Abstract
Dissent is endemic to political systems. As Robert Dahl has noted, ‘No government receives indefinitely the total support of the people over whom it asserts its jurisdiction.’1 Political systems vary, however, in the limits they place on thought and behaviour critical of official policy and in the severity of the sanctions they mete out for transgression of the established limits or boundaries.
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Notes and References
Robert A. Dahl, Regimes and Oppositions (New Haven, Conn., 1973) 1.
Ernest Clark [Thomas Remington], ‘Revolutionary Ritual: A Comparative Analysis of Thought Reform and the Show Trial’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 9 (Autumn 1976) 232.
Professor Remington kindly authorized me to reveal his identity. On the equating of dissent in the Soviet Communist Party with opposition, and both with treason, see Leonard Schapiro ‘Putting the Lid on Leninism’ in Leonard Schapiro (ed.), Political Opposition in One-Party States (London, 1972) 33–57.
Roy Medvedev, On Soviet Dissent: Interview with Piero Ostellino (New York, 1980) 127.
Ronald J. Hill, Soviet Politics, Political Science and Reform (New York, 1980).
See Stephen F. Cohen, ‘The Friends and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in the Soviet Union’, Slavic Review, 28 (June 1979) 202.
On the diversity of overt dissent, see appropriate parts of, for example, the following: Peter B. Reddaway, Uncensored Russia (New York, 1973);
Ferdinand Feldbrugge, Samizdat (Leyden, 1975);
Frederick C. Barghoorn, Detente and the Democratic Movement in the USSR (New York, 1976);
Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian Samizdat’ — An Anthology (Belmont, Mass., 1977).
On the mutiny, see Arkhiv Samizdata 2767, Radio Free Europe (July 1975). On the Novocherkassk events, see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago (New York, 1976) 506–14.
Valentin Turchin, Inertsiya strakha (New York, 1977) 5.
Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston, 1973) 453.
Amalrik made the remark I report above in a panel of a conference, at which I was present, at Stanford University that led to publication of the book The Soviet Union: Looking to the 1980’s ed. Robert B. Wesson (Stanford, Calif., 1980).
In Bukovsky’s Foreword to Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Russia’s Political Hospitals (London, 1977).
Dina Spechler, ‘Permitted Dissent in the Decade after Stalin: Criticism and Protest in Novy Mir, 1953–1964’, in Paul Cocks et al. (eds.), The Dynamics of Soviet Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1976) 28–50.
Aleksandr Tvardovsky, (‘On the occasion of the Jubilee’) Novy Mir, 1 (1965) 3–18.
Frederick C. Barghoorn, ‘The Post-Khrushchev Campaign to Suppress Dissent’, in Rudolf L. Tôkés (ed.), Dissent in the USSR (Baltimore, 1975) 53.
Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, N.J., 1970) 13, 47, 113.
He is careful, however, to point out that strikes and riots cannot be correlated with changes in real wages. J.M. Montias, ‘Economic Conditions and Political Instability in Communist Countries’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 13 (Winter 1980) 285. Montias focuses mainly on Eastern Europe, especially Poland, but one of the nine cases he examines is the strikes and demonstrations at Novocherkassk, in the Don region of Russia, in June 1962.
See Jay D. Sorenson, ‘Soviet Workers: The Current Scene’, Problems of Communism, 13 (January-February 1964) 25–32; Albert Boiter, ‘When the Kettle Boils Over…’, ibid., 33–43; and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s vivid, detailed account in Gulag Archipelago, 506–14.
Leonid Plyushch, History’s Carnival (New York, 1979) 122–4, 171.
Andrei D. Sakharov, My Country and the World (New York, 1975) 11–41.
Andrei D. Sakharov, Alarm and Hope, (eds) Alfred Friendly Jr and Efrem Yankelevich (New York, 1978) 130.
Considerable additional material on the subjects discussed above is contained in works cited earlier, especially Chalidze SSSR-Rabochee dvizhenie?, and in Albert Boiter (ed.), Sobranie Dokumentov Samizdata, vol. 30, Khelsinkski Samizdat iz SSSR (Munich, 1978) 475–506, 710–16, 719–24.
An excellent treatment of religious dissent is in Barbara Wolfe Jancar, ‘Religious Dissent in the Soviet Union’, in Tôkés (ed.), Dissent in the USSR, 191–230. On nationality dissent, including resistance to Russification, Jewish and German emigration demands, the Lithuanian struggle to preserve their Catholic heritage, and so on, see Helene Carrere d’Encausse, Decline of an Empire: The Soviet Socialist Republics in Revolt (New York, 1979, 1980)
Barbara Wolfe Jancar, ‘Modernity and the Character of Dissent’, in Charles Gati (ed.), The Politics of Modernization in Eastern Europe: Testing the Soviet Model (New York, 1974) 340.
See Andrei D. Sakharov, Sakharov Speaks, ed. Harrison E. Salisbury (New York, 1974) 39. Text of the letter is on 115–34.
See Sakharov’s 1977 essay, ‘Alarm and Hope’, in Alarm and Hope, 99–111; Yury Orlov, ‘Vozmozhen li sotsializm netotalitarnogo dpa’, in Pavel Litvinov, M. Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shragin, Samosoznanie (Insights) (New York, 1976) 279–304; Turchin, Inertsiya strakha.
On ‘regulative performance’, see Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell Jr, Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston, 1966) 307–14, quotation on 307.
On the Soviet system for suppression of dissent see, for example, Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Post-Khrushchev Campaign to Suppress Dissent’, 35–94, and Peter Reddaway, ‘Policy Towards Dissent Since Khrushchev’ in T.H. Rigby, Archie Brown and Peter Reddaway (eds), Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR (New York, 1980) 158–92. Very important is Bloch and Reddaway, Russia’s Political Hospitals (London, 1977).
Petr Grigorenko, Sbornik statei (New York, 1977) 63.
Bernard W. Hudson, ‘Dissent in a Strait Jacket’ The Times Literary Supplement, 18 April 1975.
See, for example, Grigory Svirsky, Na lobnom meste (At the Execution Square) (London, 1979).
N. and S. Shuleiko (eds), Otkrytoe slovo (The Open Word) (New York, 1976) 7.
As Chukovskaya said at this session, she had been condemned to nonexistence as a writer, but she took comfort in the fact that she shared the fate of Mikhail Zoshchenko, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Galich and Vladimir Maksimov. See her ‘Poslednee slovo’ in Otkrytoe slovo (New York, 1976) 99.
For a discussion of post-Helsinki Soviet behaviour in the area of freedom of expression and literary cultural communication, see Robert Bernstein ‘A Publisher Looks at Helsinki’, Index on Censorship, 6 (November-December 1977) 39–43.
Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle - My Life as a Dissenter (New York, 1977) 160.
He believes that these practices unnecessarily irritate the authorities and are self-defeating. See Roy Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy (New York, 1975) 70–1, 80–2; Barghoorn, Detente and the Democratic Movement, 74;
Roy Medvedev, On Soviet Dissent (New York, 1980) ch. 10.
Pavel Litvinov, ‘The Human Rights Movement in the USSR’, Index on Censorship (Spring 1975) 14.
Pavel Litvinov (comp) and Peter Reddaway (ed.), The Trial of the Four (New York, 1972) 225–7.
Valentin Turchin, The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview, trans. from Russian by Guy Daniels (New York 1981) 289.
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© 1983 Frederick C. Barghoom
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Barghoorn, F.C. (1983). Regime—Dissenter Relations after Khrushchev: Some Observations. In: Solomon, S.G. (eds) Pluralism in the Soviet Union. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06617-9_6
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