Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

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

  SOVIET LEADERS AND LEADING DISSIDENTS

  The party reformer Nikita Khrushchev, who after Stalin’s death headed the Soviet regime from March

  DISSIDENT MOVEMENT

  1953 to October 1964, was committed to building communism in the Soviet Union, in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe and throughout the world. Paradoxically, he ended by laying the political and legal foundations for the dissident movement. That movement flourished under Khrushchev’s long-term successor Leonid Brezhnev (October 1964-No-vember 1982). Being more conservative, Brezhnev wanted to restore Stalinism, but failed, partly because of the opposition from dissidents. After the brief tenure of two interim leaders-the tough reformer Yuri Andropov (November 1982-February 1984) and the conservative Konstantin Chernenko (February 1984-March 1985)-power was assumed by Andropov’s young prot?g?, the ambitious mod-ernizer Mikhail Gorbachev (March 1985-December 1991). Like Khrushchev, Gorbachev both fought and encouraged the dissident movement. Ultimately, he failed all around. By December 1991, the Soviet Union withdrew from its outer empire in Eastern Europe and saw the collapse of its inner empire. It ceased to exist, and Gorbachev resigned from the presidency December 25, 1991.

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

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

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

  DISSIDENT MOVEMENT

  DISSIDENT GROUPS, THEIR ACTIONS, AND SOVIET COUNTERACTIONS

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

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

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

  What was the reaction of the Soviet government? At the very least, Brezhnev and his security chief and eventual successor Andropov ordered the disruption of public demonstrations by the dissidents by hiring a brass band or having thugs beat them up. The names of all the petitioners would be recorded and the more persistent letter signers would be talked to by the secret police, stripped of privileges such as foreign travel, and eventually dismissed from their jobs. The next step could be exile from Moscow, such as that of Sakharov from January 1880 to December 1986. Others, as for instance the famous tamizdat authors Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, would be formally tried, sentenced to long terms in prison camps, and expelled abroad after serving their sentences. The show trials led to further protests by dissidents and criticisms in the West. Brezhnev and Andropov tightened the screw by placing professionals with an intellectual bent in asylums, where they were

  DISSIDENT MOVEMENT

  given mind-altering drugs, and also by authorizing the killing, whether by medical neglect during incarceration or by hired thugs, of carefully chosen dissidents. The most frightening aspect of the regime’s policy was that the individual dissident did not know what fate had been decided for him or her. The post-Stalinist system of power was not fully posttotalitarian in that it retained Stalin’s option of unpredictability.

  THE MOVEMENT’S SUCCESS OR FAILURE

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

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

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alexeyeva, Ludmilla. (1985). Soviet Dissent, tr. John Glad and Carol Pearce. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Amalrik, Andrei A. (1970). Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? New York: Harper and Row. Brumberg, Abraham, ed. (1968). “In Quest of Justice: Protest and Dissent in the USSR.” Parts I and II, Problems of Communism 17(4 and 5):1-119, 1-120. Grigorenko, Petro. (1982). Memoirs, tr. Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Norton. Havel, Vaclav. (1985). “The Power of the Powerless.” In Havel, Vaclav, et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane. London: Hutchinson. Kowalewski, David. (1987). “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” In International Handbook of Human Rights, ed. Jack Donnelly and Rhoda E. Howard. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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  DMITRY ALEXANDROVICH

  Kuznetsov, Edward. (1975). Prison Diaries, tr. Howard Spier. New York: Stein and Day. Mamonova, Tatyana, ed. (1984). Women and Russia. Boston: Beacon Press. Medvedev, Roy A. (1971). Let History Judge, tr. Collen Taylor, ed. David Joravsky and Georges Haupt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Putin, Vladimir. (2000). First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, with Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Koslesnikov, tr. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick. New York: Public Affairs. Reddaway, Peter, and Bloch, Sidney. (1977). Psychiatric Terror. New York: Basic Books. Reich, Walter. (1979). “Grigorenko Gets a Second Opinion” The New York Times Magazine, May 13, 1979: 18, 39-42, 44, 46. Rubenstein, Joshua. (1985). Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, 2nd edition, revised and expanded. Boston: Beacon Press. Sakharov, Andrei A. (1968). Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, tr. The New York Times. New York: Norton. Sakharov, Andrei A. (1974). “In Answer to Solzhenitsyn [Letter to the Soviet Leaders],” dated April 3, 1974, trans. Guy Daniels. New York Review of Books 21(10) June 13, 1974:3-4,6. Sakharov, Andrei A. (1992). Memoirs, tr. Richard Lourie. New York: Vintage Books. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. (1963). One Day in the Life of Ivan D
enisovich, tr. Max Hayward and Ronald Hin-gley. New York: Praeger. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. (1974). Letter to the Soviet Leaders, trans. Hilary Sternberg. New York: Index on Censorship in association with Harper and Row. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. (1985). The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, tr. Thomas P. Whitney (Parts I-IV) and Harry Wil-letts (Parts V-VII), abridged by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. New York: Harper and Row. Taagepera, Rein. (1984). Softening Without Liberalization in the Soviet Union: The Case of Juri Kukk. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Verba, Lesya, and Yasen, Bohdan, eds. (1980). The Human Rights Movement in Ukraine: Documents of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group 1976-1980. Baltimore: Smoloskyp Publishers. Walesa, Lech. (1992). The Struggle and the Triumph: An Autobiography, with the collaboration of Arkadius Rybicki, tr. Franklin Philip, in collaboration with Helen Mahut. New York: Arcade Publishers.

  YAROSLAV BILINSKY

  DMITRY ALEXANDROVICH

  (d. 1294), Grand prince of Vladimir.

  In 1260 Dmitry Alexandrovich was appointed to Novgorod by his father Alexander Yaroslavich “Nevsky” who, two years later, ordered him to attack the Teutonic Knights at Yurev (Tartu, Dorpat) in Estonia. But in 1264, after his father died, the Novgorodians evicted Dmitry because of his youth. Nevertheless, in 1268 they requested him to wage war against the castle of Rakovor (Rakvere, We-senburg) in Estonia. After Dmitry’s uncle Yaroslav of Vladimir died in 1271, he occupied Novgorod again, but his uncle Vasily evicted him. Vasily died in 1276, and Dmitry replaced him as grand prince of Vladimir. After that the Novgorodians once again invited him to rule their town. While there he waged war on Karelia and in 1280 built a stone fortress at Kopore near the Gulf of Finland. In 1281, however, Dmitry quarreled with the Novgorodi-ans. He waged war against them and because of this failed to present himself to the new Khan in Saray. His younger brother Andrei, who did visit the Golden Horde, was therefore awarded the patent for Vladimir. Because Dmitry refused to abdicate, the khan gave Andrei troops with which he evicted his brother and seized Vladimir and Novgorod. Dmitry fled to Sweden and later returned to Pereyaslavl. In 1283, when Andrei brought Tatar troops against him, Dmitry sought help from Khan Nogay, an enemy of the Golden Horde, who gave him troops. They wreaked havoc on northern Russia. Andrei eventually capitulated but continued to plot Dmitry’s overthrow. In 1293, after summoning the Tatars the fourth time, he succeeded in forcing Dmitry’s abdication. Dmitry died in 1294 while returning to Pereyaslavl Zalessky. See also: ALEXANDER YAROSLAVICH; ANDREI ALEXAN-DROVICH; GOLDEN HORDE; NOVGOROD THE GREAT