So, who in the Soviet Union began to be called dissidents and for what reason? Dissidents (Latin dissidents - dissent) is a term that, since the mid-70s, has been applied to individuals who openly argued with official doctrines in certain areas of public life of the USSR and came into clear conflict with the apparatus of power. It is characteristic that the only self-designation that the dissidents did not receive from the outside was the term “human rights activists.” The human rights movement has always been the core of the dissident movement, in other words, the field of intersection of the interests of all other movements - political, socio-cultural, national, religious, etc. The focus of human rights activists was the situation with human rights in the Soviet Union and the inconsistency of this provision with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights UN.

From the general mass of dissidents, dissidents stood out not only in their way of thinking, but also in their type of social behavior. The driving force behind participation in the dissident movement was the desire to:

• - civil and moral resistance;
• - providing assistance to people subjected to repression;
• - formation and preservation of certain social ideals.

The well-known human rights activist L. Alekseeva, introducing the concept of “dissident movements”, included in it such forms of dissent as national; national-religious; national democratic movements; movements of representatives of peoples for travel to their historical homeland or native places; for human rights; socialist; for socio-economic rights.

Among the intelligentsia, where, in general, dissidence originates, not everyone and did not always understand the people who, to one degree or another, challenged the system. At the beginning of 1968, the writer K. Chukovsky noted in his diary “It seems to me that this (the speech of dissidents - author) is a pre-Decembrist movement, the beginning of the sacrificial exploits of the Russian intelligentsia, which will turn Russian history into an expanding bloody stream. This is just the beginning, just a trickle.”

The first years of Brezhnev's rule (1964-1967), associated with an intensified attack on small islands of freedom born of the thaw, marked the beginning of the formation of organized opposition to the regime in the form of the human rights movement. In the history of the human rights movement, these years can be defined as the initial stage of its formation.

The main form of dissident activity was protests and appeals to the country's top political leadership and law enforcement agencies.

The exact date of birth of the human rights movement is not difficult to establish: it is December 5, 1965, when the first demonstration under human rights slogans took place on Pushkin Square in Moscow. However, this event was preceded by many years of struggle between democratically minded groups and individuals.

In 1965, repression against dissidents intensified, which was likely the result of attempts by the Stalinists in the new leadership to achieve political superiority.

In the fall of 1965, Moscow writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuliy Daniel, who published their works abroad under the pseudonyms Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak, were arrested.

The arrest of the writers was perceived as a prologue to ominous changes. Not only friends and acquaintances of the arrested, but also people unfamiliar with them heatedly discussed what fate awaited the writers.

In such a situation, the first demonstration in Soviet times under human rights slogans took place on December 5, 1965 in Moscow on Pushkin Square. A few days before December 5 (Soviet Constitution Day 1936), leaflets with a “Civil Appeal” printed on a typewriter were scattered at Moscow University and several humanities institutes. The author of the appeal and the initiator of the demonstration was Alexander Yesenin-Volpin.

The son of Sergei Yesenin, a mathematician and poet, he was twice imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals: in 1949, at the age of 25, for “anti-Soviet poetry,” and after Stalin’s death, in 1959, for transmitting border a collection of poems and his “Free Philosophical Treatise”.

According to Bukovsky, about 200 people came to the Pushkin monument at the appointed time. Volpin and several people next to him unfurled small posters, but they were quickly snatched away by state security officers; Even those standing nearby did not have time to read what was written on the posters. Then it became known that it was written: “We demand publicity of the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel!” and “Respect the Soviet Constitution!” As A. S. Yesenin-Volpin himself recalled these memorable days, speaking at an extended meeting of the Department of Russian Contemporary History of the Historical and Archival Institute of the Russian State University for the Humanities on January 17, 1994, it was in his hands that there was a poster “Respect the Soviet Constitution,” which caused in turn, many “perplexed” questions from official officials during his interrogation. About 20 people were detained. The detainees were released after a few hours. Most of them were students. All of them and those seen in the square that evening (about 40 people) were expelled from the institutes.

Perhaps because of such an unusual event in Soviet conditions as a demonstration, the authorities did not dare to organize a closed trial. However, in January 1966, the trial did take place and the sentence was harsh: Sinyavsky and Daniel received 5 and 7 years in maximum security camps, respectively.

The trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky showed that the authorities refused to attribute terrorist intentions to the defendants and use the death penalty for verbal “anti-Sovietism.” But the authorities have also demonstrated that they do not intend to abandon the practice of repression for attempts to exercise freedom of speech.

After the trial, a samizdat collection dedicated to the trial began to be compiled (samizdat is a phenomenon in political and cultural life, when works of art and political ideas disliked by the authorities were retyped on a typewriter and passed from one reader to another) collection “White Book”, similar to the “White Book” in the case of I .Brodsky, according to the process of Daniel and Sinyavsky. Its compilation was undertaken by Alexander Ginzburg, the author of one of the first samizdat magazines, Syntax.

The arrest of the writers was followed by a fairly broad campaign of letters of protest. It became clear that the thaw was over and society was faced with an urgent need to fight for its rights. The trial of the writers and the petition campaign of 1966 created a final divide between the authorities and society, dividing the intelligentsia into insiders and outsiders. Such divisions in Russian history have always led, and this time led to the formation of a cohesive and organized political opposition.

The trial of the writers was just one of the signs of re-Stalinization. Works justifying and exalting Stalin began to appear in the press more and more often, and anti-Stalin statements were not allowed to pass. The pressure of censorship, weakened after the 20th Congress, increased. These alarming symptoms also caused numerous protests, both individual and collective.

A letter from 25 prominent scientific and cultural figures to Brezhnev about the tendencies for the rehabilitation of Stalin, which quickly spread throughout Moscow, made a particular impression. Among those who signed this letter are the composer Shostakovich, 13 academicians (including A.D. Sakharov), famous directors, actors, artists, writers, and old Bolsheviks with pre-revolutionary experience. The arguments against re-Stalinization were made in the spirit of loyalty (re-Stalinization will bring discord into Soviet society, into the consciousness of people, worsen relations with the communist parties of the West, etc.), but the protest against the revival of Stalinism was expressed energetically.

In 1966, an open confrontation between Stalinists and anti-Stalinists began in society. If at the official level there were more and more speeches praising Stalin, then educational institutions, universities, and houses of scientists invited writers and publicists who had proven themselves to be anti-Stalinists for conversations and lectures.

At the same time, there was a massive distribution of anti-Stalinist samizdat materials. Solzhenitsyn’s novels “In the First Circle” and “Cancer Ward” became most famous during these years. Memoirs about the camps and prisons of the Stalin era were distributed: “This must not happen again” by S. Gazaryan, “Memoirs” by V. Olitskaya, “Notebooks for grandchildren” by M. Baitalsky, etc. “Kolyma Stories” by V. Shalamov was reprinted and rewritten. But the most widespread was the first part of E. Ginzburg’s chronicle novel “Steep Route”. The petition campaign also continued. Intellectuals and human rights activists still wrote letters with the hope of bringing some sense to the authorities. The most famous were: a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU from 43 children of communists who were repressed during Stalin’s times (September 1967) and letters from Roy Medvedev and Pyotr Yakir to the magazine “Communist”, containing a list of Stalin’s crimes.

The next period in the development of the dissident and human rights movement - 1968-1975 - coincided with the strangulation of the Prague Spring, the suspension of any attempts to transform political institutions, and the immersion of political life in a state of stagnation.

In early 1968, the petition campaign continued. Appeals to the authorities were supplemented by letters against judicial reprisals against samizdators: former student of the Moscow Historical and Archival Institute Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg, Alexei Dobrovolsky, Vera Dashkova. The “Trial of Four” was directly related to the case of Sinyavsky and Daniel: Ginzburg and Galanskov were accused of compiling and transmitting to the West the “White Book on the Trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel,” Galanskov, in addition, of compiling the samizdat literary and journalistic collection “Phoenix-66” ", and Dashkova and Dobrovolsky - in assistance to Galanskov and Ginzburg. In form, the protests of 1968 repeated the events of two years ago, but on an increased scale.

On January 22, a demonstration took place in defense of the arrested, organized by V. Bukovsky and V. Khaustov. About 30 people took part in the demonstration. (The organizers of the demonstration were arrested and subsequently sentenced to 3 years in the camps). During the trial of the “four,” about 400 people gathered outside the courthouse.

However, as in 1966, letters to Soviet authorities became the predominant form of protest in 1968.

The petition campaign was also much broader than in 1966. Representatives of all layers of the intelligentsia, right down to the most privileged, took part in the petition campaign. “Signatories” (as those who signed protests against political persecution began to be called) turned out to be more than 700. Andrei Amalrik in his work “Will the Soviet Union Exist Until 1984?” analyzed the social composition of the signatories. Among them, scientists made up 45%; artists - 22%; engineers and technicians - 13%; publishing workers, teachers, doctors, lawyers - 9%; workers - 6%, students - 5. The signing campaign of 1968 was not immediately successful: Ginzburg was sentenced to 5 years in a camp, Galanskov to 7, and died in prison in 1972. However, petitions and numerous speeches slowed down the process of curtailing democracy and did not allow the Stalinists to achieve complete revenge.

In the spring and summer of 1968, the Czechoslovak crisis developed, caused by an attempt at radical democratic transformations of the socialist system and ending with the introduction of Soviet troops into Czechoslovakia. The most famous demonstration in defense of Czechoslovakia was the demonstration on August 25, 1968 on Red Square in Moscow. Larisa Bogoraz, Pavel Litvinov, Konstantin Babitsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Viktor Fainberg, Vadim Delaunay and Vladimir Dremlyuga sat on the parapet at Lobnoye Mesto and unfurled the slogans “Long live free and independent Czechoslovakia!” (in Czech), “Shame on the occupiers!”, “Hands off Czechoslovakia!”, “For your and our freedom!” (in Russian). Almost immediately, plainclothes KGB officers rushed to the demonstrators, who were on duty on Red Square awaiting the departure of the Czechoslovak delegation from the Kremlin.

The slogans were torn out; despite the fact that no one resisted, the demonstrators were beaten and forced into cars. The trial took place in October. Two were sent to a camp, three to exile, one to a mental hospital. N. Gorbanevskaya, who had an infant, was released. The people of Czechoslovakia learned about this demonstration in the USSR and all over the world.

The reassessment of values ​​that took place in Soviet society in 1968 and the government’s final rejection of the liberal course determined the new alignment of opposition forces. Crystallized during the “signature” campaigns of 1966-68, protests against the invasion of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia, the human rights movement set a course for the formation of unions and associations - not only to influence the government, but also to protect their own rights.

And yet, one more pole of public life deserves special mention, perhaps best in the words of the former Soviet dissident P. M. Litvinov. “I think that everywhere: in the party, in the army, even in the KGB, there were people who were aware of the situation, were ready to change and took steps towards it,” he recalls. - Dissidents did them faster, more decisively and set an example for someone at the expense of their own sacrifice. They were one of the factors."

In April 1968, a group began working that published the political bulletin “Chronicle of Current Events” (CTC). The first editor of the chronicle was Natalya Gorbanevskaya. After her arrest in December 1969 and until 1972 - Anatoly Yakobson. Subsequently, the editorial board changed every 2-3 years, mainly due to arrests. The change of editors remained virtually unnoticeable to readers due to the unchanged style of presentation and selection of materials.

The mechanism for receiving information to the editorial office and distributing the Chronicle was proposed in its 5th issue: “Everyone... can easily transfer the information known to him to the disposal of the Chronicle. Tell it to the person from whom you took the Chronicle, and he will tell it to the person from whom he took the Chronicle, etc. Just don’t try to go through the entire chain single-handedly, so that you won’t be mistaken for an informer.”

The editorial staff of the HTS collected information about human rights violations in the USSR, the situation of political prisoners, arrests of human rights activists, and acts of exercise of civil rights. Over the course of several years of work, HTS has established connections between disparate groups in the human rights movement. The chronicle was closely connected not only with human rights activists, but also with various dissidents. Thus, a significant amount of CTS materials is devoted to the problems of national minorities, national democratic movements in the Soviet republics, primarily in Ukraine and Lithuania, as well as religious problems. Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses and Baptists were frequent correspondents of the Chronicle. The breadth of the Chronicle's geographical connections was also significant. By 1972, the issues described the situation in 35 points of the country.

In 1968, the USSR tightened censorship in scientific publications, increased the threshold of secrecy for many types of published information, and began jamming Western radio stations.

The natural reaction to this was the significant growth of samizdat, and since there was not enough underground publishing capacity, it became the rule to send or try to send a copy of the manuscript to the West. At first, samizdat texts came “by gravity”, through familiar correspondents, scientists, and tourists who were not afraid to bring “forbidden books” across the border. In the West, some of the manuscripts were published and also smuggled back into the Union. This is how a phenomenon was formed, which at first received the name “tamizdat” among human rights activists, the role of which in saving the most interesting works of Russian literature and social thought remains to be understood.

Increased repression against human rights activists in 1968-69. brought to life a completely new phenomenon for Soviet political life - the creation of the first human rights association. It was created in 1969. It began traditionally, with a letter about violations of civil rights in the USSR, although sent to an unconventional addressee - the UN. The authors of the letter explained their appeal as follows: “We are appealing to the UN because we have not received any response to our protests and complaints, sent for a number of years to the highest government and judicial authorities in the USSR. The hope that our voice will be heard, that the authorities will stop the lawlessness that we constantly pointed out, this hope has been exhausted.” They asked the UN to “protect human rights violated in the Soviet Union.” The letter was signed by 15 people: participants in the signing campaigns of 1966-1968. Tatyana Velikanova, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Sergey Kovalev, Victor Krasin, Alexander Lavut, Anatoly Levitin-Krasnov, Yuri Maltsev, Grigory Podyapolsky, Tatyana Khodorovich, Pyotr Yakir, Anatoly Yakobson and Henrikh Altunyan (Kharkov), Leonid Plyushch (Kiev). The initiative group wrote that in the USSR “... one of the most basic human rights is being violated - the right to have independent beliefs and disseminate them by any legal means.” The signatories stated that they would form the “Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR” (IG). The activities of the IS were limited to investigating facts of human rights violations, demanding the release of prisoners of conscience and prisoners in special hospitals. Data on human rights violations and the number of prisoners was sent to the UN and international humanitarian congresses. International League of Human Rights. IS existed until 1972. By this time, 8 of its 15 members were arrested. The activities of the Islamic State were interrupted due to the arrest in the summer of 1972 of its leaders P. Yakir and V. Krasin.

The experience of the legal work of the Islamic State convinced others that it was possible to act openly. In November 1970, the Human Rights Committee in the USSR was created in Moscow. The initiators were Valery Chalidze, Andrei Tverdokhlebov and Academician Sakharov, all three were physicists. Later they were joined by Igor Shafarevich, mathematician, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The committee's experts were A. Yesenin-Volpin and B. Tsukerman, and the correspondents were A. Solzhenitsyn and A. Galich. The founding statement indicated the goals of the Committee: advisory assistance to public authorities in the creation and application of human rights guarantees; development of theoretical aspects of this problem and study of its specifics in a socialist society; legal education, promotion of international and Soviet documents on human rights. The Committee dealt with the following problems: a comparative analysis of the USSR's obligations under the international covenants on human rights and Soviet legislation; the rights of persons recognized as mentally ill; definition of the concepts “political prisoner” and “parasite”.

The dissidence that arose within the USSR could nevertheless count on international sympathy and support. In the West and especially in the USA they immediately realized what benefits could be derived from it. The strong ideological charge of the Cold War and public discussions on the topic of “détente” fueled the mutual attraction of East and West, despite the divide between them. The most active dissidents knew that they could find help and support abroad: the works they sent abroad were published and then secretly transported back to the USSR through couriers. To the already existing “samizdat”, which is not suspending its activities in any way, “tamizdat” was added, and with the advent of new technical capabilities, also “magnitizdat”, that is, prohibited songs and programs recorded on tape. Accordingly, the means of political struggle have become more diverse. On the other hand, in the West there was a growing understanding of the processes taking place in Soviet society. More and more foreigners lived in the USSR on official business or as a result of exchanges encouraged by the policy of détente. Western institutes and research centers dealing with the Soviet Union are becoming increasingly equipped and reputable, especially in the USA, Great Britain and Germany. There was still a lot of ballast in their work, a lot of unnecessary, approximate, a lot of bias. But in general, the progress in their research was undeniable and, accordingly, the means of influencing the political struggle in the USSR became more and more thoughtful.

In the early 70s, trends emerged in dissidence that were quite different in ideals and political orientation. An attempt at precise classification, as always in such cases, leads to simplification. With all this, it is possible to distinguish, at least in general terms, three main directions: Leninist-communist, liberal-democratic and religious-nationalist. All of them had activists, but, in the end, each of them found an exponent of their ideas in the person of one most prominent personality. In all three cases these were men of exceptional qualities and strong character. The three directions were represented, respectively, by Roy Medvedev, Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn - very dissimilar people, with fundamental differences in positions due to too serious differences in views. But all three found themselves forced to confront the power of the state. This was the only thing that united them. But this alone was enough to prevent the polemics between them from developing into open hostility and putting an end to cooperation in the opposition camp.

That is why, if not for any other, completely understandable political reasons, dissidence, especially abroad, was spoken of as a single and rather united phenomenon. But there was no unity. During the 1970s, the three main trends and their supporters often argued with each other, their beliefs being incompatible. Neither could agree with the other two without abandoning what was the very basis of each's political activity. But even this circumstance was not used by the Brezhnev government to initiate a dialogue with one or another of the three trends of dissidence. Only once was a weak attempt of this kind made by the head of the KGB, Andropov, who had some respect for Medvedev, the only one of the three who, despite being expelled from the party and removed from his job, nevertheless avoided arrest. However, in this case, it was not just about a political choice, but about the behavior of a smart policeman who created more problems for Medvedev than he could solve.

There were more similarities between the first two of the mentioned movements - communist and democratic. The names of Sakharov and Medvedev appeared side by side in petitions written at the turn of the 60s and 70s, including a joint political appeal to Brezhnev, Kosygin and Podgorny (the latter was formally the head of state), which constituted one of the first 13 political platforms of dissidence. The neo-communist movement flowed directly from the anti-Stalinist sentiments that periodically arose in Soviet history. His birth coincided with protests against the “rehabilitation” of Stalin. In this sense, it can be seen as a reflection of the views of some members of the CPSU itself and functionaries of the party-state apparatus, who still continued to harbor reformist hopes. It was aimed at a possible compromise with opposition groups, or, as they said then, at an alliance “between the best representatives of the intelligentsia [...] and the most progressive representatives of the apparatus.” The main aspiration of the neo-communists was the combination of political democracy with socialism, less statist in nature and closer to the original ideas of Marx and Lenin. It was the emphasis on democracy as a “core value” that brought this movement closer to both Sakharov and the “revisionist” trends of European communism in both the East and the West.

Socialist democracy became the headline of Roy Medvedev's major programmatic work, published in the West and disseminated in the USSR through “samizdat”. Calm but tenacious, Medvedev became widely known both at home and abroad by providing the first historical analysis of Stalinism, Soviet in form and Leninist in spirit. He presented his book to the responsible leaders of the state as a contribution to the anti-Stalinist policy of the CPSU of the Khrushchev period. The authorities did not accept the book and banned it, then it was published abroad and spread throughout the world. Medvedev himself was the son of an old Bolshevik who died during the Stalinist repressions of the 30s. Roy Medvedev joined the CPSU after the 20th Party Congress, in 1956, and was expelled from it in the late 60s. Thanks to his great hard work, he was able to give life to the “samizdat” edition of the “Political Diary”, a kind of underground magazine, among the readers of which were also people from the party and state apparatus (“a kind of “samizdat” for officials,” Sakharov later described it). It was precisely because of its balanced, non-extremist positions that the magazine enjoyed great popularity and influence.

It must be said that in this neo-communist movement there was also a more radical direction, more likely associated with the freedom-loving spirit of the Bolshevik revolution. This direction was primarily important because it gave dissidence, especially in the first years of its existence, the most active and irreconcilable activists. Their first underground organization was called the “Union of Struggle for the Revival of Leninism.” “To Leninism - yes, to Stalinism - no!” - this is the slogan of some of them. Since the 1930s, similar opposition groups of the Leninist persuasion often arose in the USSR, especially among young people. The most famous among them were Grigorenko, Kosterin, Pisarev, Yakir, Litvinov, Bogoraz, Gorbanevskaya, Krasin. Unfortunately, they also owe their fame to the fact that they were subjected to the most persistent persecution.

The appeal to the heads of state, compiled by Medvedev, Sakharov and another scientist, Turchin, said: “There can be no other way out of the difficulties except democratization carried out by the CPSU according to a carefully developed project.” The proposal was accompanied by a program of 15 steps to be implemented in stages. At this stage, the gradual, evolutionary nature of the proposals further connected the neo-communist dissidence movement with the democratic one, the most prominent representative of which was Academician Sakharov.

Andrei Sakharov came into politics in a typical way for the USSR in the 60s. His name was ensured fame even beyond his activities in the dissident movement. Coming from an intelligent family, a physicist of the highest class, at just over 30 years old he becomes the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences, having played a primary role in the development and creation of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. For him, as for some of his American colleagues, this was precisely the starting point of political activity: recognizing the threat posed by new weapons, Sakharov began to think about how to prevent the catastrophe looming over the world. By thinking and observing, he became more aware of his country's problems and became involved in political skirmishes both among scientists and in meetings with Moscow leaders. In connection with this, his famous brochure appeared in 1968, not published in the USSR, but nevertheless becoming famous and receiving wide resonance abroad.

Sakharov was a man of bright mind and gentle character. But few, least of all the Soviet leaders, understood from the very beginning what reserves of firmness such a combination could conceal.

In his 1968 work, which remains one of the highest achievements of his thought, Sakharov, based on the danger that arose in the atomic age of the destruction of all humanity as a result of its division, spoke of the “necessity of intellectual freedom” for the development of his country. The article became famous because it defended ideas that would later become widespread throughout the world, because what the physicist Sakharov proposed was important not only for the USSR, but for all other countries. Already in this work he pointed to environmental pollution as a global threat. He noted the danger of insoluble problems arising in connection with uncontrolled demographic growth of the population. But compared with all other problems, the problem of the nuclear threat was of paramount importance and danger. To prove this, Sakharov presented arguments that will be used by wide circles of world public opinion against the ongoing arms race, which has been increasing in pace in the coming years. The main argument spoke of the impossibility of achieving decisive superiority in this area for one of the competing parties and the fatal impossibility of creating effective protection against new types of weapons even “with the help of recklessly expensive anti-missile systems.”

However, the most famous is the thesis about the need for “convergence” between the two systems, socialist and capitalist. It is disastrous to consider ideologies incompatible in an era when it was necessary to use “all the positive experience accumulated by humanity” for the benefit, ensuring the conditions for “social justice and intellectual freedom.” We, Sakharov said, “demonstrated the vitality of the socialist orientation,” but capitalism also proved the ability to evolve and develop. Neither of the two societies should plot the destruction of the other, but should master everything that is positive in it. Thus, both societies must move closer together “in a democratic and socialist spirit.” The communist movement was called upon to put an end to its Stalinist degenerate vices. What is desirable in the West is the development of leftist forces capable of giving birth to intensive international cooperation, culminating in the creation of a “world government.” Thus, democracy in the USSR was seen as an integral part of a huge global project, a mandatory and indestructible part. In Sakharov’s work, this idea was the essence of the attack on “ideological censorship” and “police dictatorship,” which became even more destructive when they were covered with the false cover of progressive and socialist ideology.

Sakharov's democratic demands were formulated even more precisely in a memorandum sent to Brezhnev in March 1971. In enlightened inspiration, Sakharov put forward a proposal for the creation of an International Council of Experts on Problems of Peace, Disarmament, Economic Assistance to Countries in Need, Human Rights and Environmental Protection - an advisory body composed of people of impeccable reputation and authority, especially scientists. Governments of all countries should listen to the opinion of this advice. Thus, “convergence” remained the guiding idea of ​​the entire Sakharov concept.

The greatest contribution of the democratic movement to the political activities of dissidents was the human rights movement. The first committee for the protection of human rights was created in 1970 by Sakharov and his two comrades, Chalidze and Tverdokhlebov, despite the fact that it was Sakharov who remained in the eyes of people its true and highest representative. The birth of this organization was not accompanied by any anti-government statements. Moreover, its original concept included respect for Soviet laws, starting with the constitution, and for the rights that the latter recognized for citizens at least on paper. It was even proposed to cooperate with the government for these purposes. The organization was subsequently accused by the most extreme dissident groups of abandoning genuine political struggle. However, it was precisely this attitude towards compliance with the law that ensured the effectiveness of the organization. Gradually, during the 70s, the demand for “human rights” became, at least in tactical terms, the central slogan of the entire dissident movement.

More radical tendencies also appeared in the democratic movement; groups appeared that preferred revolution to evolution. Many of them looked to the West as a model, an example to follow, believing that what the USSR needed was not convergence, but a simple and direct return to capitalism. For them, democracy seemed possible only within this framework; they did not share Sakharov’s thoughts about the transition to democracy through reform and evolution of the existing society in the USSR. The refusal of the authorities in this case to conduct a dialogue with the reformists and the use of repression against them contributed to the development of the most extremist tendencies. In 1973, a frantic campaign was launched in the press specifically against Sakharov. Without putting forward more radical slogans and still remaining a reformist, Sakharov was also forced at this moment to ask the West for more energetic pressure on the Soviet leaders. He began not only to support, but to suggest actions to those American official representatives who, like Senator Jackson with his famous “amendment,” made any, especially economic, agreement with the USSR dependent on granting Jews the right to emigrate or on compliance with other political conditions.

It should be said that the importance of the ideas of the democratic movement was not met by their inadequate impact not only on society as a whole, but also on the dissident circles themselves. Of course, these ideas were in circulation among the intelligentsia. For example, another famous physicist, Kapitsa, offered to discuss Sakharov’s proposals. But things didn’t go further than that. Even without agreeing with the opinion that Sakharov’s ideas “left the masses indifferent,” one can nevertheless argue that the democratic movement as such, having managed to do more than attract individuals into its ranks and use their noble aspirations, nevertheless and in the most dissident part of Russia it never became dominant.

On October 9, 1975, Sakharov learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was not allowed to travel for the prize, as “a person with knowledge of state secrets.” Instead, on December 10, his wife Elena Bonner received the award.

The third, much more significant component of the dissident movement—the nationalist movement—deserves separate discussion. All dissident movements acquired political significance only because, without being isolated, as it might seem, they found their continuation in the hidden beliefs and in the state of mind of various groups of society and even the apparatus of power itself. But both movements mentioned above have always remained a reflection of the views of small groups. According to the already mentioned calculation, of the dissidents, who numbered approximately half a million people, almost all, with the exception of two or three tens of thousands, were one way or another part of this third current.

The nationalist dissident movement is important not so much for the spirit of opposition to the communist leadership that was present in it, but because, in line with this movement, nationalist problems were discussed openly, in the official environment. Previously, this did not happen at all or was observed to an insignificant extent, even where there was an increased sensitivity to the trumpet sounds of nationalism. In the third dissident movement, various streams of nationalistic tradition - religious, Slavophile, cultural - or simply anti-communist overtones merged together. But the most fertile ground for nationalism was created by the crisis of official ideology. In 1961, the Khrushchev party program contained a careless promise that in 20 years communism would come to the USSR, a society of prosperity and equality would be created, to which sooner or later the whole world would come. As a reaction to this promise in the 70s, the conviction emerged that communism would never come either in the USSR or in any other country. To an outside observer, such a declaration might seem naive and generally insignificant. But it felt completely different in a country where they worked, fought and suffered for decades in the name of this future. There was a need to replace the outdated ideology with a new, spare one in order to move forward.

Solzhenitsyn was the prophet of this movement. The writer did not immediately openly declare his beliefs. In his autobiographical notes, he noted that he kept these beliefs under wraps for a long time in order to better prepare for the “mission” that, in his opinion, was destined for him.

Undoubtedly, Solzhenitsyn's original concept differs from the later one. In the 60s, this gave grounds for a variety of people to believe that even Solzhenitsyn, despite his oppositional views, remains invariably in line with the socialist orientation, albeit only in its “ethical”, Tolstoyan or religious plane, but still within the framework of the Soviet culture in the broadest sense of the word. Only later, in the 70s, when the writer decided to make his political ideas public, it was discovered that Solzhenitsyn was an absolute and irreconcilable opponent of any socialist idea and the entire revolutionary and post-revolutionary experience of his country.

Solzhenitsyn gained fame not only for his political ideas and talent as a writer. His popularity was greatly facilitated by the extraordinary temperament of a fighter, absolutely convinced that he was right, even distinguished by a certain taste of intolerance and fanaticism, characteristic of people of his type. In this way he won the sympathy of those who did not at all share his way of thinking. More than anyone else, Solzhenitsyn gave dissidence the character of an uncompromising anti-communist struggle. In this way, he wanted to differ from other dissident movements, even those, as was the case with Sakharov and the Medvedev brothers, who helped him a lot in the fight against the authorities.

Solzhenitsyn acted not only as an enemy of Bolshevism in all its manifestations, from Lenin onwards, without making allowances even for Khrushchev, to whom he owed his release from the camp where he was thrown at the end of the war and the publication of his first book. In his opinion, Marxism and communism were “first of all, the result of a historical crisis, psychological and moral, a crisis of the entire culture and the entire system of thinking in the world, which began in the Renaissance and found its maximum expression in the enlighteners of the 18th century.” According to Solzhenitsyn, all of Russia’s troubles began with Peter’s “ruthless reforms” or even earlier, with attempts to modernize the Orthodox cult undertaken in the 17th century by Patriarch Nikon. The year 1917 with its revolution was only the last and fatal step into the abyss.

Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, who “were united by the fact that they were both victims of repression,” were complete antipodes in their political views. Solzhenitsyn did not want to hear about any “convergence,” because for him the West was not a model to follow, but an example that should be avoided. He believed that the powerless, selfish and corrupt Western world could not be promising. Even “intellectual freedom” was more a means than an end for the writer; it only made sense if it was used to achieve a “higher” goal. For Russia, he saw a solution not in parliamentary democracy and not in parties; for him, a system “outside parties” or simply “without parties” would be preferable. For many centuries, Russia lived under authoritarian rule, and everything was fine. Even autocrats of “religious centuries” were worthy of respect because they “felt responsible before God and before their conscience.” The highest principle should be a “nation” - an organism as living and complex as individual people, similar to each other in their “mystical nature,” innate, non-artificial. Solzhenitsyn declared himself an enemy of any internationalism or cosmopolitanism. It is not surprising that these positions were bitterly rejected by Sakharov.

In all dissident circles, including those that did not share his views in all or at all, Solzhenitsyn’s name was respected due to the intransigence of his positions and worldwide recognition after the publication of his works abroad (in 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in the field literature). There was a whole series of more or less underground groups that disseminated and defended views similar to those of Solzhenitsyn.

Neo-nationalist currents of all shades merged when faced with criticism from the outside. There was something that united them. First of all, the thesis that the Soviet system is not a product of Russian history, but the result of a violent imposition from the outside (or, as the same Solzhenitsyn says, “the muddy whirlpool of progressist ideology that swept over us from the West”). What all neonationalists had in common was a belief in the “potential superiority of the Russian nation,” in its “social, moral and religious revival,” in its “mission.” For all of them, there was only Russia, not the Soviet Union. Some of the neo-nationalists viewed the rest of the peoples of the USSR, especially the Slavic ones, as an appendage, as a kind of variety of the Russian people; others are like a burden from which it would be desirable to get rid of. The idea of ​​equal unification of the Russian nation with other peoples was alien to all of them.

The neonationalist press was not censored, leading many observers to speculate about official encouragement of the movement. This phenomenon was also discussed at the highest level. Brezhnev personally expressed his displeasure at the pressure from neo-nationalists. The open discussion that unfolded at that time was regarded as evidence of a “deep conflict” hidden behind the façade of official unity, which was destined to have a great impact on society and especially on young people. The verdict on neo-nationalist tendencies has been pronounced. But, unlike the past, in this case the practical consequences were insignificant: the most prominent of the neo-Slavophiles were removed from their positions, but continued their careers in other, often even more prestigious, positions. It is no coincidence that rumors appeared about influential patrons behind them: the name most often mentioned was Polyansky, the then head of the government of the RSFSR. (He, in turn, was removed from his post in 1973 and, accordingly, removed from the Politburo. However, the documentation now available does not confirm the fact that the reason for his fall was, as they said then, precisely Russophile sympathies.) In fact Much more important than the support of this or that leader was the sympathy that the nascent ideology found among civil servants, especially in the army and even in the party itself.

Indicative in this regard are the vicissitudes of fate of the deputy head of the propaganda department of the CPSU Central Committee, Alexander Yakovlev. It was he who carried out the most powerful attack on new nationalist, in particular Russian, tendencies. He did this very carefully, using labels characterizing these ideas as “anti-Marxist” and even “counter-revolutionary”, incompatible with the policy of détente and “dangerous due to a clear attempt to return to the past.” These uncontroversial, seemingly orthodox statements cost the author his place. The then Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee for Culture Demichev and Suslov criticized him for going too far, after which Yakovlev was sent to the distant Canadian embassy for almost ten years.

Since the beginning of the 70s. arrests of human rights defenders in the capital and major cities have increased significantly. Special “samizdat” processes began. Any text written on one’s own behalf was subject to Art. 190(1), or art. 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, which meant 3 or 7 years in camps, respectively. Repressions and trials by the early 70s. demonstrated the power of the totalitarian machine of state power. Psychiatric repression intensified. In August 1971, the Ministry of Health of the USSR agreed with the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the USSR a new instruction granting psychiatrists the right to forcibly hospitalize persons “posing a public danger” without the consent of the patient’s relatives or “other persons around him.” In psychiatric hospitals in the early 70s there were: V. Gershuni, P. Grigorenko, V. Fainberg, V. Borisov, M. Kukobaka and other human rights activists. Psychiatric repression was used especially strongly in the Russian hinterland and in the Union republics, primarily in Ukraine. Dissidents considered placement in special psychiatric hospitals (SPH) to be more difficult than imprisonment in prisons and camps. P. Grigorenko, who visited such special mental hospitals twice, noted: “A patient in St. Petersburg does not even have the meager rights that prisoners have. He has no rights at all. Doctors can do whatever they want with it.”

Hundreds, if not thousands of dissidents found themselves incarcerated in St. Petersburg and regular mental hospitals. In such cases, they were tried in absentia, and the trial was always closed. Imprisonment in St. Petersburg could last as long as desired, and the medical commission asked two usual questions from year to year. First: “Have your beliefs changed?” If the patient answered “yes,” he was asked: “Did this happen on its own or as a result of treatment?” If he confirmed that this was due to treatment, then he could hope for a quick release.

The authorities did not hide the fact that psychiatry was widely used against dissidents. In February 1976, for example, the Literaturnaya Gazeta talked about the “case of Leonid Plush.” Soviet doctors declared him insane, and Western doctors declared him mentally healthy. “Guided by purely humane considerations,” the newspaper noted on this occasion, “we want to believe that the course of treatment in a Soviet psychiatric hospital contributed to his recovery and there will be no relapse. It is known, however, that mental illness is insidious, and it is impossible to give one hundred percent guarantee that a person who once imagined himself as a prophet will not later declare himself Julius Caesar, pursued by Brutus in the uniform of a KGB captain.”

The arrested figures of the human rights movement numbered in the hundreds. Gradually, the main object of persecution became the activities of the HTS and samizdat activities in general. The apogee of repression was the so-called Case No. 24 - the investigation of the leading figures of the Moscow Initiative Group for the Protection of Human Rights in the USSR P. Yakir and V. Krasin, arrested in the summer of 1972. The case of Yakir and Krasin was conceived by the security authorities as a process against the HTS, since it did not constitute secret that Yakir’s apartment served as the main point of collecting information for the Chronicle. The KGB case was a success - Yakir and Krasin “repented” and gave evidence against more than 200 people who took part in the work of the HTS.

The publication of the Chronicle, suspended back in 1972, was discontinued the following year due to mass arrests. Since the summer of 1973, the nature of the repressions has changed. The practice of the authorities began to include expulsion from the country or deprivation of citizenship. Many human rights activists were even asked to choose between a new term and leaving the country. In July - October, Zhores Medvedev, the brother of Roy Medvedev, a fighter against psychiatric repression, who went to England on scientific affairs, was deprived of citizenship; V. Chalidze, one of the leaders of the democratic movement, who also traveled to the USA for scientific purposes. In August, Andrei Sinyavsky was allowed to travel to France, and in September, one of the leading members of the Islamic State and editor of the Chronicle, Anatoly Yakobson, was pushed to leave for Israel.

• On September 5, 1973, A. Solzhenitsyn sent a “Letter to the Leaders of the Soviet Union” to the Kremlin, which ultimately served as the impetus for the forced expulsion of the writer in February 1974.
• On August 27, the trial of Krasin and Yakir took place, and on September 5, their press conference took place, at which both publicly repented and condemned their activities and the human rights movement as a whole. Soon, depressed by what had happened, Yakir’s friend, the famous human rights activist, Ilya Gabai, committed suicide. In the same month, due to the arrests, the Human Rights Committee ceased its work.

The human rights movement virtually ceased to exist. The survivors went deep underground. The feeling that the game was lost and that the system that remained unshaken would exist almost forever became dominant both among those who escaped arrest and among prisoners of Brezhnev’s camps.

1972-1974 were, perhaps, the period of the most severe crisis of the human rights movement. The prospect of action was lost, almost all active human rights defenders ended up in prison, and the very ideological basis of the movement was called into question. The current situation required a radical revision of the opposition's policies. This revision was carried out in 1974.

By 1974, conditions had developed for the resumption of activities of human rights groups and associations. Now these efforts were concentrated around the newly created Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights, which was finally headed by A.D. Sakharov.

In February 1974, the Chronicle of Current Events resumed its publications, and the first (after three years of silence) statements by the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights appeared. By October 1974, the group had finally recovered. On October 30, members of the initiative group held a press conference chaired by Sakharov. At the press conference, foreign journalists were presented with appeals and open letters from political prisoners. Among them, a collective appeal to the International Democratic Federation of Women about the situation of women political prisoners, to the Universal Postal Union about systematic violations of its rules in places of detention, etc. In addition, at the press conference, recordings of interviews with eleven political prisoners of Perm camp No. 35 were played, concerning their legal status, camp regime, relations with the administration. IS issued a statement calling for October 30 to be considered the Day of Political Prisoners.

In the 70s dissidence became more radical. Its main representatives hardened their positions. Everyone, even those who later denied this, began their activities with the idea of ​​starting a dialogue with representatives of the authorities: the experience of the Khrushchev era gave reason for such hope. It was, however, destroyed by new repressions and the authorities’ refusal to engage in dialogue. What was at first simply political criticism turns into categorical accusations. At first, dissidents cherished the hope of correcting and improving the existing system, continuing to consider it socialist. But, ultimately, they began to see in this system only signs of dying and advocated for its complete abandonment. The government's policies were unable to cope with dissidence and only radicalized it in all its components.

After the USSR signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki in 1975, the situation with respect for human rights and political freedoms became international. After this, Soviet human rights organizations found themselves under the protection of international norms, which extremely irritated the Brezhnev leadership. In 1976, Yu. Orlov created a public group to promote the implementation of the Helsinki Agreements, which prepared reports on human rights violations in the USSR and sent them to the governments of the countries participating in the Conference and to Soviet government bodies. The consequence of this was the expansion of the practice of deprivation of citizenship and deportation abroad. In the second half of the 1970s, the Soviet Union was constantly accused at the official international level of non-compliance with human rights. The authorities' response was to intensify repression against Helsinki groups.

The human rights movement ceased to exist in the late 80s, when, due to a change in the government's course, the movement was no longer purely human rights in nature. It moved to a new level and took on other forms.

The dissident movement in the USSR occurred in the 60s - 80s of the twentieth century. A dissident is a dissenter, a dissident, a person who has a different worldview that differs from the accepted norms of the ideology dominant in the country. Today it has become very fashionable to attribute all the failures of foreign and domestic policy to the activities of dissidents, but this is not true, since most of these people sincerely wished well for their country. The essence of the dissident movement was the struggle for human rights. Their representatives never said that the USSR is a bad country or that a revolution needs to be carried out against the current government. The point was only that the current management system within the country interferes with effective development.

To understand the essence, it is enough to even take the example of Academician Sakharov’s 1970 letter to the country’s leadership. After all, it says nothing except that the current management system hinders the development of civilian science and technology. But even if you look at the military area, where the USSR actively participated in the arms race with the United States, then even there the current system of governing the country was failing. Much is said about the fact that the arms race was going on, and the results of its sides were approximately equal. But in principle there should be no arms race, since back in the 60s Chelomei developed several elements of strategic defense and offensive that made it possible to outpace Western countries in a military sense by 40 years. But it was precisely the management system of the times of Khrushchev and Brezhnev that blocked these ideas. I gave this example to demonstrate that the country’s governance system was indeed ineffective, and this sooner or later was bound to result in a response from the population. This happened in the form of dissidents, who were a small group of people in number (no more than 100 thousand people in the whole country), but who saw the shortcomings of their country, and proposed to solve these shortcomings so that people in the country would have real rights, and the country itself began to develop effectively in all directions.

Causes of origin

The USSR in the 60s - 80s remained a country where one ideology and one party continued to dominate. Any deviation from the norms accepted in Soviet society was condemned, therefore any attempts at democratic foundations, even the most minimal ones, were always suppressed. The dissident movement in the USSR was a response to the tightening of the state's positions. Every year, especially during the Brezhnev era, there were more and more problems in the USSR, but the state’s response was not to solve these problems, but to smooth them out, first of all, by tightening the situation within the country. This was expressed in the suppression of any dissent. Actually, this was the reason for the formation of dissidence, the main figures of which spoke about the need to solve the numerous problems that actually arise before the state.
The dissident movement was never political. It was moral. There is a lot of controversy around this movement today, but it is important to understand that it was not unambiguous and homogeneous. Among the dissenters there were traitors to the country, but there were also those who wanted the best for the country.

Stages of formation

The main stages in the development of dissidence and dissent in the USSR:

• 1964-1972 - Genesis.
• 1973-1974 - Direct birth. First crisis.
• 1974-1979 - Receiving international recognition, as well as money from abroad.
• 1980-1984 - Second crisis. The defeat of the movement.

The genesis is characterized by the emergence of the very idea that Soviet ideology is not ideal. This became possible largely due to the policies of the CPSU, which after Khrushchev actually pursued the interests of the ruling nomenklatura, and not the state as a whole. This ultimately led to stagnation, but not economic stagnation, but developmental stagnation.

Composition of the movement

The dissident movement in the USSR in the 60-80s of the last century can be divided into three large categories:

• Social Democrats. The most prominent representatives are Roy and Zhores Medvedev. This group was engaged in criticism of the current government from the point of view of Marxist ideology. That is, they said that what was happening in the USSR was not a socialist state, and in fact, Marx had something completely different in mind. They were partly right, but it should be understood that Marxist ideology was exclusively theoretical, and the USSR existed in practice.
• Liberals. The most prominent representative is Academician Sakharov. This group includes scientists who, from a scientific point of view, conveyed their vision of problems within the country. Their main complaint was that the current party system and the current government system do not allow the country to develop and do not allow science to develop, first of all. They were right about this. You just need to look at the number of Nobel laureates in technical fields for everything to fall into place. In the 50s, the USSR had 3 laureates in physics and 1 in chemistry. In the 60s, the USSR had 3 laureates in physics, but no one in chemistry. In the 70s, the USSR had 1 laureate in physics, but no one in chemistry. In the 80s, the USSR did not have a single laureate in physics and chemistry.
• “Soilmen”. A prominent representative is Solzhenitsyn. Disciples can be called people who spoke from the point of view of Christian ideology and the identity of Russia. It was from these two categories that they criticized the current system.

In some textbooks you can find a fourth category of dissidents - human rights activists. These are people who spoke out in defense of dissidents who suffered from the authorities, and also spoke out in defense of human rights in the USSR and demanding compliance with the current constitution, according to which the country had freedom of speech, press, rallies, and so on. Prominent representatives of human rights activists are Kovalev and Yakunin.

Human rights activists

The human rights direction of the dissident movement was born on December 5, 1965. On this day, a small demonstration took place on Pushkin Square in Moscow, the key slogans of which were the protection of the rights and interests of the population. This demonstration is rarely described; it was small in number and short-lived. In fact, a few minutes after it began, it was dispersed by the police.

Subsequently, human rights activists began to publish the newspaper “Chronicle of Current Events,” which described all cases of human rights violations in the USSR. Moreover, this group of dissidents worked not only in Moscow, but also in all major cities of the country. There was a fight against human rights defenders from the state, including through the 5th department of the KGB. Most human rights defenders who had an active position and actively participated in the life of dissidents ended up in camps, psychiatric hospitals or were expelled from the country.

Human rights organizations operated in the USSR for about 15 years, but did not achieve significant changes in terms of human rights. Any effective activity was accompanied by a response from the authorities. It was this group of people who actively tried to involve Western countries in their work, in particular they constantly appealed to Western newspapers and governments for help.

Start of movement

The dissident movement in the USSR began in 1965 with the trial against writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. These writers published in the West, under the pseudonyms Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak, a series of literary works that in one way or another criticized the Soviet regime. The trial against them dragged on, but in February 1966 they were sentenced to 7 years under Article 70 of the USSR Criminal Code. It was an article “On propaganda for the purpose of undermining Soviet power.” Letters began to arrive in defense of the writers to the central committee of the party and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, but the response was not to soften the measures, but to initiate new cases, but against the people who sent them. This is where it all started. It became clear that the state does not accept any criticism and does not allow any dissent to flourish in the country.

It was the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, as well as the events that followed, that determined the course of the dissident movement in the 60s - 80s - the struggle with the help of literature and open letters to the country's governing bodies. One of the forms of this confrontation was an open letter from Sakharov, Turchin and Medvedev to the Soviet leadership in 1970. This letter stated that the Soviet Union was significantly behind the United States in the development of civilian science and technology, and that the existing management system was inhibiting the overall development of science. This was actually true.

Jewish issues of dissidence

Many people have a common misconception that dissidence in the Soviet Union is an exclusively Jewish issue. Actually this is not true. Jewish issues were part of the dissident movement, but did not cover it completely. Please note that in the classification that we gave at the beginning of the article, there is no Jewish question at all. Because this was a local issue and a local problem, which in no case should be inflated to a global and national scale.

The Jewish problem was that the state in every possible way prevented Jews from moving to Israel. To achieve this, various measures were used. Suffice it to say that in the seventies a rule was established that if a person wants to leave the USSR and move to another country, then he must compensate the state for the costs of his own education. On the one hand, this is an absolutely logical and correct step, but on the other hand, the Soviet nomenklatura took this idea to the point of absurdity. With the average wage in the country being 120-130 rubles, upon relocation a person was obliged to pay the state 12,000 rubles. That is, this was the average worker’s salary for more than 8 years! Naturally, these amounts were not affordable for the population, and naturally the Jewish problem in the USSR began to worsen. Suffice it to recall the so-called “airplane trial” in Leningrad in 1970, when a group of Jewish dissidents tried to hijack a plane flying to Israel.

Nobel laureates

When talking about dissidents, great importance and attention is paid to Nobel laureates. In 1970, Alexander Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 1975, Academician Sakharov received the Nobel Peace Prize. Both are prominent dissident figures. If the name of Sakharov is not used so widely, then Solzhenitsyn and his Nobel Prize are promoted today as the epicenter of the development of the USSR, and the epicenter of its criticism with truthful presentation of information. Already a Nobel laureate, Solzhenitsyn in 1973 published his outright fake “The Gulag Archipelago”. Today this book is often presented as historically informed and truthful. This is not true, and therein lies a huge nuance that must be taken into account. Solzhenitsyn, in “The Gulag Archipelago,” says that he was not based on historical documents, and the work is exclusively impressionistic in nature. This is important to understand, since modern public figures who are trying to put forward some hypotheses and theories based on the 60 million victims identified in the “Gulag Archipelago” are absolute ignoramuses and cannot realistically assess the events. After all, Solzhenitsyn, I emphasize once again, himself said that his book does not contain any historical facts or documents.

Sweeps

The end of the dissident movement in the USSR can be attributed to the end of 1979, when troops were sent into Afghanistan. Almost simultaneously with this event, Academician Sakharov was arrested and sent into exile. After this, arrests of prominent figures of the dissident movement began in Moscow and other large cities of the USSR, most of whom were later convicted. Around the end of 1983, the purges were completely suppressed.

It is noteworthy that the second stage of the purge of the dissident movement in the eighties came down to either the arrest of people or exile. The favorite tactic of placing people in psychiatric hospitals, which was actively used in the 60s and 70s, was not used this time.

Thanks to the arrest of prominent figures, the dissident movement in the USSR was completely suppressed.

Lighting in the West

The way the dissident movement was presented in the West is very important. Today it is common to say that the West has always supported dissident movements and also protected people who suffered from the Soviet regime. In fact, this was not the case, since the dissident movement was heterogeneous. The West undeniably supported those people who occupied pro-Western positions, but the same West did not react in any way, for example, but the persecution of Russian patriots, towards whom the Soviet government more often used cruel measures than against pro-Western agents. Western countries supported only those movements within the USSR that suited their interests and which, in the eyes of public opinion, extolled the role of the United States and other Western countries.

KGB and its role

To combat dissidents, the 5th department was created in the KGB. This is important to note, because it once again emphasizes that the problem of dissidence in the USSR was serious, since it was necessary to create an entire department based on the KGB. On the other hand, at a certain stage in the development of statehood, the KGB had a real need to develop the dissident movement. After all, this Fifth Department could actually exist only if there were dissidents, and victory over them meant the automatic end of the work of this department. This is important to understand because it is a characteristic feature of Soviet reality and the Soviet administrative apparatus. People are assigned to the fifth department, they are assigned to work in a whole area within the country. That is, people have real power. As soon as they defeat the dissidents, that is, they complete the task for which the department was created, they will be disbanded, and people will be returned to other positions in other departments that work according to their own norms and rules, and where these people will no longer have the power which they have here and now. That is why in the seventies the interests of the KGB and the United States actually coincided - they supported liberal dissidents. Why them? Each had their own reasons:

• USA. This country always supports only those who bow to its system.
• KGB. The dissident movement had 3 directions in the USSR: liberals, Marxists and scientists. The least dangerous of them were liberals, since Marxists criticized the state from an ideological point of view, which was unacceptable, and scientists represented the country's elite, receiving criticism from which was also undesirable. Therefore, the development of any direction of dissidence, except liberal, would cause a negative assessment of the work of the KGB from the party. Therefore, the course was taken approximately as follows - we will rein in the Marxists and scientists, and leave the liberals alone for a while

Professor Fursov, for example, says that approximately half of all dissidents in the USSR reported on each other to the KGB. Therefore, if there was an urgent need and desire to work, the State Security Committee of the Soviet Union could destroy the dissident movement quite quickly and painlessly. But this was the Soviet reality and the Soviet management system, when undesirable elements were harmful to the state, but the fight against them was contrary to the interests of the ruling circles. This was the main result of Brezhnev’s rule, when the ruling nomenklatura pursued its own interests, not the state ones.

Encyclopedic YouTube

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  As part of a research program launched at the end of 1990 by NIPC Memorial to study the history of dissident activity and the human rights movement in the USSR, the following definition of dissidence (dissent) was proposed:

  Since then, dissidents have often been used to refer mainly to people who oppose authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, although the word is also used in broader contexts, for example to refer to people who oppose the prevailing mentality of their group. According to Lyudmila Alekseeva, dissidents are a historical category, like the Decembrists, Narodniks and even informals:58.

  The terms “dissident” and “dissident” have caused and continue to cause terminological disputes and criticism. For example, Leonid Borodin, who actively opposed the Soviet system and was persecuted, refuses to consider himself a dissident, since by dissident he understands only the liberal and liberal-democratic opposition to the regime of the 1960s - early 1970s, which took shape in the mid-1970s in human rights movement. According to L. Ternovsky, a dissident is a person who is guided by the laws written in the country where he lives, and not by spontaneously established customs and concepts.

  The dissidents dissociated themselves from any involvement in terrorism and, in connection with the explosions in Moscow in January 1977, stated:

  …Dissidents view terror with indignation and disgust. … We urge media professionals around the world to use the term “dissidents” only in this sense and not to expand it to include violent individuals. ...

  We ask you to remember that every journalist or commentator who does not distinguish between dissidents and terrorists is helping those who are trying to revive Stalinist methods of dealing with dissidents.

  In official Soviet documents and propaganda, the term “dissident” was usually used in quotation marks: “the so-called ‘dissidents’.” Much more often they were called “anti-Soviet elements”, “anti-Soviet”, “renegades”.

  Ideology

  Among the dissidents there were people of very different views, but they were united mainly by the inability to openly express their beliefs. There has never been a single "dissident organization" or "dissident ideology" uniting the majority of dissidents.

  If what happened can be called movement - as opposed to “stagnation” - then this movement is Brownian, that is, a phenomenon that is more psychological than social. But in this Brownian movement, here and there, turbulences and currents constantly appeared, moving somewhere - national, religious “movements,” including human rights ones.

  Dissidence as a phenomenon originated among the Moscow intelligentsia, largely in that part of it that experienced the tragedy of its fathers and grandfathers in the late thirties, experienced a just feeling of revenge in the wake of the famous “thaw” and the subsequent disappointment. At the first stage, Moscow dissidence was neither anti-communist nor anti-socialist, but precisely liberal, if by liberalism we mean a certain set of good wishes, not certified by political experience, political knowledge, or, especially, a political worldview.

  • “true communists” - were guided by Marxist-Leninist teaching, but believed that it was distorted in the USSR (for example, Roy Medvedev, NCPSU, “Young Socialists”);
  • “Western liberals” considered capitalism of the Western European or American type to be the “correct” system; some of them were supporters of the “theory of convergence” - the doctrine of the inevitability of rapprochement and subsequent merging of capitalism and socialism, but most of the “Westerners” considered socialism a “bad” (or short-lived) system;
  • “eclectics” - combined different views that contradicted the official ideology of the USSR;
  • Russian nationalists - supporters of Russia's “special path”; many of them attached great importance to the revival of Orthodoxy; some were supporters of the monarchy; see also soil scientists (in particular, Igor Shafarevich, Leonid Borodin, Vladimir Osipov);
  • other nationalists (in the Baltic states, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) - their demands ranged from the development of national culture to complete separation from the USSR. They often proclaimed themselves liberals, but having achieved political power during the collapse of the USSR, some of them (for example, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Abulfaz Elchibey) became ideologists of ethnocratic regimes. As Leonid Borodin wrote, “quantitatively, the nationalists of Ukraine, the Baltic states and the Caucasus have always prevailed in the camps. There were, of course, connections between the nationalist opposition and Moscow dissidence, but according to the principle: “a lousy Muscovite gets a tuft of wool.” Limply welcoming the anti-Russian sentiments of the Moscow oppositionists, the nationalists did not connect their successes with the prospects of Moscow dissidence, pinning their hopes on the collapse of the Union in economic competition with the West, or even on the Third World War.”

  Dissidents also included activists of the Zionist movement (“refuseniks”), activists of the Crimean Tatar movement for the return to Crimea (leader - M. A. Dzhemilev), nonconformist religious figures: Orthodox - D. S. Dudko, S. A. Zheludkov, A. . E Krasnov-Levitin, A.I. Ogorodnikov, B.V. Talantov, G.P. Yakunin, “true Orthodox Christians”, Baptist - Council of Evangelical Christian Baptist Churches, Catholic in Lithuania, Adventist Reformists led by V. A. Shelkov, Pentecostals (in particular, the Siberian Seven), Hare Krishnas (see International Society for Krishna Consciousness in Russia).

  Since the late 1960s, the meaning of the activity or tactics of many dissidents who adhered to different ideologies was the struggle for human rights in the USSR - first of all, for the right to freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of emigration, for the release of political prisoners (“prisoners of conscience”) - see Human rights movement in the USSR.

  Social composition

  The institutionalization of science inevitably led to the emergence of a layer of people who critically comprehend the surrounding reality. According to some estimates, the majority of dissidents belonged to the intelligentsia. At the end of the 1960s, 45% of all dissidents were scientists, 13% were engineers and technicians:55,65-66.

  For a thousand academicians and corresponding members,
  For the entire educated cultural legion
  There were only this handful of sick intellectuals,
  Say out loud what a healthy million thinks!
  

  In fact, two main directions of dissident opposition to the totalitarian regime have emerged.

  The first of them was focused on support from outside the USSR, the second - on the use of protest sentiments of the population within the country.

  The activities, as a rule, are open; some of the dissidents, mainly Moscow human rights activists, were based on appeals to foreign public opinion, the use of the Western press, non-governmental organizations, foundations, and connections with Western political and government figures.

  At the same time, the actions of a significant part of the dissidents were either simply a form of spontaneous self-expression and protest, or a form of individual or group resistance to totalitarianism - Group of Revolutionary Communism, Valentin Sokolov, Andrei Derevyankin, Yuri Petrovsky and others. In particular, this second direction was expressed in the creation of various kinds of underground organizations, focused not on connections with the West, but exclusively on organizing resistance within the USSR.

  Dissidents sent open letters to central newspapers and the Central Committee of the CPSU, produced and distributed samizdat, organized demonstrations (for example, “Glasnost Rally”, Demonstration on August 25, 1968), trying to bring to the public information about the real state of affairs in the country.

  Dissidents paid much attention to “samizdat” - the publication of homemade brochures, magazines, books, collections, etc. The name “Samizdat” appeared as a joke - by analogy with the names of Moscow publishing houses - “Detizdat” (publishing house of children’s literature), “Politizdat” ( publishing house of political literature), etc. People themselves printed unauthorized literature on typewriters and thus distributed it throughout Moscow, and then throughout other cities. "Erica takes four copies,- Alexander Galich sang in his song. - That's all. And that's enough! (See the lyrics of the song) - this is said about “samizdat”: “Erika”, a typewriter, became the main instrument when there were no copiers or computers with printers (copiers began to appear in the 1970s, but only for institutions , and everyone working for them was required to keep track of the number of pages printed). Some of those who received the first copies reprinted and replicated them. This is how dissident magazines spread. In addition to “samizdat,” “tamizdat” was widespread - the publication of prohibited materials abroad and their subsequent distribution throughout the USSR.

  In February 1979, the “Elections-79” group arose, whose members intended to exercise in person the right granted by the Constitution of the USSR to nominate independent candidates for elections to the Supreme Council of the USSR. Roy Medvedev and Lyudmila Agapova, the wife of the defector Agapov, who sought to go to her husband, were nominated. The group submitted documents to register these candidates, but did not receive a response by the due date; as a result, the relevant election commissions refused to register the candidates.

  Position of the authorities

  The Soviet leadership fundamentally rejected the idea of ​​the existence of any opposition in the USSR, much less the possibility of dialogue with dissidents. On the contrary, in the USSR the “ideological unity of society” was proclaimed; dissidents were called nothing more than “renegades.”

  Official propaganda sought to present dissidents as agents of Western intelligence services, and dissidence as a kind of professional activity that was generously paid from abroad.

  Some dissidents actually received royalties for works published in the West (see Tamizdat); the Soviet authorities invariably tried to portray this in a negative light as “bribery” or “venality,” although many officially recognized Soviet writers also published in the West and received fees for this in the same way.

  Persecution of dissidents

  The persecution to which Soviet dissidents were subjected included dismissal from work, expulsion from educational institutions, arrests, placement in psychiatric hospitals, exile, deprivation of Soviet citizenship and deportation from the country.

  Before the year, criminal prosecution of dissidents was carried out on the basis of clause 10 and similar articles of the criminal codes of other union republics (“counter-revolutionary agitation”), which provided for imprisonment for up to 10 years, and since 1960 - on the basis of art. 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1960 (“anti-Soviet agitation”) and similar articles of the criminal codes of other union republics, which provided for imprisonment for up to 7 years and 5 years of exile (up to 10 years of imprisonment and 5 years of exile for those previously convicted of a similar crime) . Since then, Art. 190-1 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR “Dissemination of knowingly false fabrications discrediting the Soviet state and social system,” which provided for imprisonment for up to 3 years (and similar articles of the criminal codes of other union republics). For all these articles from 1956 to 1987. 8,145 people were convicted in the USSR.

  In addition, for the criminal prosecution of dissidents, Articles 147 (“Violation of the laws on the separation of church from the state and school from the church”) and 227 (“Creation of a group causing harm to the health of citizens”) of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1960, articles on parasitism and violation of the regime were used registration, there are also known cases (in the 1980s) of planting weapons, ammunition or drugs with their subsequent discovery during searches and initiation of cases under the relevant articles (for example, the case of K. Azadovsky).

  Some dissidents were declared socially dangerous and mentally ill, and forced treatment was applied to them under this pretext. During the years of stagnation, punitive psychiatry attracted the authorities due to the lack of need to create the appearance of legality required in judicial proceedings.

  In the West, Soviet dissidents who were subjected to criminal prosecution or psychiatric treatment were treated as political prisoners, “prisoners of conscience.”

  State security agencies were involved in the fight against dissidents, in particular, the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR (for the fight against “ideological sabotage”)

  Until the mid-1960s, virtually any open display of political dissent resulted in arrest. But starting from the mid-1960s, the KGB began to widely use so-called “preventive measures” - warnings and threats, and arrested mainly only those dissidents who continued their activities despite intimidation. KGB officers often offered dissidents a choice between emigration and arrest.

  The activities of the KGB in the 1970-80s were significantly influenced by the socio-economic processes occurring in the country during the period of “developed socialism” and changes in the foreign policy of the USSR. During this period, the KGB focused its efforts on combating nationalism and anti-Soviet manifestations within the country and abroad. Domestically, state security agencies have stepped up the fight against dissent and the dissident movement; however, the actions of physical violence, deportations and imprisonments became more subtle and disguised. The use of psychological pressure on dissidents has increased, including surveillance, pressure through public opinion, undermining professional careers, preventive conversations, deportation from the USSR, forced imprisonment in psychiatric clinics, political trials, slander, lies and compromising material, various provocations and intimidation. There was a ban on the residence of politically unreliable citizens in the capital cities of the country - the so-called “exile for the 101st kilometer”. Under the close attention of the KGB were, first of all, representatives of the creative intelligentsia - figures of literature, art and science - who, due to their social status and international authority, could harm the reputation of the Soviet state in the understanding of the Communist Party.

  The activities of the KGB in the persecution of the Soviet writer, Nobel Prize laureate in literature A. I. Solzhenitsyn are indicative. In the late 1960s - early 1970s, a special unit was created in the KGB - the 9th department of the Fifth Directorate of the KGB - exclusively engaged in the operational development of a dissident writer. In August 1971, the KGB attempted to physically eliminate Solzhenitsyn - during a trip to Novocherkassk, he was secretly injected with an unknown poisonous substance; the writer survived, but after that he was seriously ill for a long time. In the summer of 1973, KGB officers detained one of the writer’s assistants, E. Voronyanskaya, and during interrogation forced her to reveal the location of one copy of the manuscript of Solzhenitsyn’s work “The Gulag Archipelago.” Returning home, the woman hanged herself. Having learned about what had happened, Solzhenitsyn ordered the publication of “Archipelago” to begin in the West. A powerful propaganda campaign was launched in the Soviet press, accusing the writer of slandering the Soviet state and social system. Attempts by the KGB, through Solzhenitsyn’s ex-wife, to persuade the writer to refuse to publish “Archipelago” abroad in exchange for a promise of assistance in the official publication of his story “Cancer Ward” in the USSR were unsuccessful and the first volume of the work was published in Paris in December 1973. In January 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, accused of treason, deprived of Soviet citizenship and expelled from the USSR. The initiator of the deportation of the writer was Andropov, whose opinion became decisive in choosing the measure to “suppress anti-Soviet activities” of Solzhenitsyn at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU. After the writer was expelled from the country, the KGB and Andropov personally continued the campaign to discredit Solzhenitsyn and, as Andropov put it, “exposing the active use by reactionary circles of the West of such renegades in ideological sabotage against the countries of the socialist commonwealth.”

  Prominent scientists were the target of many years of persecution by the KGB. For example, the Soviet physicist, three times Hero of Socialist Labor, dissident and human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate A.D. Sakharov was under KGB surveillance since the 1960s, subjected to searches and numerous insults in the press. In 1980, on charges of anti-Soviet activities, Sakharov was arrested and sent into exile without trial in the city of Gorky, where he spent 7 years under house arrest under the control of KGB officers. In 1978, the KGB attempted, on charges of anti-Soviet activities, to initiate a criminal case against the Soviet philosopher, sociologist and writer A. A. Zinoviev with the aim of sending him for compulsory treatment to a psychiatric hospital, however, “taking into account the campaign launched in the West around psychiatry in USSR" this preventive measure was considered inappropriate. Alternatively, in a memorandum to the CPSU Central Committee, the KGB leadership recommended allowing Zinoviev and his family to travel abroad and blocking his entry into the USSR.

  To monitor the USSR's implementation of the Helsinki Agreements on the observance of human rights, in 1976 a group of Soviet dissidents formed the Moscow Helsinki Group (MHG), the first leader of which was the Soviet physicist, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Armenian SSR Yu. F. Orlov. Since its formation, the MHG was subjected to constant persecution and pressure from the KGB and other security agencies of the Soviet state. Members of the group were threatened, forced to emigrate, and forced to stop their human rights activities. Since February 1977, activists Yu. F. Orlov, A. Ginzburg, A. Sharansky and M. Landa began to be arrested. In the Sharansky case, the KGB received the sanction of the CPSU Central Committee to prepare and publish a number of propaganda articles, as well as to write and transmit to US President John Carter a personal letter from the defendant’s father-in-law denying the fact of Sharansky’s marriage and “exposing” his immoral character. Under pressure from the KGB in 1976-1977, members of the MHG L. Alekseeva, P. Grigorenko and V. Rubin were forced to emigrate. In the period from 1976 to 1982, eight members of the group were arrested and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment or exile (a total of 60 years in camps and 40 years in exile), six more were forced to emigrate from the USSR and were deprived of citizenship. In the fall of 1982, under conditions of increasing repression, the three remaining members of the group were forced to announce the cessation of the activities of the MHG. The Moscow Helsinki Group was able to resume its activities only in 1989, at the height of Gorbachev's perestroika.

  The KGB sought to get arrested dissidents to make public statements condemning the dissident movement. Thus, the “Counterintelligence Dictionary” (published by the Higher School of the KGB in 1972) states: “The KGB bodies, carrying out measures for the ideological disarmament of the enemy together with party bodies and under their direct leadership, inform the governing bodies about all ideologically harmful manifestations, prepare materials to publicly expose the criminal activities of bearers of anti-Soviet ideas and views, organize open speeches by prominent enemy ideologists who have broken with their previous views, carry out political and educational work with persons convicted of anti-Soviet activities, organize disintegration work among members of ideologically harmful groups, and carry out preventive measures in that environment , in which these groups recruit their members." In exchange for mitigation of punishment, they managed to obtain “repentant” speeches from Pyotr Yakir, Viktor Krasin, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Dmitry Dudko.

  Letters from Western figures in support of dissidents were deliberately left unanswered. For example, in 1983, the then General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU Yu. V. Andropov gave special instructions not to respond to a letter from Federal Chancellor of Austria Bruno Kreisky in support of Yuri Orlov.

  Lawyers who insisted on the innocence of dissidents were removed from political cases; This is how Sofya Kallistratova was removed, insisting on the absence of a crime in the actions of Vadim Delaunay and Natalya Gorbanevskaya.

  Exchange of political prisoners

  Impact and results

  Most residents of the USSR had no information about the activities of dissidents. Dissident publications were largely inaccessible to most citizens of the USSR, and Western radio broadcasting in the languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR was jammed until 1988.

  The activities of dissidents attracted the attention of the foreign public to human rights violations in the USSR. Demands for the release of Soviet political prisoners were put forward by many foreign politicians, including even some members of foreign communist parties, which caused concern among the Soviet leadership.

  There is a known case when Viktor Orekhov, an employee of the 5th Directorate of the KGB of the USSR, under the influence of the ideas of dissidents, began to inform his “supervisors” of information about upcoming searches and arrests.

  Be that as it may, by the beginning of the 1980s, according to the testimony of the former participants in the dissident movement themselves, dissidence as a more or less organized opposition was over.

  The collapse of the totalitarian regime in the USSR, the acquisition of certain political rights and freedoms by the population - such as, for example, freedom of speech and creativity - led to the fact that a significant part of the dissidents, recognizing their task as completed, integrated into the post-Soviet political system.

  However, the former dissidents did not become a significant political force. Alexander Daniel answered the question about the reasons for this:

  A little about one unfounded complaint against dissidents and the reason for disappointment in them. The basis for misconceptions about their role in the political process in the territory of the former Soviet Union is a false analogy with contemporary oppositions in Eastern and Central Europe - primarily in Poland and Czechoslovakia. But “Solidarity” or “Charter 77” were real mass movements, with their own political platforms, their own leaders, their own social ideals, etc. These movements - persecuted, semi-underground - were, nevertheless, prototypes of future political parties capable of fighting for power, winning and maintaining it. In Russia, there was no political movement called “dissidence”; there was no common political platform - from monarchists to communists. And the fact that dissidence was not a political movement meant, in particular, that dissidence did not predispose to political thinking. Dissident thinking is “I am here and now doing this. Why am I doing this? Forgive me, according to Tolstoy, according to Sartre and according to all the existentialists, I cannot do otherwise.” This is a purely existential act, emanating from a moral impulse, although framed as an act of defense of rights. Of course, most dissidents did not like Soviet power, but even then, why should they love it? But they didn’t fight against her. All their words about this at that time were by no means to divert the eyes of the KGB officers; they really did not set such a task for themselves. Why? Because there was no political perspective in sight. Acting on the basis of how your word will respond in three hundred years or never will respond at all, on a philosophy of hopelessness, is impossible in combination with political thinking. I know one very serious, strong exception - Sakharov. Sakharov, as a man of a very strong and generalizing mind, suspected that something could happen in his lifetime, and tried to rise a little higher than both existential and political thinking, to be a conductor of moral politics. But for this it was necessary to have very extraordinary intellectual fearlessness, especially given the aversion to politics that infected the entire intelligentsia. Sakharov in this sense is perhaps the only political thinker. And it’s not for nothing that he was the first to fit into political life. And dissidents as such are not politicians. They can say: “This will be good.” But no one ever taught them how to move from what is to what should be. What are the algorithms for this transition, what are the stages of this transition? How to walk along this path without slipping, without crossing the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable compromise?

  A number of Soviet dissidents are active in legal political activity in modern Russia - Lyudmila Alekseeva, Valeria Novodvorskaya, Alexander Podrabinek and others.

  At the same time, some of the Soviet dissidents either categorically did not accept the post-Soviet political regime - Adel Naidenovich, Alexander Tarasov, or were not rehabilitated - Igor Ogurtsov, or were even again subjected to repression for their opposition activities - Sergei Grigoryants

  Dissidence caused enormous harm to the USSR. The vast majority of dissidents are traitors working for Western intelligence services, members of the so-called “fifth column”. Under the guise of protecting human rights, they tirelessly and inevitably led the country to collapse. Those positive phenomena that existed in the USSR were hushed up or deliberately distorted, changing the meaning to the opposite, and the communist system, with which most of the people living in the Union were happy, was presented in every possible way as slavish, inhuman, etc. In the end, they celebrated victory when, together with traitors in the highest echelons of power, they managed to destroy a great power - the USSR. Quite a few dissidents now live in the United States and NATO countries. There, many of them were awarded various highest awards for “human rights” activities, and some - openly, for their work to destroy the USSR...

  Dissident organizations

  • All-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of the People
  • Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR
  • Free interprofessional association of workers
  • International Union of Evangelical Christian Baptist Churches
  • Group for establishing trust between the USSR and USA
  • Russian public Fund assist the persecuted and their families
  • Working Commission to Inquire into the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes

  see also

  Notes

  1. History of Soviet dissidents
  2. History of Soviet dissidents. Memorial
  3. “Dissident” (from the manuscript of the book by S. A. Kovalev)
  4. Where did dissidence come from? : The history of Soviet dissent in the memoirs of one of the heroines of the dissident movement Lyudmila Alekseeva (undefined) . [Recording of an interview with Yu. Ryzhenko]. Colta.ru (February 27, 2014). Retrieved January 19, 2015.
  5. Bezborodov A. B. Academic dissidence in the USSR // Russian Historical Journal, 1999, volume II, No. 1. ISBN 5-7281-0092-9
  6. Vladimir Kozlov. Sedition: Dissent in the USSR under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. 1953-1982 years. According to declassified documents of the Supreme Court and the Prosecutor's Office of the USSR
  7. Dissidents about dissidence. // "Banner". - 1997. No. 9
  8. L. Ternovsky. Law and concepts (Russian version).

  The human rights movement is part of the dissident movement in the USSR, focused primarily on defending the civil rights and freedoms of citizens guaranteed by the Constitution of the USSR (freedom of speech, press, demonstrations, associations, etc.), regardless of their affiliation with any social groups. , national or ideological groups (in contrast to other factions of the dissident movement, which defended certain socio-political projects - monarchical or left-socialist, demanding self-determination and separation of individual territories, etc.). Human rights activities were mainly understood as activities aimed at protecting the rights of other people to express their own opinions and live as they wish, even if this opinion and this way of life do not coincide with the opinions and lifestyle of the human rights defenders themselves.

  The emergence of dissidence

  dissident government opposition

  At the end of the 50s. In the Soviet Union, the beginnings of a phenomenon emerged that would turn into dissidence a few years later. Dissidents were those representatives of society who openly expressed disagreement with generally accepted standards of life in the country and took specific actions to confirm their position. Dissidence as a socio-political phenomenon was a product of the very system of organization of Soviet society. And it was one of the brightest areas of moral resistance to totalitarianism. There were several areas of dissident movements, the largest being the human rights movement, as well as religious movements and national movements. Young people were especially active in the 60s; they wanted to know the truth about the history of terror in Soviet Russia and demanded open discussions on political topics. At some universities in the country, meetings were held with survivors of the years of repression; the new generation sought to understand the mistakes of their predecessors. The dissidents of the 1960s, in terms of their generational composition, are quite clearly divided into two streams. The first stream is the marginal youth of the early 1960s, whose formation occurred in the first years after the 20th Congress, and the first public social manifestations - Mayakovka, SMOG - in the early 1960s. The second stream is the middle and upper layer of the “military” intelligentsia and older generations who have already fit into the system. The passive but categorical rejection of ideological officialdom by the “senior dissidents” was formed long before the speeches of the “young marginals”, back in the 1940s, but most of them became involved in active opposition to the regime a little later - only from the mid-1960s. The second half of the 1960s was the time of merging of both generational streams into a single dissident environment based on the experience of confrontation between the “marginal” and the value systems of the “elders.” The next dissident generation, also the last, are “dissidents by inheritance,” young people of the second half of the 1970s who no longer participated in the development of the dissident value system, but received it in ready-made form and began to create a kind of hermetic subculture on its basis (“boiler room culture”). According to famous researchers in 1967. on the territory of the USSR, there were more than 400 unofficial student groups of various directions (from liberals and populists to neo-fascists), which were actually in opposition to the regime. By the second half of the 60s. This also includes the formation of such forms of protest as the creation of funds for material assistance to political prisoners and their families. 1968 was the year of formation of the human rights movement. Since 1969, the dissident movement has acquired clearer organizational forms. In May of the same year, the first open public association in the USSR, uncontrolled by the authorities, was created - the Initiative Group (IG) for the Defense of Human Rights (lasted until 1972) in the USSR. The activities of the IS were limited to investigating facts and compiling reviews of human rights violations, demanding the release of prisoners of conscience and prisoners of special hospitals. A major practical result of the activities of the Islamic State was the publicization of data on political persecution in the USSR. The emergence of IS stimulated the emergence and activities of similar associations and circles in other cities and republics.

  In 1970, the Human Rights Committee in the USSR was created in Moscow. The initiators were physicists V. Chalidze, A. Tverdokhlebov and academician A.D. Sakharov. The Committee became the first independent public human rights organization to receive official recognition: in July 1971, it became a branch of the International League of Human Rights, a non-governmental association with the status of an advisory body to the UN, UNESCO and the ILO. By the second half of the 60s. This also includes the formation of such forms of protest as the creation of funds for material assistance to political prisoners and their families.

  A special phenomenon of the 60-70s. there were national movements. Their characteristic features are: mass participation, the presence of recognized leaders, specific programs for achieving the main goal - national liberation, connections with foreign centers, a fairly broad social composition and real results of activity.

  In the mid-60s. In Leningrad, the All-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of Peoples (VSKHSON) was founded, headed by N. Ogurtsov, whose members argued that the existing system was a type of state monopoly capitalism and totalitarianism, degenerating into an extreme form of despotism. VSKHSON saw the only way to liberate the people from communism - armed, therefore in 1967 - 1968. Mass trials of underground Social Christians took place.

  Rise of the dissident movement (1976–1979)

  In 1976, the Helsinki stage in the development of the dissident movement began. In connection with the signing of the 1975 Helsinki Agreement by European countries, the USA and Canada, which provided for the observance of human rights, dissidents created Helsinki groups that monitored its compliance by the USSR authorities. This created problems for Soviet diplomacy. Thus, the movement finally reoriented itself to the West. The first “Group for Assistance in the Implementation of the Helsinki Agreements in the USSR” was created in Moscow on May 12, 1976, and then in Ukraine and Georgia.

  The group sent more than 80 materials about human rights violations in the USSR to the governments of the states that signed the Final Act. At an international meeting in Belgrade in October 1977, where respect for human rights was discussed, materials from Helsinki groups from the USSR were officially featured.

  The KGB decided to launch a new counterattack, since the leaders of the Helsinki groups “are becoming more and more impudent, presenting an extremely negative and dangerous example for others.

  At the same time, the proposed measures should show the ruling circles of Western countries the futility of pursuing a policy of blackmail and pressure towards the Soviet Union, and once again emphasize that, consistently pursuing a line towards easing international tension, we will resolutely suppress any attempts to interfere in our internal affairs and attempts to for the socialist gains of the working people."

  On February 3, 1977, the manager of the Fund for Assistance to Political Prisoners, A. Ginzburg, was arrested. The leader of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Yu. Orlov, was summoned to the prosecutor's office, but did not appear, and on February 9 he held a press conference where he spoke about the beginning of the defeat of the group. On February 10, he was arrested. Helsinki residents were also arrested in Ukraine and Georgia. But only in Georgia the group was completely defeated. The authorities applied pressure, weakened the activity of the groups, but did not completely destroy the movement. Despite the noticeable intensification of the American administration's position on the issue of human rights, the dissident leaders associated the arrests with the inconsistency and instability of Carter's behavior. However, the KGB's actions were relatively cautious. They went for arrests in cases where they hoped to somehow justify their position abroad (by accusing dissidents of libel or even espionage), but for now they refused the most scandalous actions (the expulsion of Sakharov, which was already being prepared in 1977), and especially the defeat movements. The Helsinki campaign made it possible to consolidate the human rights and national movements and significantly expand the ranks of human rights activists in the province. This created a good basis for further expansion of dissent.

  L. Alekseeva writes about the dissidents of the “call” of the late 70s: “the new people for the most part were not satisfied only with moral confrontation, the pathos of which was cultivated by the founders of the human rights movement. The new people wanted, if not immediate, but practical results from their struggle; they were looking for ways to achieve it.” And this led to the emergence of a new generation of left-wing dissenters.

  On December 5, 1978, an unprecedented event occurred in Leningrad. Shortly after the arrest of activists of the Revolutionary Communist Youth League, a student demonstration took place in their defense. About 200 boys and girls from Leningrad State University, the Academy of Arts, the Art College named after. Serov, Polytechnic Institute, from various vocational schools and schools. About 20 people were detained, but they were later released. During the trial of the union leader A. Tsurkov on April 3–6, 1979, a crowd of students gathered in front of the building.

  Another channel for the expansion of the dissident movement, which became especially noticeable in the late 70s. in connection with economic difficulties in the USSR - a movement of refuseniks - Jews who wanted to leave the Soviet Union, but were refused this by the Soviet authorities. The ban on leaving the country was associated with the fear of leaking military information and brain drain. The cheapness and relatively high quality of Soviet education coupled with a low (compared to developed Western countries) standard of living could lead to a real exodus of the intelligentsia (which happened a decade later). The consequences for the economy and military-strategic policy of the USSR could be the most disastrous. Unable to provide its intelligentsia with a standard of living higher than in the West (especially if judged by tourist impressions), the Soviet leadership limited the freedom to leave the country. At the same time, Western countries and Israel provided benefits to Jewish immigrants.

  The refusenik movement cannot be clearly considered national. As a rule, Jewish origin was only a reason for leaving for the West. In 1979, only 34.2% of those leaving on Israeli visas came to Israel, in 1981 - 18.9%. The rest were heading to the USA and Europe.

  The total number of refuseniks in 1981 reached 40 thousand. It was a mass group, the number of which exceeded the number of “pure” dissidents. State policy turned a “refusenik” into an oppositionist almost automatically (although the decision to leave the USSR was already dissident). L. Alekseeva wrote that “tens of thousands of people who applied to leave remained in the country. They found themselves in a tragic situation. The fact of filing an application not only deprived them of their previous social status, but transferred them to the category of “disloyal” from the point of view of the authorities. With the cessation of emigration, they were doomed to exile for an indefinitely long time, possibly for life.”

  The attacks on refuseniks intensified in 1978, after the A. Sharansky case, when the authorities accused the dissidents of espionage, since by reporting information about the oppression of Jews who worked for the defense, he provided information of interest to intelligence. The “Sharansky case” even allowed the USSR to put pressure on the United States - Carter asked Soviet leaders not to publish materials about the connections of dissidents with American intelligence. The trial of Sharansky, who carried out the “link” between dissidents and “refuseniks,” allowed official propaganda to further discredit the refusenik movement, since the defendant himself could not serve as confirmation of the propaganda he was spreading about the “fascist anti-Semitic campaign” in the USSR - Sharansky received a higher education, worked for defense enterprise, was not fired from his job, but stopped attending it after submitting an application to leave abroad. All this, according to the official version, indicated that all information about state anti-Semitism was false.

  In the early 80s. The Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public began to act against the “refuseniks”. At his press conferences, where Western journalists were also allowed, speakers included both Soviet Jews, who more or less successfully refuted information about official anti-Semitism, and Jews who returned from emigration back to the USSR and argued that “we were just idiots, not understanding “What are we going to do when leaving our only Motherland.”

  Dissidents demonstrated their solidarity with people whose civil rights were violated, their rejection of the anti-Semitism inherent in a significant part of the ruling bureaucracy. Already during Sharansky’s trial, dissident protesters, regardless of their nationality, sang the Israeli anthem.

  For the regime, the rapprochement between dissidents and refuseniks was of little importance - many dissident leaders were considered Zionists. But while sympathizing with Jews who wanted to leave the USSR, dissidents sometimes spoke out against the violation of the rights of Palestinians - opponents of Israel. So in September 1976, A. Sakharov and E. Bonner appealed to the UN about the tragic situation in the Tel Zaatar Palestinian camp. But such nuances could not change the opinion of the Politburo - within the USSR, dissidents acted on the side of the Zionists. E. Bonner was considered a conductor of Zionist influence on Sakharov. Expansion of the refusal movement in the late 70s. was seen as an extension of dissidence.

  The religious opposition movement also continued to develop rapidly, refusing to recognize the strategy of the hierarchs of the Orthodox Church to ally with the atheistic government, which persecutes any preaching outside the church walls. Religious dissent was ecumenical. There was a Christian Committee, created to protect the rights of believers and uniting representatives of different faiths, including priests, more (V. Fonchenkov) or less (G. Yakunin) loyal to the Patriarchate. The educational Christian seminar organized by A. Ogorodnikov (ecumenical in orientation), which published the irregular magazine “Community,” and the circles of D. Dudko and A. Men (see Chapter III) continued their work.

  The spiritual atmosphere of such circles had enormous attractive power. The circle subculture, closer in its mechanism to informal movements than to the dissident environment, attracted the unorthodox intelligentsia with its atmosphere. V. Aksyuchits talks about Dudko’s circle: “Many, many people in small rooms held conversations, discussions, debates for many hours, in a very friendly atmosphere, with prayer. First the service, then the feast, they thought: today we have seven tables or today we have six tables. That's six table changes before everyone dine. Everyone was fed. Then they gathered at the same table. The room was full and these endless discussions and conversations were taking place. Either someone was reading something, or a special topic was being discussed.”

  To the horror of the authorities, D. Dudko began publishing a special leaflet for parishioners, “In the Light of the Transfiguration,” which, in particular, talked about cases of oppression of believers. In Leningrad there was a seminar “37”, which published a magazine of the same name. All of these organizations had a fairly fluid composition and refused to have a rigid work plan. As a result, hundreds of people passed through them, who in turn influenced thousands of acquaintances. At the same time, as L. Alekseeva writes, “for the most part, Orthodox parishioners and even the Orthodox intelligentsia do not take part in civil resistance to state pressure on freedom of conscience and even condemn such resistance as “un-Christian.”

  In 1979–1980 Samizdat publishing expanded. “XTS” began to be republished in the USA, penetrating into the USSR in the form of “tamizdat”. In the 70s The volume of the Chronicle increased as the information flow increased, both its own network of information and the network of organizations associated with HTS expanded. But the efficiency of the CTS output began to decline. In 1974–1983 On average, 3–4 issues were published (before 1972 - 6). “Chronicle” turned into a “thick magazine”.

  In the 1970s "Chronicle" was the central, but far from the only publication of dissidents (not to mention non-dissident samizdat). They published materials from the Moscow Helsinki Group, collections in defense of individual dissidents, materials from specialized groups (the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, the Free Intersectoral Association of Workers, etc.), the historical collection “Memory,” the free Moscow magazine “Poiski,” ideologically colored magazines “Left Turn” (“Socialism and the Future”), “Options”, “Perspectives”. Samizdat spread more and more widely among the intelligentsia.

  In the mid-70s. samizdat began to be replaced by tamizdat - the magazines “Vestnik RKhD”, “Grani”, “Continent” and books published by the NTS publishing house “Posev”.

  At the same time, the development of fundamentally new methods of struggle began, which, it seemed, could attract wide sections of the population to the dissidents. In 1978, attempts were made to create a legal independent trade union. In January, V. Klebanov, who had already “served time” in a mental hospital for trying to create a group to monitor working conditions, again tried to register the Association of Free Trade Union for the Protection of Workers, which was legal and loyal to the authorities. Klebanov was arrested, and the trade union, where about 200 relatively loyal citizens signed up, immediately collapsed. Then, on December 28, 1978, L. Agapova, L. Volokhonsky, V. Novodvorskaya, V. Skvirsky and others proclaimed the Free Interprofessional Association of Workers (SFOT).

  SMOT, which became the first dissident “going to the people,” did not succeed in its activities, but was symptomatic for the authorities - dissent did not want to remain in the narrow niche allocated for it by the system. “The purpose of SMOT was to provide legal, moral and material assistance to its members. For this purpose, within SMOT they intended to create “cooperative” associations - mutual aid funds, associations for the purchase or rental of houses in the countryside for shared use, for the creation of kindergartens where there are none or in short supply, and even for the exchange of goods (say, sending from Moscow to other city ​​tea and condensed milk, available in Moscow, in exchange for pork stew, which is available in some areas of Eastern Siberia, but is not available in Moscow),” wrote L. Alekseeva. However, the intentions of some of the creators were much more radical, which predetermined the failure of the moderate part of the program. One of the publishers of the SMOT Information Bulletin - the only actually implemented project of the organization - V. Senderov, declared himself a member of the People's Labor Union. V. Novodvorskaya also took extremely radical positions. For such leaders, the “union” was only a tool for moving to more active action. Novodvorskaya herself recalls the logic that guided the radical part of the founders of the “trade union”: “Kosciuszko and Dombrowski woke up KOS-KOR, and KOS-KOR woke up Solidarity. In our country, the 20th Congress woke up Bulat Okudzhava and Yuri Lyubimov, they woke up the dissidents, but the dissidents could no longer disturb anyone: everyone was fast asleep. The ascent did not take place. Therefore, the idea that inspired Grandfather (V. Skvirsky - A.Sh.) of workers' trade unions, independent of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions, was purely platonic. Our SMOT - Free Interprofessional Association of Workers - was a desperate attempt by the unfortunate intelligentsia, in accordance with Stakhanov’s initiative, to push harder and create a labor movement out of itself.”

  Strictly speaking, the dissident movement was not purely intellectual. It was varied. Among those arrested were many workers.

  Membership in SMOT was secret (which is not typical for dissidents), and when leaders left the organization (which happened often, and not only because of arrest), the groups were lost. The semi-underground nature of the organization and the radicalism of some of its organizers made repression inevitable. After the arrest of L. Volokhonsky in 1982, the SMOT bulletin went underground, and the real activities of the organization ceased.

  In December 1980, apparently not without the influence of the Polish experience, the editors of samizdat magazines announced the creation of the “Free Cultural Trade Union”. But in general, the attempt to “give birth” to a workers’ movement, or at least a trade union movement, failed. Still, this was a symptom of the movement’s search for access to new segments of the population, which could not but worry the authorities.

  The next important symptom of this kind was the performance of the group “Elections-79” (V. Sychev, V. Baranov, L. Agapova, V. Solovyov, etc. - about 40 people in total), which nominated the city as a candidate for the Union Council in the Sverdlovsk district. Moscow to R. Medvedev and to the Council of Nationalities - to L. Agapov. It is clear that the candidates were not registered. But the dissidents’ raising of the “question of power” in such an open form showed the country’s leaders that the opposition was “playing too hard.” This was also a symptom of the activation of the left wing of the opposition, which was preparing to move on to the political struggle itself, filling Soviet democratic formalities with content (which would happen during Perestroika).

  With the creation of the Working Commission to investigate the use of psychiatry for political purposes, the investigation of psychiatric repression in the USSR was put on a regular basis.

  V. Bukovsky, who was imprisoned for this activity back in 1972 and, considered crazy, was exchanged for L. Corvalan in 1976, says: “Reputable Soviet psychiatrists avoided participating in our endeavor, they were afraid of reprisals. Ordinary psychiatrists - the first of them was Gluzman - soon suffered reprisals themselves. I didn’t really count on Western psychiatrists. How can they know all the complexities of our lives, how can they believe, contrary to the opinion of authoritative Soviet colleagues, whom you also regularly meet at international conferences, that some unknown person does not need compulsory psychiatric treatment?

  However, ironically, this particular case turned out to be one of the most successful in the twenty-year history of our movement. The very idea of ​​placing a healthy person in a mental hospital for political reasons captured the imagination with the tragedy of the situation, inevitably led to philosophical problems regarding the concepts and definitions of mental health, and everyone easily imagined themselves in the place of the victim... What was the unconscious impulse of the so-called “revolution of 1968” , suddenly found verbal expression, and our experience turned out to be the most advanced.”

  In these words of Bukovsky there is a noticeable exaggeration caused by a natural misunderstanding of the situation in the civil movement in the West. The impulse of 1968 predetermined constant interest in the problem of civil rights, primarily in their own countries. The Soviet experience was only an extreme and therefore important example of the phenomena that human rights activists observed at home. It is no coincidence that the campaign of support for Soviet dissidents coincided with the appearance on the screens of the American film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which tells the story of psychiatric repression in the United States. And here there was a similarity between the two systems, which most domestic dissidents simply did not notice. The violation of human rights in the West seemed to Western liberals to be a far-fetched problem, exaggerated by the USSR (each side in the conflict “exaggerated” what it liked, but can even one single violation of human rights be exaggerated - after all, rights are universal). Bukovsky writes with disdain “about some ‘Wilmington Ten’, about bans on professions in Germany and torture in Ulster.”

  Serious violations of human rights were typical for both “camps”, but in the USSR they were usually grosser - the power machine simply did not know what it was doing. For example, according to Bukovsky, “they in the Kremlin really believed that I was paranoid. So that’s why they decided to expose me with maximum publicity.” In the West, Bukovsky’s reasoning did not seem strange at all, and the assertions that in the USSR normal people were considered crazy were clearly confirmed.

  The offensive of dissidents in 1976–1979, which caused an unpleasant resonance in the West and even stimulated a quarrel with a number of European communist parties (the so-called “Eurocommunism”), caused concrete damage to the regime.

  International scandals, mass student protests in Leningrad and unrest in Georgia, the expansion of the "refusenik" movement, the scandal in the Writers' Union associated with Metropol (see Chapter VI), attempts to create independent trade unions, nominate candidates for deputies - all this has already happened dangerous, especially considering that the formal constitutional system of the USSR was extremely democratic. The Politburo was ready to tolerate the opposition as a closed subculture, but the vigorous activity of the late 70s. has reached the end of the authoritarian regime's patience. This, along with the deterioration of the international situation, became the main reason for the offensive against dissidents in the first half of the 80s. In preparation for reforms, the ruling elite got rid of political competitors who had shown their readiness, if necessary, to begin catalyzing mass opposition movements.

  With all this, the KGB still preferred to get rid of the enemy without landing. In January 1978, the “authorities” unofficially let dissidents know that in the near future “the flow of unofficial information will stop. People transmitting such information are faced with a voluntary choice, either - it would be better for everyone - they will leave the country, otherwise they will have to deal with them in accordance with the law. We are talking about people like Kopelev, Kornilov, Voinovich, Vladimov. When asked... if this is not a return to Stalinism, the answer was: “Under Stalin, they would have been imprisoned immediately, but we give them a choice.” Three of the named writers then left the country and were stripped of their citizenship. During a trip abroad, G. Vishnevskaya and M. Rostropovich were deprived of their citizenship. The state returned to “Leninist humanity” when opposition cultural figures began to be sent abroad rather than imprisoned and shot. But the dissidents did not appreciate this “humanity”. Commenting on the decree depriving him of citizenship, V. Voinovich wrote in an open letter to Brezhnev: “You have rated my activities undeservedly highly. I did not undermine the prestige of the Soviet state. Thanks to the efforts of its leaders and your personal contribution, the Soviet state has no prestige. Therefore, in fairness, you should deprive yourself of citizenship.

  I do not recognize your decree and consider it nothing more than a piece of paper... Being a moderate optimist, I have no doubt that in a short time all your decrees depriving our poor homeland of its cultural heritage will be canceled. My optimism, however, is not enough to believe in an equally rapid elimination of the paper deficit. And my readers will have to hand over twenty kilograms of your works to waste paper in order to receive a coupon for one book about the soldier Chonkin.”

  Voinovich's witty lines hardly reached the addressee. The expulsion had a sad international resonance for the Kremlin leaders, but arrests would have had much more unpleasant consequences. And yet, the regime failed to stop the opposition’s advance without arrests.