Soviet dissidents


Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term dissident was used in the Soviet Union in the period from the mid-1960s until the Fall of Communism. It was used to refer to small groups of marginalized intellectuals whose challenges, from modest to radical to the Soviet regime, met protection and encouragement from correspondents, and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities. Following the etymology of the term, a dissident is considered to "sit apart" from the regime. As dissenters began self-identifying as dissidents, the term came to refer to an individual whose non-conformism was perceived to be for the good of a society. The most influential subset of the dissidents is known as the Soviet human rights movement.
Political opposition in the USSR was barely visible, and apart from rare exceptions, it had little consequence, primarily because it was instantly crushed with brute force. Instead, an important element of dissident activity in the Soviet Union was informing society about violation of laws and human rights and organizing in defense of those rights. Over time, the dissident movement created vivid awareness of Soviet Communist abuses.
Soviet dissidents who criticized the state in most cases faced legal sanctions under the Soviet Criminal Code and the choice between exile abroad, the mental hospital, or the labor camp. Anti-Soviet political behavior, in particular, being outspoken in opposition to the authorities, demonstrating for reform, writing books critical of the USSR were defined in some persons as being simultaneously a criminal act, a symptom, and a diagnosis.

1950s–1960s

In the 1950s, Soviet dissidents started leaking criticism to the West by sending documents and statements to foreign diplomatic missions in Moscow. In the 1960s, Soviet dissidents frequently declared that the rights the government of the Soviet Union denied them were universal rights, possessed by everyone regardless of race, religion and nationality. In August 1969, for instance, the Initiating Group for Defense of Civil Rights in the USSR appealed to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights to defend the human rights being trampled on by Soviet authorities in a number of trials.
Some of the major milestones of the dissident movement of the 1960s included:
  • Public readings of poetry at the Mayakovsky Square in downtown Moscow, where some of the underground writings critical of the system were often circulated; some of these public readings were dispersed by the police;
  • The trial of poet Iosif Brodsky who was charged with 'parasitism' for not being officially employed and sentenced in 1963 to internal exile; he gained widespread sympathy and support in dissident and semi-dissident circles, mostly through the notes from his trial compiled by Frida Vigdorova
  • The trial and sentencing of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel who were arrested in 1965 for publishing their co-authored work abroad under pennames and sentenced to labor camp and internal exile; opposition to this trial led to a campaign of petitions for their release that was signed by thousands of people, many of whom went on to participate more actively in the dissident movement
  • Silent demonstrations on Moscow's Pushkin Square initiated by Alexander Yesenin-Volpin on the Soviet Constitution Day of Dec. 5, 1965, with posters urging the authorities to observe their own Constitution
  • Petitioning campaigns against the downplaying of Stalin's terror after the removal of Nikita Khrushchev and the resurgence of the cult of Stalin's personality in parts of the Soviet government bureaucracy
  • The launch, in April 1968, of the underground periodical, 'Chronicle of Current Events', documenting violations of human rights and protest activities across the Soviet Union
  • The publication in the West of Andrei Sakharov's first political essay 'Reflections on Progress and Intellectual Freedom' in the spring and summer of 1968
  • The rally of protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to suppress 'the Prague Spring'; was held on August 25, 1968, on Moscow's Red Square by eight dissidents including Viktor Fainberg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pavel Litvinov, Vladimir Dremlyuga, and others
  • The founding of the Initiative on Human Rights in 1969

    1970s

Our history shows that most of the people can be fooled for a very long time. But now all this idiocy is coming into clear contradiction with the fact that we have some level of openness.

The heyday of the dissenters as a presence in the Western public life was the 1970s. The Helsinki Accords inspired dissidents in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland to openly protest human rights failures by their own governments. The Soviet dissidents demanded that the Soviet authorities implement their own commitments proceeding from the Helsinki Agreement with the same zeal and in the same way as formerly the outspoken legalists expected the Soviet authorities to adhere strictly to the letter of their constitution. Dissident Russian and East European intellectuals who urged compliance with the Helsinki accords have been subjected to official repression. According to Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch, Moscow has taken advantage of the Helsinki security pact to improve its economy while increasing the suppression of political dissenters. 50 members of Soviet Helsinki Groups were imprisoned. Cases of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union were divulged by Amnesty International in 1975 and by The Committee for the Defense of Soviet Political Prisoners in 1975 and 1976.
US President Jimmy Carter in his inaugural address on 20 January 1977 announced that human rights would be central to foreign policy during his administration. In February, Carter sent Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov a letter expressing his support for the latter's stance on human rights. In the wake of Carter's letter to Sakharov, the USSR cautioned against attempts "to interfere' in its affairs under "a thought-up pretext of 'defending human rights.'" Because of Carter's open show of support for Soviet dissidents, the KGB was able to link dissent with American imperialism through suggesting that such protest is a cover for American espionage in the Soviet Union. The KGB head Yuri Andropov determined, "The need has thus emerged to terminate the actions of Orlov, fellow Helsinki monitor Ginzburg and others once and for all, on the basis of existing law." According to Dmitri Volkogonov and Harold Shukman, it was Andropov who approved the numerous trials of human rights activists such as Andrei Amalrik, Vladimir Bukovsky, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Alexander Ginzburg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pyotr Grigorenko, Anatoly Shcharansky, and others:
If we accept human rights violations as just "their way" of doing things, then we are all guilty.

Voluntary and involuntary emigration allowed the authorities to rid themselves of many political active intellectuals including writers Valentin Turchin, Georgi Vladimov, Vladimir Voinovich, Lev Kopelev, Vladimir Maximov, Naum Korzhavin, Vasily Aksyonov, psychiatrist Marina Voikhanskaya and others. A Chronicle of Current Events covered 424 political trials, in which 753 people were convicted, and no one of the accused was acquitted; in addition, 164 people were declared insane and sent to compulsory treatment in a psychiatric hospital.
According to Soviet dissidents and Western critics, the KGB had routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing public trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. On the grounds that political dissenters in the Soviet Union were psychotic and deluded, they were locked away in psychiatric hospitals and treated with neuroleptics. Confinement of political dissenters in psychiatric institutions had become a common practice. That technique could be called the "medicalization" of dissidence or psychiatric terror, the now familiar form of repression applied in the Soviet Union to Leonid Plyushch, Pyotr Grigorenko, and many others. Finally, many persons at that time tended to believe that dissidents were abnormal people whose commitment to mental hospitals was quite justified. In the opinion of the Moscow Helsinki Group chairwoman Lyudmila Alexeyeva, the attribution of a mental illness to a prominent figure who came out with a political declaration or action is the most significant factor in the assessment of psychiatry during the 1960–1980s. At that time Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky wrote A New Mental Illness in the USSR: The Opposition published in French, German, Italian, Spanish and A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents published in Russian, English, French, Italian, German, Danish.

Repression of the Helsinki Watch Groups

In 1977–1979 and again in 1980–1982, the KGB reacted to the Helsinki Watch Groups in Moscow, Kiev, Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Erevan by launching large-scale arrests and sentencing its members to in prison, labor camp, internal exile and psychiatric imprisonment.
From the members of the Moscow Helsinki Group, 1978 saw its members Yuri Orlov, Vladimir Slepak and Anatoly Shcharansky sentenced to lengthy labor camp terms and internal exile for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" and treason. Another wave of arrests followed in the early 1980s: Malva Landa, Viktor Nekipelov, Leonard Ternovsky, Feliks Serebrov, Tatiana Osipova, Anatoly Marchenko, and Ivan Kovalev. Soviet authorities offered some activists the "opportunity" to emigrate. Lyudmila Alexeyeva emigrated in 1977. The Moscow Helsinki Group founding members Mikhail Bernshtam, Alexander Korchak, Vitaly Rubin also emigrated, and Pyotr Grigorenko was stripped of his Soviet citizenship while seeking medical treatment abroad.
The Ukrainian Helsinki Group suffered severe repressions throughout 1977–1982, with at times multiple labor camp sentences handed out to Mykola Rudenko, Oleksy Tykhy, Myroslav Marynovych, Mykola Matusevych, Levko Lukyanenko, Oles Berdnyk, Mykola Horbal, Zinovy Krasivsky, Vitaly Kalynychenko, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Olha Heyko, Vasyl Stus, Oksana Meshko, Ivan Sokulsky, Ivan Kandyba, Petro Rozumny, Vasyl Striltsiv, Yaroslav Lesiv, Vasyl Sichko, Yuri Lytvyn, Petro Sichko. By 1983 the Ukrainian Helsinki Group had 37 members, of whom 22 were in prison camps, 5 were in exile, 6 emigrated to the West, 3 were released and were living in Ukraine, 1 committed suicide.
The Lithuanian Helsinki Group saw its members subjected to two waves of imprisonment for anti-Soviet activities and "organization of religious processions": Viktoras Petkus was sentenced in 1978; others followed in 1980–1981: Algirdas Statkevičius, Vytautas Skuodys, Mečislovas Jurevičius, and Vytautas Vaičiūnas.