterodoxy in the "thick journals...

...5 has so far reached the West only in a few extracts...

...For although most dissenters do not form conspiratorial groups or draft political programs, and thereby at least imply a desire to change the system and play a leading part in a new one, there are some who do, 4 and the borderline between the two categories is often blurred...

...The result, especially as the KGB pressed down increasingly on the human rights movement, was the rapid development of a movement to emigrate to Israel...

...See also Daniel Weissbort, ed., Selected Poems by Natalya Gorbanevskaya with a Transcript of her Trial and Papers Relating to her Detention in a Prison Psychiatric Hospital (South Hinksey, Oxford, 1972...

...A second reason is that Soviet Marxism-Leninism has become ossified, ritualized, and almost universally— except within the party apparatus, where it is the obligatory language—discredited or ignored...

...They also pioneered a new method, soon imitated by the dissenters, of communicating regularly with the West by international telephone, dictating whole documents on to tape recorders in London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco...

...Armenia, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, and Moldavia IN ARMENIA, Latvia, and Estonia national movements clearly exist but are much weaker than those in Lithuania and the Ukraine...

...We might only note here that in a system as inflexible as the Soviet one, and in a world where change occurs with increasing rapidity, either opposition factions or established leaders could well in future feel compelled to look outside the Establishment for new ideas...

...This is especially true of minority nationalism, which has continued to advance in many parts of the world for over a century, but has received repeated setbacks in Russia and the U.S.S.R...

...For a useful account of the Germans' history since 1941 see Ann Sheehy's study, The Crimean Tartars, The Meskhetians and the Volga Germans, Minority Rights Group, 36 Craven Street, London WC2 (London, 1973...

...35 Presumably, again, strategic reasons inhibit the regime from allowing them to return home...

...World opinion has been indifferent to their situation, as to the Meskhetians', in contrast to its response to the Jews...

...The KGB had presumably received—from a Politbureau shocked by how rapidly liberalism had burgeoned in Czechoslovakia—new guidelines aimed at preventing the growth of the human rights movement and cutting its links with the Crimean Tartars...

...Its liberal political position was implied by the article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (no, 19), which it carried regularly on its masthead: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression...

...Meanwhile, some of them will probably continue to give support of various kinds to the mainstream dissenters, especially in Moscow...

...Has he managed to outmaneuver them and secure the services of one of the few lawyers who will vigorously defend him...

...Its editors have changed and rotated quite often, and very few people have known for sure who they were at any particular moment...

...The sequels to these operations continued in 1974, those in Lithuania showing no signs of ending, and a new, if much smaller operation was also launched in Georgia...

...Although the Soviet Germans are about a million less numerous than the Jews, their movement seems likely to become a strong one and to figure increasingly prominently in negotiations between the Soviet and West German governments...

...First came Novy mir under Tvardovsky and his revisionist lieutenants, a journal with which the dissenters had many links...

...Roy Medvedev, although a rather isolated figure among the active dissenters, has evidently enjoyed enough protection from apparatchiki sympathetic to his brand of "socialism with a human face" to enable him to continue writing and publishing abroad...

...It is this vacuum that the dissenting forces show some signs of beginning to fill, much to the alarm of the apparat...

...See Literaturnaya gazeta, Nov.15, 1972, where the article occupied two whole pages...

...See Zhores Medvedev, Ten Years after Ivan Denisovich (London, 1973) chap...

...23 In September 1973 the KGB launched its media campaign against the two most formidable dissenting figures, Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, presumably planning to arrest or deport them and thus bring dissent under better control...

...Between 1956 and 1974 over 200 members of their movement were imprisoned, and thousands who returned to the Crimea without permission were expelled...

...This has been partly in reaction to their tendency to try to discourage it and, in important respects, to reverse it...

...But for dissenting groups to win some de facto freedom of expression, and thus be able to articulate their demands loudly, is one thing...

...the Orthodox Church and religious thought...

...This force was powerful enough that it had to be met by concessions as well as repression...

...1967, it is true, saw the concession of legal exculpation (for their alleged wartime crimes) granted to the Crimean Tartars, who had recently begun sending regular delegations to Moscow and also establishing links there with dissenting intellectuals...

...The one occasion on which a few governments spoke up was in the autumn of 1973, when a virulent campaign against Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov was launched in the Soviet media...

...Neo-Leninists and Neo-Marxists A SMALL and apparently declining sector consider (or considered) themselves neo-Leninists or neo-Marxists...

...and, often more important, abroad...

...In these terms, Solzhenitsyn and Osipov are liberal nationalists and can be distinguished from centrist and right-wing tendencies...

...Hence the decision in August to settle accounts with Sakharov, and then, when he was immediately and aggressively defended by Solzhenitsyn, with him too...

...In February 1970, after a six-month rearguard action, it succumbed to a 150 PETER REDDAWAY forcible takeover by literary officials and hacks...

...Governments which have spoken out about the South African, Brazilian, Greek, Spanish, Chilean, and other authoritarian regimes have preferred not to criticize publicly (or even, apparently, privately) the U.S.S.R.'s suppression of human rights and its treatment of political prisoners in forced labor camps and mental hospitals...

...Vladimir Osipov, for three years the chief editor of the samizdat journal, Veche, calls himself a "liberal patriot...

...Thus Trotsky and his followers openly called themselves an opposition, even when exiled abroad...

...Other notable features have been the Chronicle's size and also the accuracy, concreteness, and detailed nature of its information: an average issue is 10-15,000 words long...

...with Shelest having reached a viable modus vivendi with the Ukrainian dissenters...

...To combat samizdat and unauthorized demonstrations, articles 190/1 and 190/3 were added to the Criminal Code in 1966, along with new laws to suppress religious dissent...

...The dissenters' only satisfaction then is that they have clearly revealed the kangaroo nature of the proceedings...

...In early 1974 Osipov was ousted from the Veche editorship by less liberal elements, but soon founded a new journal of his own, Zemlya, only to be arrested in November of that year...

...With the latter the Ukrainian dissenters maintained close ties from the start, and as a result their problems have been well covered in the Chronicle...

...It must also fear the latter as a potentially destructive force in the long tradition of elemental Russian revolt "from below...

...5-6 (1973), pp...

...To sum up, by the end of 1974 at least half the leaders of the "first generation" of mainstream dissent had been more or less neutralized through imprisonment, emigration, exhaustion, intimidation, or death...

...The method of distribution has been the standard one for samizdat: typescripts passed from hand to hand, constantly being retyped in ten copies on onionskin paper...

...problems of ecology and the preservation of old Russian architecture...

...Underlying all the Chronicle's reporting has been an insistent concern for legality, for the observation of Soviet laws (in their more liberal interpretation), and for the subtle education of its readers in how to use their legal rights to promote the democratization of society...

...Much less has been done from the West than the dissenters have hoped, but more than nothing...

...This was when it sponsored efforts to "co-opt" the journal to a position more acceptable to the regime, in which Veche would disown Orthodoxy and anti-industrialism in favor of neopaganism, virulent anti-Semitism, and recognition of the party as the preserver of national unity and stability against the many threats of disintegration that faced the country...

...The Central Asian republics are a more complex phenomenon, but it must suffice to DISSENT IN THE SOVIET UNION 145 say here that they have not yet produced any samizdat documents except those by the exiled minorities to be discussed below...

...The moral concerns that hold it together are a common humanitarianism, a common insistence on legality, and a common moral opposition to the oppressive methods of the regime...

...also his article and its two attachments referred to in note 38, and Chronicle, 7, material on the Fetisov group in Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, pp...

...Politicheskiy dnevnik, Herzen Foundation, Amsterdam...

...Liberal Russian Nationalists THE THIRD and last broad trend can be labeled liberal Russian nationalist...

...8 But a genuine human rights movement, in which different groups consciously cooperated with each other, began to emerge only in 1965-67...

...The main catalyst was the Ukrainian and Moscow arrests of 1965...

...To date, though, evidently in deference to the mass nature of the dissent, the authorities have refrained from imposing sentences longer than six years at political trials...

...Then, concurrently with the arrests of Sinyaysky and Daniel in Moscow, 20 Ukrainian intellectuals were also arrested and sentenced to up to six years each...

...Hence it views itself not as a political but a human rights movement, a movement that asserts the worth of the individual vis-d-vis the omnipotence and frequent brutality of the state...

...But it has a considerably larger number of sympathizers, who read samizdat publications, help it in various ways, but prefer not to put their names to documents or protests...

...The main response to this came within two months of Nikonov's removal, when Osipov and others founded the samizdat journal Veche for Russian patriots loyal but not subservient to the regime...

...See Chronicle, 16...

...In the course of the year several hundred apartment searches and interrogations were conducted in the case against the Chronicle, in a variety of cities, and a dozen or so arrests were made...

...this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers...

...Yakovlev also attacked nationalist deviations in Georgia and Armenia...

...Such communication has now been performed so often with impunity by Sakharov, and by others operating to some extent under his wing, that it has become increasingly difficult for the KGB to prosecute producers of 140 PETER REDDAWAY the Chronicle, which regularly does exactly the same thing...

...Their deportation in 1944 was, however, punishment for their alleged wholesale collaboration with the Germans, and not until 1967 did they win the removal of this charge from the record...

...There is no proof that such an assurance was given, but, as mentioned above, no protests were in fact made...

...The most useful collection of materials on the relation of Solzhenitsyn to literary and human rights dissenters is Leopold Labedz, ed., Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record (London, 1972...

...25 But, as noted above, the KGB's major move came in January 1972...

...See Chronicle, 32, especially the items concerning V. Pailodze, L. Alimonaki, Y. Gastev, and M. Kostava...

...The dissenters too impose restraints...

...Nine years later the situation is radically different...

...Other leaders and supporters are engineers, teachers, lawyers, writers, artists, journalists, and students, with a very small number of workers and military men...

...Some of the latter have belonged to groups that, as we shall see below, have gradually found the means and the resolution to imitate the dissenters' methods and take advantage of their services...

...copyright ® Archie Brown and Michael Kaser, 1975...

...If this last phenomenon should become more common in the future, involving, as it does, a major potential vulnerability of the Soviet system, then it could probably be said that the nationalities problem would definitely become the regime's first preoccupation in the area of dissent...

...33 Again, militancy, helped by the conjuncture of Brandt's Ostpolitik, appears to have paid off...

...It is not concerned with agitation against the system as a whole, and so the penalties are relatively light (up to three years' imprisonment or five years' exile...

...Other important source books on Ukrainian dissent in the 1960s are Michael Browne, ed., Ferment in the Ukraine (London, 1971), and Ivan Dzyuba, Internationalism or Russification...

...In addition to much ad hoc activity, regular meetings are held in Moscow flats, where relatives of political prisoners congregate, often from distant corners of the country, to exchange information and experiences, obtain legal advice, and, as their family incomes have often become nil, communicate their material needs...

...However, as these questions are discussed in another chapter they will not be developed here...

...This said, we may now look more closely at the main political, ideological, and philosophical tendencies within it...

...What were its editorial principles...

...To put it in perspective, a brief review of the full range of semilegitimate and extrasystem Russian nationalism since the early 1960s may be useful...

...In this way they increase the political cost of planned KGB repressions and sometimes mitigate or even prevent them...

...Hence the emergence in 1964 of both the officially approved "Motherland" [Rodina] clubs and the liberal nationalist underground group of Leningrad Social-Christians, 36 and in 1965 of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments...

...If not, however, Andrei Amalrik's assessment, written in 1969, will presumably have been proved right: The regime...

...Yet, partly because of the dissenters' efforts, this fact has a definitely inhibiting effect on the KGB in some cases...

...But it seems likely that the services of a basically humanitarian movement will be needed for a long time to come, and the moral strength of the present movement will probably prove to be more than the KGB can break...

...Veche was concerned primarily with: the thought of Slavophiles, nationalists, and neoSlavophiles...

...DISSENT IN THE SOVIET UNION 149 Working-Class Dissent IT IS CLEAR that discontent is quite widespread among workers and peasants, but except for frequent "go-slows" and rather rare strikes, and the mass participation in certain national and religious dissent movements, it is not yet organized...

...Much of the intricate network of Chronicle correspondents and distributors was uncovered, and 1973 was a year of reduced and less coordinated activity...

...4. E.g., the Leningrad "Social-Christians," a group of anti-Soviet revolutionaries, or "The Democrats," a Moscow-Leningrad-Baltic group...

...It is especially likely to appear when a power struggle is producing instability in the leadership...

...The simultaneous assault on the Ukrainian dissenters probably resulted from a KGB assessment that Shelest's modus vivendi with them had, in view of the vigorous development of the Ukrainian Herald over the last two years, broken down in a way that was too dangerous to tolerate any longer...

Dissent in the Soviet Union

Reddaway, Peter