The Varieties of Soviet Dissidence
DANIELS, ROBERT V.
The Varieties of Soviet Dissidence Dissent in the USSR: Politics, Ideology and People Edited by Rudolf L. Tokes Johns Hopkins. 453 pp. $15.00. Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor of History,...
...Nobody who knows the Soviets well believes they are easing tensions merely because the West is being polite...
...In my opinion, this is a fundamental question in judging the future course of the Soviet regime, albeit one that is impossible to answer on the basis of the available evidence...
...The writers accurately note the failure of the Soviet masses to respond to the dissidents, yet they generally neglect to mention that the prerevolutionary intelligentsia had the same problem almost until the beginning of this century...
...It is ironic, for instance, that Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn should be lionized in the U.S...
...Collectively, their work presents a highly informative picture of the conditions under which the dissent movement has operated, and the variety of viewpoints contained within it...
...In any case, could alternative views subtly receive a sympathetic hearing as time changes the character of the ruling elite...
...And now this most thoroughly documented aspect of Soviet affairs has become a subject for examination by social scientists...
...Harassment, imprisonment and deportation have wiped out most of the main spokesmen, reducing their influence to a shadow of what it may have been at its height in the late '60s...
...A less metaphysical and more realistic explanation for the dissidents' apparent failure would be-as Howard Biddulph and Gayle Durham Hollander make clear in discussing the conditions for communicating dissent-that practically everyone has been intimidated...
...Among the more outstanding are The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime, 1953-1970, by Abraham Rothberg, Voices of the Silent, by Cornelia Gerstenmeier and Uncen-sored Russia: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union, compiled by Peter Reddaway from the underground Chronicle of Current Events...
...The submissiveness of the Russians is blamed in some pieces on the lack of a commitment to democracy-an interpretation that ignores Russia's experience in 1917...
...If anything, such pressures may modestly contribute to keeping the Soviet modus operandi a little more circumspect...
...and Robert Slusser on the historical issues discussed in underground publications...
...What, finally, are the policy implications for the U.S...
...Yet some dissidents, exemplified by the historian Roy A. Medvedev, hope for reform in the context of Marxism and the Communist Party, perhaps on the model of the Prague Spring...
...No wonder there is a gulf between the intelligentsia and the masses...
...Thus, Walter D. Connor, in viewing the dissent movement as "a symptom of socioeconomic changes," exhibits faint recognition of the moral courage and defiance that has animated it...
...The Soviet authorities would naturally like to prevent the messages of the Medvedevs and Sol-zhenitsyns from reaching the outside world as well, and presumably they have subscribed to the International Copyright Convention in order to control dissident publication abroad...
...For this they have suffered imprisonment, exile, mental and physical torture, and banishment from their homeland...
...The formula for our posture can be found in the Soviets' own text: coexistence for practical reasons, but "no ideological coexistence...
...Even the bulk of the intellectuals, as George Feifer points out from his experiences on the scene, are politically quiescent...
...Gene Sosin on magnitizdat, the tape-recorded songs of nonconformity...
...Hounded by the police, shunned by the masses, cut off from all but the most tenuous contact with the outside world, a handful of defiant intellectuals-mainly writers, historians and scientists-launched an effort to speak the truth...
...Others, stressing the Orthodox religion, Russian nationalism or both, have philosophically rejected the West in favor of a tradition-centered "neo-Slavophilism...
...There are clear indications, brought out in Frederick Barg-hoorn's lead article on the government's campaign against its opponents and Theodore Friedgut's account of the "Democratic Movement," that dissent in the Soviet Union has passed its peak...
...Since that time, of course, Russian passivity has been insured by stringent censorship and terror...
...Although Tokes complains in his introduction, citing Sheldon S. Wolin, that American social science has preferred the static over the changeable and has sacrificed ideological perceptiveness on the altar of behaviorism, one can find just such excesses of jargon-laden model-building and pigeon-holing sprinkled throughout his book...
...The nearest thing to a good historical synthesis is Peter Dornan's discussion of Sakharov's intellectual development and political troubles from the '50s-'70s...
...Reviewed by Robert V. Daniels Professor of History, University of Vermont The story of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s and early 1970s ranks among the epics of human courage...
...Peter Maggs of the Illinois Law School has contributed a brief note to Dissent in the USSR suggesting legal maneuvers to avoid such restraints...
...Barbara Jancar on religious movements...
...In the West, their heroism has inspired a flood of publications: memoirs, translations of samizdat writings, narrative accounts...
...But it is difficult from this volume to grasp where protest in the Soviet Union came from and where it may be headed...
...In addition, comprehensive research archives of dissident literature, accumulated by Radio Liberty, are available at eight major academic libraries, including MIT's Center for International Studies...
...But this may not be much of a problem any more...
...Unfortunately, a number of the articles in this volume give scant attention to the actual ideas of the dissenters or to the moral commitment that has driven them, whatever their viewpoint...
...Among the main dissenter tendencies, much the most congenial to the American system is the liberal or social democratic position that is represented by thinkers like the physicist Andrei D. Sakharov...
...In Dissent in the Soviet Union Professor Rudolf L. Tokes, a Hungarian-born political scientist at the University of Connecticut, has brought together analyses by a dozen scholars (all American save one Canadian and one Israeli) in political science, sociology and related fields...
...It is time to take up that challenge and keep the leaders in Moscow ideologically on the defensive, where they belong...
...For there is a tendency in the United States to equate all Soviet disaffection with American ideas of individual freedom...
...Nor will support of the dissenters alter the real economic and geopolitical facts that have persuaded the Kremlin detente is in the interest of the USSR...
...The difficulty then, far from being the lack of a commitment to democracy, was an excessive indulgence in it without a comprehension of its limitations in everyday life (present-day Portugal provides close parallels...
...Should dissent be encouraged-assuming there is much left and that it can be encouraged-or should we hold back in the interest of detente...
...On the other hand, one may wonder, as Connor does, whether there are quiet sympathizers with the dissenters amid the younger, more professional elements of the Party and government hierarchy...
...The deep divisions among the dissidents need to be underscored...
...as the natural ally of democracy when his beliefs are evidently a good deal more foreign to our own than the monarchism of George III...
...The most informative contributors are those who minimize analytical methodology and stress what the dissenters have thought and said-notably George L. Kline on the philosophers Aleksandr Yesenin-Volpin, Valery Chalidze and Grig-ory Pomerantz...
Vol. 58 • October 1975 • No. 20
