Soviet dissidents

• 1. Introduction

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  Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with Soviet ideology, in a country where disagreement could be answered with a psychiatric diagnosis. Soviet psychiatry had an official term for that particular kind of nonconformity: sluggish schizophrenia. Between the mid-1960s and the fall of Communism, the label dissident applied to marginalized intellectuals whose challenges to the regime ranged from modest to radical. Anyone who spoke out in most cases faced a stark choice: exile abroad, a labor camp, or a mental hospital. What turned criticism into a diagnosable illness? What did resistance actually look like inside a system built to crush it? And how did a scattered movement come to matter so much to the outside world?

• 2. Early Acts of Defiance

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  In the 1950s, small groups of dissidents began smuggling criticism to the West by sending documents and statements to foreign diplomatic missions in Moscow. By the 1960s, dissidents framed their demands differently. They insisted that the rights denied to them belonged to everyone, regardless of race, religion, or nationality. In August 1969, the Initiating Group for Defense of Civil Rights in the USSR appealed directly to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. The group asked the UN to intervene in a number of trials where Soviet authorities were trampling on basic rights.

  Poetry readings at Mayakovsky Square in downtown Moscow became one flashpoint, drawing crowds who circulated underground writings critical of the regime. Police repeatedly broke up these public gatherings. In 1963, the poet Iosif Brodsky, later known as Joseph Brodsky, was charged with parasitism for not holding official employment. He was sentenced to internal exile, and would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Notes from his trial, compiled by Frida Vigdorova, spread through dissident circles and won him widespread sympathy.

  In 1965, writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested for publishing their co-authored work abroad under pennames. Both were sentenced to labor camp terms and internal exile, and the trial triggered a petition campaign signed by thousands. Many of those signers went on to become active participants in the dissident movement themselves.

  On the 5th of December 1965, the Soviet Constitution Day, Alexander Yesenin-Volpin led a silent demonstration on Moscow's Pushkin Square. Protesters carried posters that simply urged the authorities to observe their own constitution. Separate petitioning campaigns pushed back against the downplaying of Stalin's terror after Nikita Khrushchev's removal from power. Parts of the Soviet bureaucracy were reviving a cult around Stalin's personality at the same time.

  In April 1968, dissidents launched an underground periodical called the Chronicle of Current Events. It documented human rights violations and protest activity across the Soviet Union, issue after issue. In the spring and summer of that year, the West published Andrei Sakharov's first political essay, titled Reflections on Progress and Intellectual Freedom.

  On the 25th of August 1968, eight dissidents staged a protest on Moscow's Red Square against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Viktor Fainberg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pavel Litvinov, and Vladimir Dremlyuga were among those protesting the crushing of the Prague Spring. By 1969, these separate protests had produced something new, a named group called the Initiative on Human Rights. Its founding set the stage for a harder Soviet response in the decade just ahead.

• 3. The Medicalization of Disagreement

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  Soviet law treated some acts of dissent as three things simultaneously: a crime under Article 70 of the Soviet Criminal Code, a symptom such as a so-called delusion of reformism, and a formal diagnosis. Being outspoken against the authorities, demonstrating for reform, or writing a book critical of the USSR could each trigger this triple label.

  The KGB routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists rather than to open trial, according to Soviet dissidents and Western critics. A closed diagnosis avoided the embarrassment of a public trial and let officials frame dissent as the product of illness rather than conviction. Those judged psychotic were confined in psychiatric hospitals and treated with neuroleptics, a practice common enough to earn its own name: psychiatric terror. Leonid Plyushch and Pyotr Grigorenko were among those who endured this treatment.

  The underground Chronicle of Current Events tallied 424 political trials, in which 753 people were convicted and not one person was acquitted. The same records show 164 people were declared insane and sent for compulsory psychiatric treatment. Moscow Helsinki Group chairwoman Lyudmila Alexeyeva later offered her own judgment on the practice. She judged the labeling of a prominent figure as mentally ill to be the clearest sign of Soviet psychiatry's character during the 1960s and 1980s.

  Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky wrote about this practice in A New Mental Illness in the USSR: The Opposition, published in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. With psychiatrist Semyon Gluzman, he also co-wrote A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents, published in Russian, English, French, Italian, German, and Danish. Groups calling themselves Helsinki Watch would soon organize to challenge these very practices in the open, under a new international agreement signed in 1975.

• 4. Repression of the Helsinki Watch Groups

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  "The need has thus emerged to terminate the actions of Orlov, fellow Helsinki monitor Ginzburg and others once and for all, on the basis of existing law," KGB head Yuri Andropov wrote. Dmitri Volkogonov and Harold Shukman later concluded that Andropov personally approved these prosecutions. Their list of targets included Andrei Amalrik, Vladimir Bukovsky, Vyacheslav Chornovil, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Alexander Ginzburg, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Pyotr Grigorenko, and Anatoly Shcharansky.

  In 1977-1979, and again in 1980-1982, the KGB launched large-scale arrests against Helsinki Watch Groups in Moscow, Kiev, Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Erevan. Across those groups, 50 members would eventually be imprisoned. Emigration served as a release valve for authorities eager to be rid of politically active intellectuals. Those who left included writers Valentin Turchin, Georgi Vladimov, Vladimir Voinovich, Lev Kopelev, Vladimir Maximov, and Naum Korzhavin. Vasily Aksyonov and psychiatrist Marina Voikhanskaya emigrated as well.

  In 1978, the Moscow Helsinki Group lost three of its own to the courts. Yuri Orlov, Vladimir Slepak, and Anatoly Shcharansky were each sentenced to lengthy labor camp terms and internal exile for anti-Soviet agitation and treason. A second wave of arrests in the early 1980s took Malva Landa, Viktor Nekipelov, Leonard Ternovsky, Feliks Serebrov, Tatiana Osipova, Anatoly Marchenko, and Ivan Kovalev. Soviet authorities offered some of the accused an alternative: emigration instead of prosecution. Lyudmila Alexeyeva took that path in 1977, followed by founding members Mikhail Bernshtam, Alexander Korchak, and Vitaly Rubin. Pyotr Grigorenko lost his Soviet citizenship entirely while abroad seeking medical treatment.

  The Ukrainian Helsinki Group absorbed the harshest repression of any branch between 1977 and 1982. Multiple labor camp sentences fell on members including Mykola Rudenko, Oleksy Tykhy, Vyacheslav Chornovil, and Vasyl Stus. More than a dozen others appear in the group's own record of those punished. By 1983, the group counted 37 members in total. Of these, 22 were serving time in prison camps and 5 were in internal exile. Another 6 had emigrated to the West, and 3 had been released and were living in Ukraine. One member, Mykhailo Melnyk, had died by suicide.

  The Lithuanian Helsinki Group faced two separate waves of imprisonment, for anti-Soviet activity and for organizing religious processions. Viktoras Petkus was sentenced in 1978. Algirdas Statkevičius, Vytautas Skuodys, Mečislovas Jurevičius, and Vytautas Vaičiūnas followed in 1980-1981.

  Each of these prison sentences was being tracked from abroad, where a newly elected American president was about to make Soviet dissidents a matter of official US policy.

• 5. Diplomacy and Pressure From Abroad

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  "Our history shows that most of the people can be fooled for a very long time," Soviet writer Vladimir Voinovich once said. "But now all this idiocy is coming into clear contradiction with the fact that we have some level of openness." In 1974, the United States Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik amendment in direct response to the plight of Soviet refuseniks. The law aimed to restrict trade with Communist bloc countries that limited freedom of emigration and other human rights.

  In August 1975, eight member countries of the Warsaw Pact signed the Helsinki Final Act. Its so-called third basket carried extensive human rights clauses. The accords inspired dissidents not only in the Soviet Union but in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland to challenge their own governments openly. Soviet dissident Leonid Plyushch argued that Moscow had used the Helsinki pact to improve its economy while increasing the suppression of political dissenters. Amnesty International documented cases of Soviet political prisoners in 1975. The Committee for the Defense of Soviet Political Prisoners published its own findings in 1975 and 1976.

  On the 20th of January 1977, President Jimmy Carter used his inaugural address to declare human rights central to his foreign policy. The next month, Carter wrote directly to Andrei Sakharov, expressing support for his stance on human rights. The Soviet government warned against any attempt "to interfere" in its affairs under what it called a "thought-up pretext of defending human rights." Carter's public support gave the KGB an opening, and it began portraying dissent as a cover for American espionage inside the Soviet Union.

  In 1977, Carter welcomed dissident Vladimir Bukovsky to the White House. Carter said he did not intend "to be timid" in defending human rights.

  In 1979, the Ford Foundation funded the founding of the US Helsinki Watch Committee. Modeled on the Moscow Helsinki Group and similar bloc watch groups, it monitored compliance with the Helsinki human rights provisions and lobbied US policymakers directly.

  President Ronald Reagan attributed the "brutal treatment of Soviet dissidents" to what he called "bureaucratic inertia." On the 14th of November 1988, Reagan met Andrei Sakharov at the White House. He said Soviet human rights abuses would continue until the problem was "completely eliminated." Reagan carried the same message whether addressing about one hundred dissidents in a broadcast to the Soviet people or speaking at the US Embassy. His agenda centered on three freedoms: to travel, to speak, and to worship.

  None of this outside attention was aimed at one unified organization. It was responding to a patchwork of separate movements inside the Soviet Union, from Crimean Tatars seeking to return home to Soviet Jews seeking permission to leave for Israel.

• 6. Many Movements, One Cause

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  In the early years of what became known as the Brezhnev stagnation, activists shifted their focus toward civil and, eventually, human rights concerns. Their approach favored close attention to legal and procedural questions over broad moral commentary, rejecting both underground conspiracy and violent confrontation. The Committee on Human Rights in the USSR formed in 1970, drawing in figures such as Valery Chalidze alongside Yuri Orlov and Lyudmila Alexeyeva. This shared rights-based vocabulary connected groups as different as youth subculture activists and academics such as Andrei Sakharov.

  The Crimean Tatars' first collective letter demanding the right to return to Crimea dates to 1957. Mustafa Dzhemilev led the movement in building a democratic, decentralized organization across the places where Tatars had been forcibly resettled. That structure was considered unique in the history of Soviet independent movements. Meskhetian Turks pursued a parallel campaign to return to South Georgia, while ethnic Germans sought to resettle along the Volga River near Saratov.

  Soviet Jews were routinely denied permission to emigrate to Israel, a restriction that helped spark a revival of interest in Jewish culture. The refusenik cause drew considerable attention in the West. Citizens of German origin from the Baltic states, along with descendants of eighteenth-century Volga German settlers, formed their own movement to leave the country. A 1972 agreement with West Germany allowed between 6,000 and 8,000 people to emigrate each year for the rest of the decade. By the mid-1980s, almost 70,000 ethnic Germans had left the Soviet Union under it, and more than 15,000 Armenians had emigrated as well.

  Russian Orthodox activism stayed comparatively small next to the other religious movements. Lithuania's Catholic movement operated as part of the country's larger national movement rather than as a separate cause. Protestant groups opposing state interference included Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists, and Pentecostals, and many Pentecostals, like Jewish and German dissidents, pursued emigration as their goal.

  Among the Soviet Union's constituent republics, Ukraine produced the first national movement to emerge, beginning in the 1960s. It aimed to resist the Russification of Ukraine and to win equal rights and democratization for the republic. Lithuania's own national movement, active in the 1970s, stayed closely tied to its Catholic counterpart.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's publication of The Gulag Archipelago stood as one landmark, alongside the earlier persecutions of Osip Mandelshtam, Boris Pasternak, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Dozens of literary figures took part in the wider movement, among them Vasily Aksyonov, Yuli Daniel, Lev Kopelev, Varlam Shalamov, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Vladimir Voinovich. Earlier still, non-conforming academics in the young Soviet Union had been forced abroad aboard the so-called Philosophers' ships. Cultural theorist Grigori Pomerants later carried that same nonconformist tradition forward as an active dissident. Underground poetry and the wider field of Soviet Nonconformist Art, including the Lianozovo group of painters and the circle known as the Second Culture, extended dissent into the visual arts.

  Smaller currents included Socialists, independent labor unions organizing around socioeconomic rights, and separate women's, environmental, and peace movements. Every one of these separate currents produced its own witnesses, and some of the clearest reckoning with what dissent actually cost came directly from the dissidents themselves.

• 7. In Their Own Words

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  Andrei Sakharov once put the personal cost plainly: "Everyone wants to have a job, be married, have children, be happy, but dissidents must be prepared to see their lives destroyed and those dear to them hurt." He added that his own situation, his family's situation, and his country's situation were all, in his words, "getting steadily worse."

  Lyudmila Alexeyeva, one of the founders of the Moscow Helsinki Group, posed a hypothetical to explain how repression scaled with numbers. "What would happen if citizens acted on the assumption that they have rights? If one person did it, he would become a martyr; if two people did it, they would be labeled an enemy organization; if thousands of people did it, the state would have to become less oppressive."

  Soviet dissident Victor Davydoff pointed to a structural problem inside totalitarian systems: they had no internal mechanism to change the ruling group's behavior. Attempts from within, he argued, were simply suppressed through repression. That left, in Davydoff's view, only one source of pressure strong enough to matter. International human rights organizations and foreign governments were the ones left to apply it from outside.