Michael Urban*, from the book "The Rebirth of Politics in Russia", 1997

Regime and opposition in the pre-political period

This chapter surveys a period that we call 'pre-political'. It can be likened to those intervals - pre-dawn or twilight - that separate night from day, intervals during which neither is quite present yet both seem to be there at once, incongruously, cancelling one another out at the same time. Pre-political suggests such an interval to us. It describes a period that is neither political in the sense of that term as we have used it, nor altogether anti-political as we have characterized communism. What defines the interval in this way would be the appearance and development of a small but none the less significant social movement that came to be known as 'the dissidents'. The presence of this novel element on the inhospitable terrain of state socialism represents a critical turning point for our subject, for it introduces a new and unique position into the field of cultural-political expression that reverberates as a series of reactions and permutations on the part of other actors. Moreover, the discursive practices associated with this movement would both anticipate a return of political life in Russia and contribute at least indirectly to that return itself.

Short exegeses of certain theoretic concepts, introduced to organize the discussion and to provide an inter-related set of categories for its principal elements, punctuate this chapter. One of these concepts -'cultural-political field' - can be briefly introduced, here, by noting three aspects of its use pertinent to our discussion. First, the compound adjective is employed to connote politically related practices that have their origins in the sphere of cultural production. That is, we, are concerned in this instance almost exclusively with individuals - poets, artists, writers, philosophers, historians - whose professional activities involve them directly in cultural discourses wherein the issues of meaning, values, subjectivity, interpretation and assessment bulk particularly large. Second, the thematization of these matters in discourses other than the one sponsored by the party-state established a field on which various discourses would contend over the questions of meaning) values and so forth. While the character of these conflicts would not constitute a form of political activity per se - any more than would, say, a  dispute among participants in a seminar on classical philosophy or modern music - they necessarily challenged the party-state's active prohibition  against  social  communication,  thus  engaging the  prepolitical issue of a right to expression rather than those substantive concerns mediated in political speech which would depend on the existence of that very right. Finally, 'cultural-political field' denotes a collection of sites on which a very small segment of the total population had been active during the time period encompassed by this chapter.¹ Nothing approaching a public possessed of beliefs in citizenship, a responsibility for the affairs of the nation and their own ability to participate in these affairs would be present until years later. In this respect, it is important at the outset to enter a certain caveat regarding the way in which the tenor of this chapter is distinguished from that of the preceding one. Since the present focus falls on small groups of individuals active on the margins of Soviet society, the description of their activities dominates the narrative, creating the impression, perhaps, of a robust political life in statu nascendi. Recalling the context and consequences of their actions, however, we are reminded that they fell considerably short of repealing communism's prohibition of politics.

This chapter is organized primarily along chronological lines, beginning with a brief consideration of the impact of the Second World War on Soviet society in the late-Stalinist epoch. Thereafter, the discussion turns to the emergence of various forms of opposition to the regime, each appearing around one or another element contained in the party-state's authority construct: first, in the form of small clandestine groups whose views derived from their interpretations of certain canonical texts; second, as small but open groups whose orientations toward the symbols of democracy and legality had been engendered by revisions of the canon undertaken by the regime itself; and, third, as those emphasizing other elements in the triad, primarily as a form of protest or pressure on the regime to correct its putative remissness regarding the respective aspects of the canon that they would valorize. We conclude the chapter by cultural-political field in the period preceding perestroika.

After the war

Despite the havoc wrought on the territory of the USSR by four years of war with Germany, Soviet society emerged from that experience united never before. Two broad considerations might be cited in this respect.

On one hand, the resurgence of the national-imperial idea in the regime's wartime propaganda - which placed the figure of Stalin in the succession of tsar-conquerors and illustrious generals from the past -along with the official restoration of the Orthodox Church created a profoundly effective patriotic ideology that struck deep roots in a people fighting for its very survival. On the other, the conditions of war had altered fundamentally the field of social action. Great numbers of people found themselves in situations in which central authority was either remote or effectively non-existent. Consequently, imperatives to act in the face of one or another exigency were commonly met by taking direct decisions 'below', in military units and partisan detachments fighting behind enemy lines, and in the towns, factories and farms on the home front. It may be no exaggeration to note that the combination of these factors - crowned, of course, by a spectacular victory purchased at the price of enormous national effort and bitter suffering - induced in society for the first time a genuine acceptance of, and identification with, the Soviet regime.

The experience of the 'Great Patriotic War', not unlike Russia's victory over Napoleon's armies more than a century earlier, also stimulated free thought and expression. Apparently, this was occasioned by a heightened sense of subjectivity (or autonomy) that accompanied the activities of masses of people together risking, sacrificing and, too often, dying in defence of their country and its state. A measure of this subjectivity can be taken from such things as Lev Kopelev's articles in the official press regarding the untoward behaviour of Soviet troops on conquered German soil, that led to his arrest; or from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's letter to a friend containing passages critical of Stalin that resulted in his arrest as well.² Solzhenitsyn even reported later that the person escorting him to his incarceration, a certain sergeant Korzhavin, figuratively remarked to him that 'he and I had gone through the same school'³ and was not afraid to show Solzhenitsyn his own critical verse, seeing nothing seditious in it.⁴ The readiness of some individuals at this time to express themselves more or less openly and critically contrasted sharply with conditions prevailing in the years immediately preceding the war.⁵ Of course, the party-state's reinstatement of an active prohibition of social communication soon cut short such unauthorized expressions and swaddled society again with official Marxism-Leninism. But the elements comprising this unstable compound - Marxism, the cult of the leader and Soviet patriotism - would begin to undergo hypostatis, each suggesting quite different interpretations and evaluations of social reality, each colliding with the interpretations and evaluations associated with the others. The first element to separate itself out of the synthesis, proving a critical vantage on the others and on government and society in general, was Marxism.

Toward the close of the 1940s, an anti-Stalinist underground began to develop in Russia's larger cities which more and more regarded the practices of the Soviet state as a crude perversion of Marxist teachings.⁶ In so far as we know, these groups were made up almost exclusively of young people, primarily students.⁷ Some were children of repressed 'kulaks' and gentry whose families had been brought to the brink of starvation during the regime's war against the countryside in the 1930s. Others were scions of high party-state functionaries, raised under invidiously comfortable material conditions,⁸ who more often than not were the initiators of these clandestine groups.⁹ Theirs was an especially personal reaction to the hypocrisy surrounding them: privileges for the elite at the expense of working people, all in the name of Marxism. At school and in these underground circles, their acquaintance with the lives of others who had suffered the most severe deprivation only sharpened the dissonance that they experienced. But as children of the elite their associations also afforded them broader access to various types of literature, including illegal materials. Through reading and the exchange of ideas in these underground study groups, little knots of young men and women began to work out their own views independently of, and in opposition to, that Marxism-Leninism purveyed by the regime.¹⁰ In some instances, this led them into revolutionary activity.¹¹

In the early post-war years, Marxism thus served as the first basis for organized opposition to the Soviet regime. The very names adopted by these groups indicated their affinity with it: the Communist Party of Youth, the Circle of Marxist Thought, the Leninist Union of Students and others.¹² In general, they seemed to be rehearsing the romance of the country's revolutionary tradition as accentuated in Bolshevik mythology. Of principal importance in this respect was the devotion of one's life to the revolutionary transformation of the country, as Lenin had devoted his. By means of disciplined theoretical study and the ongoing preparation of the larger population through the distribution of revolutionary propaganda, somehow that Archimedean point could be found and employed to overthrow the Stalin regime.

In addition to this strain of youthful revolutionaries in the years following the war, other circles were formed which presaged the appearance of the dissident movement more than a decade later. One was the Brotherhood of Beggarly Sybarites, a group of talented, if eccentric, young people whose leader, Arkadii Belinkov, produced a novel in manuscript - 'Conspiracy of the Senses' - that used the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to illustrate his thesis concerning the essential equivalence of Hitler's and Stalin's 'fascist' dictatorships.¹³ Although this group was rather quickly apprehended by the authorities, another that formed around Ernst Neizvestnyi that devoted itself to discussing the works of such writers as George Orwell, Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Berdyaev carried on its activities from 1949 to 1960 when it was repressed on the baseless charge of constituting a 'youth terrorist organization'.¹⁴ Similarly, the Moscow Logic Circle (later, the Moscow Methodological Circle) formed at Moscow State University in 1954 by Boris Grushin, Aleksandr Zinov'ev, Merab Mamardashvili and Georgii Shchedrovitskii has continued in one form or another to the present day.¹⁵ It appeared as a philosophical alternative to the Marxist paradigm against the backdrop of a rudimentary free-speech movement at the university that spun off the circle led by the future dissident, Grigorii Pomerants.¹⁶

After Stalin

Stalin's death dramatically accelerated the decomposition of the Soviet authority structure, laying open to contention that element of its triad, cult of the leader, that for the overwhelming majority of the population had remained rock-solid while he was alive. Within the circles of the elite, his passing reinforced those fissiparous tendencies inherent in state socialism's weak structures: the formation of more or less stable patron-client relations, the personal appropriation of state offices (eventually apotheosized in Brezhnev's formula regarding 'stability' and 'trust in cadres') and the related phenomena of departmentalism and localism on which we commented in the preceding chapter. Here, our discussion will concern the effects of Stalin's death on the larger society.

The evidence recorded in memoirs about this period indicates that these effects had been of seismic proportions. For instance, К. М. Simonov recalls that 'something in us, in any case [something] in me, convulsed at this moment. Something in life had finished. Something else, yet unknown, had begun.'¹⁷ Similarly, Vladimir Bukovskii remembers that 'the death of Stalin shook our life to its foundations ... it was sensed that somehow there was no more authority [vlasti] . . . People were saying completely openly: "For whom will [people] now go forth to die? For Malenkov perhaps? No. Folk will not go forth to die for Malenkov."⁾¹⁸ Moreover, it would seem that the road toward opposition to the Soviet order that many would traverse later actually started at the moment of Stalin's death. S. I. Osipov, a scientist arrested in 1956 for posting unauthorized leaflets, subsequently remarked with simplicity, 'I worked and studied with ardour, I believed in the final victory of socialism . . . After Stalin's death, my impressions changed.'¹⁹ Moving in quite the opposite direction, Leonid Rendel' and Lev Krasnopevets, founders of one of the most sensational of the underground groups, drew from this same event the inference that it was time 'to seek their own course in party life'.²⁰

Stalin's 'second' death, the partial exposure of his cult and crimes by Nikita Khrushchev at the Communist Party's historic Twentieth Congress, in many ways registered a more powerful jolt to Soviet society than had his 'first' mortality. N. Yanevich, for example, a researcher at the Institute of World Literature, later recalled that on hearing of Khrushchev's speech, 'many of us simply didn't believe it, grew livid and were filled with indignation . . . The majority of us, rank-and-file communists, were overcome by shame, shock . . . [and then] rejoicing over the end of the repression.'²¹ Among the young and educated, the news of the speech carried an even greater impact, provoking not only reflection but often a public questioning of established 'truths'.²² In institutions of higher education - for example, at Leningrad State University - discussions of the Party Congress sometimes voiced seditious ideas, such as calls to rehabilitate Nikolai Bukharin.²³ Gatherings to assess the results of the Congress at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics and at the Institute of Philosophy were witness to comparable speeches and remarks.²⁴

The release of political prisoners that was begun shortly after Stalin's death - often on the initiative of the inmates themselves who staged spontaneous revolts in a number of labour camps²⁵ - was stepped up in the wake of the Twentieth Party Congress. While the return of millions from the camps had no immediate or direct impact on the formation of opposition currents in society, as a lingering sense of apprehension if not fear dissuaded those discharged from engaging in open political activity, the stories that they told of their experiences none the less exercised a strong influence on others who would soon begin to take part in illegal organizations.²⁶ Moreover, their return contributed its weight to that of other events unsettling for the social climate at the time: the Twentieth Congress and the discussions occurring in its wake, the revolts in Poland and Hungary that followed later in the year, and the defeat of the so-called antiparty group in the Soviet leadership that was engineered in summer of 1957. The impact of these occurrences, however, was by no means uniform.

In the history faculty at Moscow State University, the group gathered around Leonid Rendel' and Lev Krasnopevets became especially active in the cause of 'carrying through, defending and realizing with new, clean hands . . . the course of renewal' authorized by the Twentieth Congress.²⁷ However, this same group took umbrage at the way in which the 'antiparty' group was expelled from the leadership, regarding this episode as a violation of the norms of intra-party democracy. They enacted their protest by distributing leaflets with a summons 'to carry out the struggle for socialist renewal in the spirit of the Twentieth Congress'.²⁸ For others, however, these same events were a spur in the opposite direction, motivating them to rise not to the defence of democratic procedures but to that of Stalinism.²⁹ This tendency would remain dormant for some time, nurtured in incubation by the official renewal of sacrilegious assaults against the dictator and his legacy that began at the Twenty-Second Congress in 1962 and continued in its aftermath. Thereafter, neo-Stalinism began to surface in official publications sermonizing against the conveniently proximate objects of much popular wrath: philistine 'bureaucrats', intellectuals, Jews and other 'cosmopolitans' regarded as menace to its totem.³⁰

Particularly jarring to many advocates of socialist renewal via the course of liberalization was the fate of the revolution in Hungary. As Vladimir Bukovskii has recalled,

After all the exposures, the censures and posthumous rehabilitations, after all the assurances about the impossibility of a return to the old [order of things], again [we saw] troops, tanks, violence and the lie ... How exhausted we were from the quiet of Moscow, from the peaceful humdrum of life! It seemed that now the truck will pull up right in our yard . . . 'It's time', they'll say to us and they'll hand the brand-new sub-machine-guns over the side. Therefore, when [some] guys . . . guardedly began to initiate a conversation with me about some [unsanctioned] organization, I became so happy that I never even let them finish.³¹

Similarly, news of the Hungarian events arrived as 'welcome grounds' for the activities of the future Union of Communists organized by Viktor Trofimov among students at Leningrad State University.³² The leaflets they distributed called on Soviet citizens to support the Hungarian insurrection. In November 1956, anti-Soviet shouts rang out at the Day of the Revolution parade in Leningrad, while in Yaroslavl a placard bearing the inscription 'We demand the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Hungary' passed before the rostrum of local party-state dignitaries.³³

These outbursts of open political expression were short-lived. Until the mid-1960s, opposition existed almost exclusively in the form of underground groups.³⁴ Most of these professed the philosophy of Marx and Lenin,³⁵ counterpoising in particular the ideas that they found in State and Revolution and 'The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power' to the realities around them so rudely at odds with the very principles enshrined in the official ideology.³⁶ In the context of this tension, the urge to express oneself, to communicate with others, would become irrepressible. In the capital, the catalyst was provided by the unveiling of a monument to the poet, Mayakovskii, in the summer of 1958 at which people soon began to congregate and to engage in spontaneous poetry readings and literary discussions. Gradually, as the talk turned more and more to political themes, a sort of miniature political society was convening at this 'Hyde Park' in Moscow. There, many of the luminaries of the future dissident movement struck up acquaintances that would grow fast in the years ahead.³⁷ But this island of free expression was repeatedly deluged by the police who broke up the meetings, arrested participants and, in a particularly violent attack in April 1961 on those assembled on the holiday honouring the cosmonaut, Yurii Gagarin, put an end to it once and for all.³⁸

Yet out of these encounters another avenue of communication emerged that would become synonymous with the dissident movement - samizdat. Initially, its carbon-copied editions contained those works of renowned Russian poets - Osip Mendel'shtam, Mariya Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak and others - that had been refused publication in the USSR. Soon, a more political content was added in the form of articles penned by so-called 'revisionists' from foreign communist parties. But it was not long before samizdat became a vehicle for self-expression; initially, again, for literary works,³⁹ but soon for other tracts critical of the Soviet system.⁴⁰ In some instances, samizdat publication became hubs around which new groups formed; in others, existing groups were inspired by materials circulated in the underground to launch their own samizdat editions.⁴¹

In sum, the early post-Stalin years witnessed a social phenomenon both new to the Soviet Union and fundamentally at odds with its prevailing order. By taking it on themselves to discuss ideas and exchange information, individuals were violating a taboo. Simultaneously, they were opening that communicative space in which the first fragile shoots of civil and political society were sprouting: orally, in public gatherings such as those at Mayakovskii Square, in informal study groups and throughout the archipelago of Soviet kitchens whose freewheeling discussions would qualify them as state socialism's premier (pre-)political site; in written form, as rough samizdat copy, circulating through the archipelago, connecting those on its many islands (indeed, even some of those in prison camps) into a micro-society that had begun to take on its own identity in opposition to the official order. Stepping into this forbidden zone, many individuals had embarked on journeys that would lead them into new environments where world-views evolved at high speed. Most who had begun their unsanctioned activities as Marxists critical of the existing Soviet order would opt for other political orientations that, paradoxically, were less revolutionary in outward appearance but more destabilizing over the long haul for the triadic construct of Marxism-Leninism.⁴²

Dissidents

In the act of debunking Stalin's cult, the leadership of the Communist Party simultaneously revived in a not insignificant way the category 'democracy' in Soviet society. Whether they did this consciously and sincerely would not be important for our purposes. Rather, the point would be that, by thematizing democracy and socialist legality as virtues to be recaptured in their proposed return to 'Leninist principles' they provided the official discourse with a counterpoint to the authoritarianism previously sanctioned by the cult of the leader. The introduction of these notions - however vague, limited or contradictory their content - transformed the communicative context. Whereas in the early postwar years internal opposition to the Soviet Union had formed around a critique of the regime on the basis of the same Marxist principles that it outwardly professed, after the Twentieth Party Congress opposition would increasingly congeal around another outward profession -'democracy, legality' - that was also at odds with the leadership cult (Lenin's, as appropriated by his extant successor) still present in more attenuated form within the Marxist-Leninist triad. As such, the dyadic relation hitherto prevailing between (Marxist) regime and (Marxist) opposition was superseded by a triangular one that included in modified form the old (Marxist) regime-opposition couple and a new point from which would proceed a discourse oriented to the values of democracy and legality. A discursive field was thereby constructed.

This spatial metaphor 'field', for the ensemble of discursive practices existing in a given system, comes from the work of Pierre Bourdieu who has developed it in his investigation of cultural production.⁴³ In short, 'field' refers to a given mode of social activity or form of work - for instance, material production (class relations), cultural production, jurisprudence or, in the present instance, discursive practices relevant to politics - in which struggles internal to it generate a structure of positions that are occupied by actors pursuing 'strategies' in opposition to others doing the same from the positions that they have occupied. For present purposes, the utility of Bourdieu's conceptualization consists in its joining of the idea of structural relations within a field as determinate of the possible set of positions available to actors at a given moment with the dynamic notions of struggle, strategy and trajectory through which actors change the boundaries of fields, adding new positions and thus altering the relations among those positions that continue to exist as well as the content of the respective positions themselves.⁴⁴ In our view, it would be mistaken to consider the dissident movement as something apart from the field in which it had existed. To the contrary, we can account for the positions taken by those involved and the permutation of positions over time as defined by the structure of the field of cultural-political discourse at one or another conjuncture, beginning with the addition of the third point, democracy/legality, into the regime-Marxist/ oppositionist-Marxist dyad.

Since open political expression remained subject to immediate party-state repression, position-taking relevant to politics occurred primarily on the field of culture in the form of literary-publicist activities. In this regard, the establishment journal of 'liberal' orientation, Novyi mir (under the editorship of Aleksandr Tvardovskii) occupied a pivotal position. Despite the party-state's close supervision and running battles with the censors, Novyi mir managed to combine the respectability attendant on its official status with a limited degree of criticism issuing from a liberal point of view that earned it an enormous amount of prestige within the country's intellectual elite. By remaining within the ambit of the establishment, the journal exchanged editorial autonomy for the possibility of exercising influence within the higher circles, never openly opposing the official line but attempting to correct it by introducing minor innovations and modifications which Novyi mir, as a recognized organ of the party-state, was in a position to do. Although restricted until 1970 (when its editorial board was purged) the journal articulated a viewpoint that would be revived in the mid-1980s by the Soviet regime itself. Perestroika's early outlines of a 'renewal of socialism' mirrored much of what Novyi mir had managed to insert in its pages under far less hospitable conditions.⁴⁵

The powerful combination of elements comprising the position occupied by Novyi mir - cultural prestige plus official respectability, a liberal orientation combined with status in the world of the party-state -exercised a profound influence on the structure of the cultural-political field, determining a set of positions that others would occupy. These positions can be divided into subsets of competitors and opponents, each marked by its relative proximity to state power. Reserving discussion of opponents for the following section, the focus here falls on competitors. They consisted of individuals engaged in literary pursuits who, for whatever motives, refused to submit themselves to the restrictions imposed by the authorities in control of access to the established hierarchy of posts in the field of culture. The positions that took would be characterized generally by an emphasis on values associated with cultural production per se: competence, authenticity, creativity free of constraint and so forth. Those within them would tend to valorize central elements in the code of cultural production in an effort to accumulate what Bourdieu has referred to as 'symbolic' and 'cultural capital'.⁴⁶ Accordingly, these positions placed prestige within the field of culture over the respectability afforded by official organizations, and valued autonomy - the core of liberal ideology - over the rewards and recognition doled out by the party-state authorities.

Those assuming this set of positions entered from various directions. Some had already established careers in literature and in the academic world while others, having been expelled from institutions of higher education, could look forward to effectively no career prospects within their respective vocations. To some extent they shared a common discourse with those in the liberal establishment and were connected to it in various ways: through individuals occupying positions at the boundaries separating establishment from unofficial cultural actors (for instance, the poets Evgenii Evtushenko and Andrei Voznesenskii); via persons who had once held some rank in the establishment and retained contact with others still in it; and by means of works in manuscript or samizdat form, that criss-crossed the boundaries dividing these sets of positions. None the less, the refusal to acknowledge the intellectual authority of the party-state implied a measure of competition with those occupying official positions in the cultural field. In this competition, those outside the institutions maintained by the party-state would pursue a strategy that maximized the value of those resources that they commanded. Since they were not encumbered directly by the constraints of the party-state, their strategy for 'accumulating cultural capital' leaned heavily toward doing what they alone were free to do, namely, to innovate and thus to position themselves as a cultural avant-garde.⁴⁷

Inasmuch as the authorities defined all unsanctioned innovations as hostile acts, those engaging in unsanctioned innovation within the context of the Soviet order were willy-nilly taking up a hostile position toward the authorities. This hostility was directly manifest in the priority assigned by dissidents to the individual, itself an assault on the collectivist ideology of the regime. In this respect, Andrei Amal'rik recalled in his memoirs that he 'had an intuitive enmity toward collective activities, that strongly developed individualism that warred with a Soviet upbringing'.⁴⁸ Similarly, Iosif Brodskii remarked in his Nobel Lecture in 1987 that 'if art teaches anything (and, above all, to the artist) it is the particularity of human existence. Being the most ancient . . . form of private entrepreneurship, voluntarily or not [art] stimulates in a person precisely his feeling of individuality, uniqueness, separateness, converting him from a social animal into a personality.'⁴⁹ This philosophical celebration of the individual - more or less characteristic of the dissident movement - required an innovation in the strategy and tactics of opposition if it were to acquire the capacity to answer the regime 'blow for blow' as individuals such as Amal'rik and Brodskii passionately insisted.⁵⁰ Discussions of these questions preoccupied dissident circles in the 1960s and early 1970s. One possible course of action, that of underground conspiratorial activity, remained a live option and was further radicalized by some in the form of armed struggle with terrorist objectives.⁵¹ But the strategic and tactical innovation adopted, one that effectively inaugurated what came to be known as the dissident movement and characterized its thinking and actions throughout its existence, took precisely the opposite tack. Rather than conspiratorial secrecy and armed struggle, the movement would emphasize non-violence, publicity and open activity. Rather than opposition to the Soviet system, the movement would embrace and scrupulously observe the system's decorative self-representations as set down in Soviet law and the country's Constitution, demanding that the authorities do likewise. This strategy, then, would encase the philosophical emphasis on the individual in a social institution, law, thus establishing a pivot for collective action around the notions of respect for law and a defence of individual rights.

The author of this seminal innovation was the mathematician-philosopher, Aleksandr Esenin-Vol'pin, son of the famous poet, Sergei Esenin. A number of individuals in Moscow who had already participated in public actions, such as those on Mayakovskii Square, readily embraced his strategy, if for no other reason than the fact that their previous activities - followed by arrests, searches of their apartments and KGB surveillance - meant that the door to the underground was for them already closed. Esenin-Vol'pin overcame the skepticism of many others by patiently and relentlessly pointing out the obvious fact: 'our laws', he argued, 'exist only on paper for [purposes of] propaganda and are always turned against you'. They would mean nothing unless and until individuals began to think of themselves as citizens and demand that the laws be observed and enforced.⁵²

In addition to this stroke of tactical genius that impudently turned the tables against the regime by speaking back to power its own words, Esenin-Vol'pin's innovation was of cardinal significance for the inception of political practice in Russia and elsewhere in the USSR. Because of its emphasis on legality, those in the movement would begin to acquaint themselves with law and legal procedure, acquiring thereby a sense of formal rights, learning how to conduct themselves under interrogation by the police and KGB, applying their knowledge of the rules against the authorities themselves (which sometimes succeeded in forcing open those closed courtrooms where their comrades stood on trial), and building over the course of these activities a rudimentary sense of citizenship.⁵³ At the same time, there were clear limits to the political import of this strategy, for it turned the face of the dissident movement ever toward the regime, never toward Russian society. When efforts to persuade the regime proved futile and dissidents turned to world opinion - or, practically speaking, to Western publics and governments - for leverage against the authorities, the socio-cultural divide between dissident elements and the larger society was deepened, as regime propaganda hastened to portray the movement as disloyal, opposed to the homeland and doing the work of foreign enemies. Perhaps these consequences were the unavoidable results of a project to mount public opposition to a regime that denied a public. But dissidents contributed to this same problem by directing their messages to the state, rather than to society.⁵⁴ Ironically, the movement did make an important impact in the sphere of the state but registered at most marginal gains in the sphere of its announced intentions: the creation of civic institutions and the development of citizenship in Russia.

The protests launched over the arrest of the writers Aleksandr Sinyavskii and Yulii Daniel in September 1965 have commonly been used to date the inception of the dissident movement.⁵⁵ As Peter Reddaway has suggested, these arrests appeared to signal a decision by the regime to return to the practice of jailing prominent figures in the cultural establishment for engaging in unsanctioned activities - in this instance, for publishing works of fiction in the West - a practice that had largely lapsed since Stalin's death.⁵⁶ But this observation should be placed in context. On one hand, repression of this type, while administered in considerably smaller doses, had by no means disappeared with the dictator's demise, as attested by the well-known cases of Boris Pasternak and losif Brodskii, the three-year internment (1962-5) of Mikhail Naritsa in a psychiatric hospital,⁵⁷ and the similar incarceration of Valerii Tarsis whose early release was prompted by the pressure of his sympathizers abroad.⁵⁸ On the other, various groups of intellectuals had already been organizing themselves in the summer of 1965 and thus were prepared to respond to these new arrests rather quickly,⁵⁹ indicating that the Sinyavskii-Daniel affair was more catalyst than cause of the sudden appearance of open dissent on a scale hitherto unprecedented in the USSR.

On 5 December 1965, the first demonstration for human rights was staged at Moscow's Pushkin Square, where Esenin-Vol'pin and others from the days of the Mayakovskii Square gatherings delivered speeches that raised the specific demand for glasnost (openness and full information) in the coming trial of Sinyavskii and Daniel, as well as the general slogan: 'Observe the Soviet Constitution!' This gathering was of seminal import in three respects. First, it inaugurated a new practice of public demonstration that would be repeated yearly on 5 December at Pushkin Square until the eclipse of the dissident movement at the close of the 1970s.⁶⁰ Moreover, it embedded at the foundation of the movement the principles associated with Esenin-Vorpin's innovation: legality, glasnost and an explicit refusal to forsake the high ground of morality for the lowlands, as understood by the dissidents, of a more practically oriented politics.⁶¹ Of course, this emphasis on morality was not without profound political ramifications in the context of the state socialist order. As Andrei Amal'rik observed, 'the dissidents ingeniously accomplished a simple thing - in an unfree country, they began to comport themselves as free people and by that alone [they began] to change the moral atmosphere and traditional methods for running the country'.⁶² But the dissidents' proclivity to address the authorities rather than society as well as their abstemious attitude toward politics would show their painful effects in later years.

Second, the demonstration at Pushkin Square represented a Rubicon for all those participating in it. To undertake 'the walk out onto the square', as this rite of passage became known in dissident circles, was simultaneously to walk out of one world and into another. It marked a turning point from private non-conformity, easily camouflaged in the landscape of indifferent loyalty that characterized the Brezhnev years, to public opposition. For those participating in their first demonstration or, for the first time, affixing their signatures to petitions protesting the incarceration of other members of the movement,⁶³ the sense of moral choice in the face of potentially dreadful consequences - and, moreover, in the company of others who had made the same choice and were prepared to face those same consequences - was of inestimable moment in producing solidarity within the dissident community and raising its spiritual elan.

Finally, the demonstration at Pushkin Square and accompanying Petition campaigns occurred as part of the first cycle in what would become a spiral of protest and reaction that characterized the relationship between the dissidents and the regime throughout the movement's existence.⁶⁴ In January 1967, a fresh batch of samizdat activists was arrested: first, Yurii Galanskov (editor of 'Feniks-66') along with three colleagues; then, Aleksandr Ginzburg (who had edited 'Sintaksis').

Immediately, a demonstration in their defence was staged at Pushkin Square and almost as immediately broken up by the police.⁶⁵ The subsequent trials called forth new petition drives on behalf of those arrested, whose intention, like many similar petitions and open letters of this period, was simply to persuade the authorities that the observance of legality and human rights was in the interests of the entire social order, theirs included.⁶⁶ Tactically, at this point, the organizers pinned their hope on the possibility that the appearance on these petitions of a number of signatures from members of the scientific and literary establishments would encourage the regime to come to its senses.⁶⁷ But in vain.

The trials of Galanskov, Ginzburg and others that took place in January 1968 initiated a new round of position-taking on the cultural-political field, establishing patterns that would prevail for the duration of the epoch of dissent. Relations between the movement and the regime took a steep turn toward confrontation, thus altering those between the movement and the liberal establishment as well. Compiling a collection of materials on the trials that was then published abroad, Pavel Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz for the first time turned from attempting to persuade the Soviet regime and 'toward world public opinion',⁶⁸ thus commencing a new epoch of appeals to the West and regular contact between dissidents and Western journalists stationed in Moscow. Concomitantly, many intellectuals on the apron of the dissident movement washed their hands of further association with it and retreated to the physical security of the establishment, whose liberal members were taking increasingly hostile positions toward their cultural-political competitors.⁶⁹ For the next two decades, 'dissident' would equate with 'pariah' for the Soviet establishment, many of whose liberal members participated in a new round of petition campaigns organized by the authorities to discredit various individuals in the movement and to drive them from their jobs.⁷⁰

The year 1968 was also a critical turning point in other respects. It marked the appearance of Andrei Sakharov's Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, circulated first in samizdat form and then published abroad, a work that foreshadowed his entry into dissident activity.⁷¹ In April, the Chronicle of Current Events made its first appearance. This unique journal, devoted to documenting human rights violations in the Soviet Union, represented a vital communications link among dissident groups scattered throughout the country, overcoming their mutual isolation and building a sense of the movement's presence on a nationwide scale. Carbon copies of its typewritten editions - coming out at first monthly and then, after a two year hiatus (1972-4) on a more irregular basis - were also smuggled out of the USSR, thus

establishing a bridgehead to 'world opinion' that leaders in the movement, more and more despairing of the chances for persuading the Soviet regime, intensely sought to cultivate.⁷² The year 1968 also witnessed the liberalization of the communist order in Czechoslovakia, the 'Prague Spring', toward which Russia's dissident movement, naturally, had a tremendous affinity. It was, indeed, during that same spring that the term 'democratic movement' first appeared in dissident circles as a replacement for their previous self-designation as a 'movement for human rights'. The attack launched on Czechoslovakia by members of the Warsaw Treaty Organization on 21 August was answered four days later by a small group of intellectuals and workers who staged a protest demonstration on Red Square which, however brief (the KGB pounced on the demonstrators immediately after they unveiled their placards), was noteworthy as a daring display of civic commitment.⁷³ Leaflets condemning the invasion appeared in Moscow and in a number of other Soviet cities, along with individual and small-group acts of protest.⁷⁴

While prospects dimmed for persuading the regime or for exercising influence on it via liberal members of the cultural establishment, dissidents searched for other allies. By the end of the 1960s, the Chronicle of Current Events had expanded its focus on human rights to include those asserting the rights of national (such as Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans and Ukrainian nationalists) and religious minorities (principally Jews and the Lithuanian Catholic Committee for the Defence of the Rights of Believers). Similarly, the formation in November 1970 of the Committee for Human Rights in the USSR was undertaken primarily to increase the visibility of the movement abroad, to forge new links with national and international organizations outside the country and thus to lend the movement additional status and clout inside the USSR. In reply, the regime broadened its array of tactics, became more selective in the measures that it took against dissidents and succeeded in driving two important wedges into that internal solidarity so important for a movement constructing itself on the basis of moral criteria.

One wedge involved recruiting defectors and redeploying them on the side of the regime. The most successful use of this tactic involved Petr Yakir and Viktor Krasin, movement stalwarts who were pressured and/or persuaded by the authorities after their arrests in 1972 to repent of their actions (which they did in front of Soviet television cameras), to give testimony against others in the movement and to summon their former comrades-in-arms to follow their examples and make peace with the regime.⁷⁵ This episode dealt a heavy blow to a movement relying on individual commitment to the moral imperative of resisting the Soviet Goliath. It shook its moral solidarity by rudely intruding the dark categories of ambition, personal advantage-seeking and betrayal into what had been a community defining itself solely in terms of pristine and selfless devotion to principles. Innocence lost would never be recovered.⁷⁶

The second wedge was a relaxation of restrictions against emigration, coupled with a harshening of the consequences for engaging in dissident activities. This tactic had the double advantage of countering some of the dissidents' criticism of the Soviet regime by demonstrating with thousands of new exit visas the authorities' regard for certain liberal principles, while at the same time depleting the ranks of their opponents in the movement. Worn out by harassment, searches, blackmail and arrest, many dissidents emigrated. Having been removed from their professional or academic posts, here was an opportunity for them again to work in their chosen fields. Facing perhaps fewer prospects for achieving their announced goals than seemed present when they had taken their first 'walk onto the square', this was a chance for them to lay down their burdens in some country where human rights already seemed secure. Less perceptibly, perhaps, emigration eroded the moral solidarity of the movement in the same way as had defection and betrayal.

Despite a brief revival of activity in the mid-1970s - occasioned by the regime's campaigns against Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that rallied many to their defence, as well as by the conclusion of the Final Act of the Helsinki Accords whose provisions on human rights, officially endorsed by the Soviet government, seemed to reopen possibilities for this struggle in the USSR⁷⁷ - the close of the decade roughly coincided with the collapse of the movement. Above all other factors, redoubled repression would account for this result, especially the step-level increase in dosage administered in the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan.⁷⁸ Yet repression alone cannot explain the fact that, when the regime relaxed its policy enormously a few years later under perestroika, there was no resurgence of activity among those active earlier in the dissident movement. Moreover, perestroika involved the regime's adoption of a number of the ideas previously espoused by the dissident movement, yet dissidents overwhelmingly stood aside from the challenge of implementing them. In order to address these apparent paradoxes, we turn to the content of those positions on the cultural-political field taken by members of the movement.

By the early 1970s, the general profile of the dissident movement had been established. The positions that it assumed, exploiting the cultural and symbolic capital available to effectively all its leading personages,

was one of moral resistance to a regime that it correspondingly characterized as immoral. From this perspective, an orientation toward political activity would run the risk of depleting this same capital. Whereas it accumulated commensurately with acts of free expression, resistance and suffering in the name of ethical principles, the prosaic aspects of political activity - say, working out concrete solutions to one or another social problem, or seeking some form of compromise with the regime - would only cause it to dissipate. To be sure, prior to perestroika the Soviet regime sent no clear signals that it was prepared to seek any form of accommodation. If anything, it tended to reinforce the movement's overall posture of moral resistance by, on one hand, signing international conventions on human rights that (with the exception of easing restrictions on emigration in the mid-1970s) it would disregard while, on the other, singling out openly political activity as the target for its swiftest and hardest blows.⁷⁹ But if the position taken by the regime thus largely determined the pre-political 'moral space' on the cultural-political field occupied by the dissident movement, it would also be important to recall how the movement constructed its own identity in the process of filling it.

This construction, of course, was not free of disputes within the movement, but that viewpoint arguing against any dialogue with an immoral regime would appear to have held trumps in a game whose stakes concerned status within a community expressing itself in terms of moral categories.⁸⁰ Those members advocating a turn toward more practical activities had little impact⁸¹ as energies flowed in other directions - defending luminaries such as Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, monitoring human rights abuses for world opinion or publishing abroad the journal Pamyat' that recorded much of the history of independent social movements in the USSR- which, irrespective of the influence that they had on the course of events in the Soviet Union, did promise a higher return on the investment of symbolic capital. On this field, where material interests were marked negatively, the matter of identity was paramount. As such, the discourse developed by the dissident movement was rooted in the dyadic construct of dissident/regime whose derivative pairings - moral/immoral, legal/illegal, enlightened/doctrinaire, freedom/slavery, the West/the Soviet Union - tended to preclude a practical orientation toward surrounding social circumstances and some accommodation with the regime responsible for them. Since, prior to Perestroika, the Soviet regime never seemed to waver in its resolve to Perform up to these expectations, it helped to secure the particular identity adopted by the dissidents.

intermittently at least, reversals in the valence of the binary opposition - dissident/regime - occurred at micro-level. Here, it would be important to recall the apparently incongruous fact that ideas generated in dissident circles found their way into the highest echelons of the party-state and there contributed to the process of pursuing some alternative course that would renovate the Soviet system, a process under way by the early 1980s that led directly to the ascendance of Mikhail Gorbachev and his project of 'perestroika'. The principal conduit for these ideas was the KGB, an organization familiar with the content of dissident thought like no other. In addition to the copious collections of dissident writings obtained by conducting searches of their apartments and confiscating samizdat manuscripts, KGB officers led innumerable interrogations and 'conversations' with members of the movement that frequently probed the critical recommendations that not a few dissidents were prepared to offer. Inasmuch as one of us was involved directly with the KGB in this respect, we can say with some assurance that, by the late 1970s, certain officials in that organization were displaying a positive interest in what some dissidents had to say.⁸²

Nationalists and Stalinists on the cultural-political field

Khrushchev's dismantling of the Stalinist triad - limited as it may have been and partially reversed by his successors as it was - contributed to the creation of two other sets of positions on the USSR's cultural-political field. Unlike the ideational core of the dissident movement whose identification with democracy and legality represented an inversion of one element in the triad (the cult of the leader) these positions were established by valorizing individually two of the elements themselves: nationalism and the leadership cult of Stalin. A number of derivative distinctions would then follow from the positions staked out on the basis of these elements dislodged from the Stalinist synthesis. First, whereas the dissidents' emphasis on human rights featured the individual as opposed to the collectivist doctrine of the regime, nationalists and Stalinists would distinguish themselves from that same regime and from others on the field by the particular collectivities that their ideologies celebrated - either the historical Russian nation or the Soviet people with that same nation marching at its head under the guidance of Stalin's teachings. Second, nationalists and Stalinists would take sharp issue with dissidents over Russia's relations with the West. Important in this respect was the affinity between the primary terms in the discourse of the dissidents and those accented in the dominant cultural-political system in the West. Since the dissidents shared a more or less common language with Western publics and governments, they monopolized these foreign sources of cultural and symbolic capital. Accordingly, nationalists and Stalinists would attempt to devalue that stock by reversing the valences apparent in the dissidents' discourse. For them the West would represent neither a model for Russia nor a (potential) ally against the Soviet regime but an aggressive 'other' whose corrosive influences on hallowed Russian or Soviet cultural values and institutions had to be arrested and undone. Third, nationalists and Stalinists cast their identities in large part against the secular-rational dimension of the dissidents' discourse. In opposition to its canonization of the individual in his or her capacity as a reasoning, conscientious being whose proper communitarian life reflected these values in social institutions based on law and consent, nationalists and Stalinists substituted - with varying degrees of obscurantism - mystical notions retrieved from a suitably idealized past that enfolded the matters of the individual, society and the structure of authority into visions of some millenarian community founded on righteous belief that they alleged to be clearly visible in their rear-view mirrors.

Schematically, Figure 2.1 sets out the structure of the basic positions taken by these groups on the Soviet cultural-political field. The organization of this chart derives from a semantic model, the 'semiotic square', developed by A. J. Greimas and F. Rastier to depict the set of relations implicit in any signifying act. The structure of the model is constituted by the rules of opposition and inversion, such that any unit of meaning calls forth an 'elementary structure of signification' composed of: a positive statement of the term (represented by A in Figure 2.1), which is distinguished by its opposite (-A), its inverse (A), and the inverse of its opposite (-A). The terms in the model stand in relations of 'mutual presupposition' whereby the positive one (A) necessarily conveys as integral to its meaning the other three terms in the square, in the manner that, say, the positive statement 'white' would derive its meaning by calling forth the corresponding terms in the elementary structure: 'black' (-A), 'non-white' (A) and 'non-black' (-A).⁸³

Following the logic of this model, we can regard the structure of the Soviet cultural-political field in the post-Stalin period as consisting of toe relations among the positive term, the triadic construct of Marxism-Leninism (in weakened condition due to the official discrediting of the Stalin cult), its opposite as represented in the discourse of the dissidents, its inverse thematizing the nationalist element torn from the Stalinist synthesis and rendered in non-Marxist-Leninist terms, and what appears as the inverse of its opposite, namely, the Stalinist position. For our purposes, the model has two obvious drawbacks. Since it is

 

Figure 2.1    The structure of the Soviet cultural-political field (during two decades prior to perestroika)

synchronous and abstract, it neither captures the development of the positions appearing in it nor discriminates among the shades of difference empirically present at one or another moment within each of them. Moreover, translating its categories into those of our subject matter results in some abstruse terminology, particularly the rendering of the 'inverse of the opposite' as 'non-anti-Marxism-Leninism' (which is to say no more than that the Stalinist position, while opposed to the regime's version of Marxism-Leninism, was not constructed on opposition to Marxism-Leninism per se). In the face of these drawbacks, the model can claim two principal advantages: economy and elegance. The former refers to the fact that all of the basic positions on the cultural-political field are included in a simple formulation; the latter, to the symmetry that it discloses regarding the relations among them (conflict/ collaboration and affinity/rivalry, as set out on the sides of the square). Below, we have occasion to refer to a few instances in which certain actors appear to behave in ways uncharacteristic of the positions that they occupy. These contrary cases, however, represent no obvious difficulties for our approach. Not only would they be consistent with Bourdieu's concepts of 'strategy' and 'trajectory' - according to which some probability obtains that actors will be disposed to produce new distinctions for themselves by taking risks that innovatively combine elements of one code with those of another - but these very cases constitute rare deviations from the patterns described by the model, amounting to exceptions that show the rule. Tellingly, none of them had succeeded in altering the structure in which it had appeared. Thus, the

model's utility consists in identifying the fundamental positions themselves and showing how these represent neither separate schools of thought nor 'indifferent variety' but structured oppositions distinguishing by relations of 'mutual presupposition' that small section of the overall population active on the cultural-political field in this period.

From this perspective, our attention is drawn to how the primary constructs enacted in the discourse of each position define, and are defined by, those of the others, resulting in the relations among them that are specified on the four sides of the model as 'conflict' (between A and -A), 'rivalry' (-A and A), 'collaboration' (-A and A) and 'affinity' (A and -A). These relations of attraction/repulsion would account for the identities assumed by the various positions, irrespective of the personal philosophies belonging to individuals who would take them. So, for instance, the existence of a 'liberal' element within the Communist Party, reported to have been furtively active in promoting a radical reform agenda for the Soviet system,⁸⁴ would not count as a distinction within this structure, since it would be defined against all positions in the model except by that to which this element belonged, namely, the Soviet regime. This liberal element would then be distinguishable only within the position occupied by the regime. Accordingly, in those specific situations characterized by an intensification of conflict between positions A and -A, this distinction within position A would readily come to nothing - as we have seen, above, in the instance of hostilities between the liberal cultural establishment and their competitors in the dissident movement. Similarly, individuals of Marxist persuasion joined the ranks of the dissidents within which their political-philosophic leanings would constitute a distinction that neither added nor subtracted anything significant from the position itself as defined by its relations with other positions in the structure. Indeed, it would not be until the collapse of the dissident movement that those articulating a Marxist discourse would be able to claim the position left vacant by this collapse.⁸⁵

If the dissident movement was pre-political - that is, as anticipating rather than realizing a political practice in its fundamental constructs regarding human rights, the rule of law and the desideratum of democracy - then the other three positions depicted in Figure 2.1 were anti-political. That aspect of the Soviet regime concerned us in the Preceding chapter; here we might add a word about nationalists and Stalinists in order to complete our discussion of the USSR's cultural-Political field. The adjective 'anti-political' would refer to the content of these positions as determined by their places in the overall structure of the field. By valorizing one or another element split off from the Stalinist triad, both positions consisted positively of certain fundamentalist 'truths' at odds with political life. This is more than a matter of abstract definition. Whereas the ideas espoused by dissidents, as well as the subsequent activities of a few members of the movement, contributed directly and importantly to the rebirth of politics in Russia, the same cannot be said for either the nationalists or the Stalinists. To be sure, nationalists and Stalinists would become players on the political field once it had been re-established. They would form parties, stage election campaigns, lead protest demonstrations and so on. But the trajectory of their political activities pointed toward closing down this field itself, in accordance with the mandate of their respective eschatologies. On the Soviet cultural-political field, Alexander Yanov's assessment seems to us a valid one. Despite surface differences between them or the planks in one or another formal programme, both positions 'share the project of constructing an economic and cultural model for Russia in which there would be no place for the intelligentsia sympathetic toward the West'.⁸⁶

The right side of our model labels the relations between the dissidents and the nationalists as 'rivalry'. Above all, this rivalry concerned their struggle to define the grounds for opposing the Soviet regime, an issue that determined the relations between these positions. Nationalist opposition first appeared as the АLL-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of the People (VSKhSON in its Russian acronym), an underground organization formed in Leningrad in 1964 that consisted of some sixty members dedicated to staging an armed insurrection against the Soviet state and the subsequent establishment of an order based on traditional values and the Russian Orthodox religion.⁸⁷ The apprehension of this group by the authorities in 1967 brought an end to insurrectionary strategies in the nationalist camp. Thereafter, their activities mainly focused on disseminating their ideology via the written word, either in samizdat - an innovation that had been rather well developed by their dissident rivals - or in officially published periodicals and books.

Like those in the VSKhSON,⁸⁸ many adopting the nationalist position had previously been members of the radical Marxist underground. Following arrest and confinement in penal institutions where their views metamorphosed, they returned to society espousing one or another version of Russian nationalist ideology. Commenting on his own experience, Vladimir Osipov - who, for his Marxist writings in samizdat, had been sent to a strict-regime labour camp in 1961 - remarked that 'not without reason is a concentration camp officially called a corrective labour colony. They come in atheists and go out Christians. They have been corrected.'⁸⁹ Osipov's conversion led to his founding of the samizdat journal Veche (1968-74) whose brand of nationalism was distinguished from others by its relative moderation. While xenophobic, it was not rabidly so; nor was it overtly anti-Semitic. However, it also opened its pages to writers expounding such views and these proved immensely popular with the journal's readership.⁹⁰ Other manifestations of extremist nationalist ideology surfacing in the second half of the 1960s would include the manifesto 'Slovo Natsii' which was decidedly fascist in orientation⁹¹ as were the views advanced by the circle around the economist, A. Fetisov,⁹² or contained in the neo-Stalinist leaflet 'A Code of Morals' that issued clandestinely from the Moscow City Committee of the Komsomol.⁹³

While at least one group in the nationalist camp, calling itself the Democratic Movement of the Soviet Union, explored the possibilities for joining forces with the dissidents,⁹⁴ the rivalry between these positions overcame any significant collaboration. The issue of the proper symbolic posture of resistance to the regime proved more important than the practical task of actually organizing a common effort against it. Moreover, the appearance of nationalist themes in Soviet publications,⁹⁵ the Great Russian chauvinist and Stalinist orientations assumed by official journals such as Molodaya gvadiya, Ogonek and Oktyabr',⁹⁶ and the patronage afforded by the state to the АН-Russian Society for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Monuments within whose mass membership (numbering 7 million by the early 1970s) nationalists propounded their views and recruited new members to their groups,⁹⁷ indicated not only that nationalists could readily forge an alliance with Stalinists (which, by the beginning of the 1970s, they appeared to have done)⁹⁸ but that nationalists could expect a considerable measure of tolerance on the part of the regime. For this reason, as well as their common emphasis on patriotism - albeit with a somewhat different flourish in each case - regime-nationalist relations appear in Figure 2.1 as 'oblique'. Solzhenitsyn's famous Letter to the Soviet Leaders, in which the author advised the regime to keep its power but lose its Marxism, would qualify as a representative expression of this oblique relationship.

On the left-hand side of Figure 2.1, the relationship between regime and Stalinists is characterized by 'affinity' while the arrow running between Stalinists and dissidents is marked 'oblique'. In the latter instance, this connotes no more than the fact that although each of the ideologies advanced from these positions represented the inverse of the other, the relations between them were in each case mediated by the regime. Dissidents would sign appeals to the authorities arguing against the rehabilitation of Stalin,⁹⁹ just as official journals such as Molodaya a would fill their pages with Stalinist tracts denouncing the corrupting effect of 'foreign' influences in the country, influences associated domestically, of course, with the dissident movement. With respect to the affinity that we have noted in the relations between the regime and the Stalinists, we should underscore the fact that each of these positions, unlike the other two in the cultural-political field, shared a common Marxist-Leninist vocabulary which tended to muffle their quarrels, making them differences of interpretation more than differences of principle. In conclusion, we might rely on a couple of the exceptions that we have mentioned in order to show the rule here.

The exceptions concerned two incidents that occurred at the beginning of the 1970s in which official rebukes of Stalinist tracts were issued by top officials in the regime.¹⁰⁰ In one instance, the authoritative journal Kommunist overtly condemned Molodaya gvardiya for publishing a number of Stalinist articles and poems that contradicted the official ideology of the party-state prevailing at the time. However, contrary to standard Soviet procedures that required a reshuffling - if not a complete sacking - of the journal's editorial board in the wake of such a judgement, no jobs were lost and Molodaya gvardiya's Stalinist orientation persisted thereafter. In the second case, Aleksandr Yakovlev, then acting head of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party's Central Committee, published a long article in the November 1971 number of Literaturnaya gazeta in which he railed against the anti-Leninist positions taken by nationalists and Stalinists in a number of official publications. This episode resulted in the loss of one job, Yakovlev's, as the party-state's chief ideologist was packed off to Canada to serve as Soviet ambassador until Mikhail Gorbachev would fetch him home some thirteen years later to take up new duties as chief architect for perestroika.

 

Notes:

* The chapter is written in cooperation with Vyatcheslav V. Igrunov.

1    Peter Reddaway has estimated that, at its highwater mark in the early 1970s, membership in the dissident movement for the entire USSR numbered no more than 2,000. See his Uncensored Russia (New York: American Heritage Press, 1972), p. 23.

2   A. I. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, 1918-1956. Opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniya, vol. II (Paris: YMCA Press, 1989), pp. 28-33.

3   Ibid., p. 164.

4   Address by N. Korzhavin at the Moscow State Historical-Archival Institute (March, 1989).

5   Another case would be that of Revol't Pimenov who was interned in a psychiatric hospital for resigning from the Komsomol in protest over the party-state's anti-Yugoslav campaign in the late 1940s. Boris Vail', Osobo opasen (London: Overseas Publication Interchange, 1980), p. 154.

6   A. V. Zhigulin, Chemye kamni: avtobiograficheskaya povest' (Moscow: Moskovstoi rabochii, 1989), pp. 32, 48, 204.

7   V. Iofe, 'Obzor Leningradskikh politicheskikh protsessov (periodizatsiya i istochniki)' (paper presented at the International Conference on "The Dissident Movement in the USSR, 1950-1980', Moscow, 24-6 August 1992), p. 40 (Archive of the Moscow Bureau of Information Exchange [hereafter, M-BIO]).

8    Zhigulin, Chemye kamni, pp. 28, 33.

9   Ibid., p. 28.

10   Zhigulin (ibid., p. 75), for instance, recounts how the son of a provincial party secretary managed to acquire a copy of Lenin's letter to the Thirteenth Congress of the Communist Party which called for Stalin's removal from the post of General Secretary, and how this radicalized the views of those in his underground circle.

11    Having been arrested with others in his group for distributing subversive leaflets, Vladimir Gershuni greeted the inmates on his arrival at a prison camp by exclaiming, 'Now we again are revolutionaries . . . only [this time] against Soviet power!' (quoted in Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag, p. 44); Georgii Pomerants related similar incidents in his conversation with V. Igrunov and S. Mitrokhin, (manuscript, M-BIO archives), p. 1. I. V. Mazus has remarked of the times that 'our groups were isolated and as defenseless as children, but we combined fundamentally the old Russian revolutionary traditions, including that of Nechaev, with everything that we ourselves were able to understand and see for ourselves'. See Ms Gde ty byl? (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 1992), p. 100.

12   Zhigulin, Chemye kamni, p. 31. Another group, led by Maya Ulanovskaya, Susanna Pechuro and Evgenii Gurevich, called itself the Union for the Struggle for the Cause of Revolution but was similarly Marxist in orientation. N. M. and M. A. Ulanovskii, Istoriya odnoi sem'i (New York: Chalidze, 1982), pp. 305-6; A. A. Yakobson, Pochva i sud'ba (Moscow: Vest', 1992), pp. 240-2, 340-1.

13   R. D. Orlova,  Vospominaniya о neproshedshem vremeni (Moscow: Slovo, 1993), p. 386; Yu. A. Gastev, 'Sud'ba "neshchikh sibaritov'", Pamyat' 1 (1976), pp. 232-68; also his 'Letter to the Editor', Pamyat' 3 (1978), pp. 539-57.

14   M. Ivanovich, 'Molodezhnaya terroristicheskaya organizatsiya (1944-1945)', Pamyat' 1 (1976), pp. 219-31; E. I. Neizvestnyi, Govorit Neizvestnyi (Perm: Permskie Novosti, 1991), pp. 30-3.

15   Amongst others, M. K. Mamardashvili, 'Nachalo vsegda istorichno, t. e. sluchaino', Voprosy metodologii 1 (1991), pp. 44-52; A. M. Pyatigorskii and V. N. Sadovskii, 'Kak my izuchali filosofiyu. Moskovskii universitet, 50-e gody', Svobodnaya mysl'2 (1993), pp. 42-54.

16   For documents concerning student actions in these years, see E. Taranov, ' "Raskachaem Leninskie gory!" Iz istorii "vol'nodumstva" v Moskovskom universitete (1955-1956 g.g.)', Svobodnaya misl' 10 (1993), pp. 94-103. The reminiscences of Grigorii Pomerants have been set out in 'Korzina tsvetov nobelevskomu laureatu', Oktyabr 11 (1990), pp. 144-6, and in the conversation cited above (M-BIO), pp. 14-15.

17   K. M. Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniya (Moscow: Novosti, 1989), p. 261.

18   V. K. Bukovskii, I vozvrashchaetsya veter (Moscow: Demokraticheskaya Rossiya, 1990), pp. 77-8.

19   S. I. Osipov, 'Za kulisami velikikh torzhestv', Izvestiya (6 November 1992), p.3.

20   S. D. Rozhdestvenskii [V. lofe], 'Materialy k istorii samodeyatel'nykh politicheskikh ob"edinenii v SSSRposle 1945 g.', Pamyat' 5 (1981), p. 232.

21   N. Yanevich [Elena Evnina], 'Institut mirovoi literatury v 1930-e - 70-e gody', Pamyat' 5 (1981), p. 115.

22   Yanevich continues thus in her memoir: 'Young people, having heard the story of the consequences of "the cult" wanted to examine the reasons for this phenomenon . . . People began to think, to compare, to criticize and to draw far-reaching conclusions.' In the case of her Institute, this led to an open 'uprising' against its director. Ibid., pp. 115-17.

23   Rozhdestvenskii, 'Materialy k istorii samodeyatel'nykh politicheskikh ob"edinenii', p. 251.

24   Orlova, Vospominaniya о neproshedshem vremeni, pp. 210, 223-6; Yu. A. Orlov, Opasnye mysli, (Moscow: Argumenty i fakty, 1991), pp. 114-17.

25   Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: a History of the Soviet Union From Within (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 329-32.

26   Yakobson, Pochva i sud'ba, p. 240.

27   Rozhdestvenskii, 'Materialy k istorii samodeyatel'nykh politicheskikh ob"edinenii', p. 232.

28   Ibid., p. 237.

29   The poet F. Chuev, of Stalinist persuasion, recounts how the crushing of the 'anti-party' group inspired him at age sixteen to compose a panegyric to the fallen party leaders (Lazar Kaganovich, Vyacheslav Molotov, et al.) entitled 'We don't believe it'. This, he says, was his 'first verse not coinciding with the official point of view'. See his Tak govoril Kaganovich (Moscow: Otechestvo, 1992), p. 15.

30   Roy Medvedev, Kniga о sotsialisticheskoi demokratii (Amsterdam and Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle, 1972), pp. 53-5, 216-18.

31    The organization that Bukovskii joined was a conspiratorial network preparing terrorist actions. Bukovskii, I vozvrashchaetsya veter, pp. 85-6.

32   Rozhdestvenskii, 'Materialy k istorii samodeyatel'nykh politicheskikh ob"edinenii', p. 251.

33   Osipov, 'Za kulisami', p. 3.

34   In Moscow, the group formed principally of students from the Library Institute decided overwhelmingly to pursue only underground, conspiratorial activity. One member, Revol't Pimenov, has claimed that his was the only voice advocating an open organization. A similar situation occurred in Leningrad at the Forestry Institute. See Pimenov's 'Vospominaniya. Chast' 1. Odin politicheskii protsess', Pamyat' 2 (1977), pp. 160-260 and part 2 of his article in Pamyat' 3 (1978), pp. 7-119.

35   Non-Marxists also joined these groups, attracted by their atmosphere of intellectual freedom. Rozhdestvenskii, 'Materialy k istorii samodeyatel'nykh politicheskikh ob"edinenii'.

36   M. Kheifets, 'Russkii patriot V. Osipov', Kontinent 27-8 (1981), p. 165.

37   Among them were Vladimir Bukovskii, Yurii Galanskov, Vladimir Osipov, Viktor Khaustov and Eduard Kuznetsov. Bukovskii, / vozvrashchaetsya veter, p. 113.

38   Kheifets, 'Russkii patriot V. Osipov', p. 180.

39   The major literary forms of samizdat at this time included the journals edited by Aleksandr Ginzburg ('Sintaksis') and Yurii Galanskov ('Feniks'). See also the collection of materials published in Novoe literatumoe obozrenie 5 (1993), pp. 186-290.

40   For instance, V. Ronkin and S. Khakhaev, 'Ot diktatury byurokratii k diktature proletariata', (M-BIO archives).

41   An example of the former would be the journal, Kolokol, (The Веll) (1962-5), put out by graduates of the Leningrad Technical Institute who named it after Alexander Herzen's famous revolutionary newspaper of the previous century. See N. Peskov, 'Delo "Kolokola"', Pamyat' 1 (1976), pp. 260-84; V. Sazhin, 'Druz'ya-tovarishchi', lerusalim 43 (1988), pp. 135-53. For examples of the latter, see the materials in Novoe literatumoe obozrenie 5 (1993), pp. 186-290, and S. M. Dovlatov, 'Remeslo' (manuscript, M-BIO archives).

42   Leonid Rendel' and Vladimir Osipov would be among the leading examples. Bukovskii has observed that by the time that the gatherings at Mayakovskii Square had come to an end, 'already there were practically no socialists among us.' (I vozvrashchaetsya veter, p. 113).

43   Andrei Amal'rik has applied a similar approach to cultural production during the USSR's dissident period in the areas of unofficial artistic life, including its intrusions into official theatre. See bis Zapiski dissidenta (Moscow: Slovo, 1991), esp. pp. 13-19.

44   Pierre Bourdieu's concepts are set out in his The Field of Cultural Production in Randal Johnson (ed.), (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); also in Bourdieu, In Other Words (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1990) and Distinction: a Social Critique of Judgement and Taste (Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 1984).

45   For the history of the journal during the Khrushchev years, see V. Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremya Khrushcheva (Moscow: Knizhnaya palata, 1991). For a more extended historical treatment, see Dina Spechler, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novyi Mir and the Soviet Regime (New York: Praeger, 1982).

46   Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, pp. 42-67, 75, 82-6; also his Distinction. Craig Calhoun, 'Habitus, Field and Capital: the Question of Historical Specificity' in C. Calhoun et al. (eds.), Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 61-88.

47   Another innovation in the media available in the cultural-political field was the so-called author's song (avtorskaya pesnya) pioneered as early as the 1940s and 1950s by M. L. Ancharov and B. Sh. Okudzhava, but which developed into a genuine cultural phenomenon in the 1960s: the 'bard movement'. These compositions, sometimes employing the verse of poets denied official recognition, exhibited varying degrees of protest against, and criticism of, social conditions, expressed usually in lyrical images. Some 'bards' participated directly in dissident activities (for instance, Aleksandr Galich and Yulii Kim); others refrained, thus protecting their standing within the establishment (Okudzhava, Vladimir Vysotskii). The high-water mark of this movement occurred in the latter half of the 1960s when an unofficial Club of Free Song was founded by (primarily) members of the urban intelligentsia which, under the aegis of the Siberian Division of the Academy of Sciences, staged a festival ('Pesnya-68') in March 1968 where artists performed uncensored compositions before a large audience. The songs of dissident Aleksandr Galich - 'Karaganda', 'Staratel'skii val'sok' and 'Pamyati Pasternaka' - took top honours. Within weeks, a newspaper and administrative campaign was launched against the festival's organizers and participants, ensuring that such a venue for free expression would not be available again in the USSR for nearly a generation. Our information on the festival and its aftermath comes from: a speech by V. Turiyanskii at an evening in remembrance of Aleksandr Galich, Meridian House of Culture (October 1993); Nina Geitner (ed.), Zaklinanie dobra i zla (Moscow: Progress, 1991), p. 446; L. I. Bogoraz and A. Yu. Daniel, 'V poiskakh nesushchestvuyushchei nauki (dissidentstvo kak istoricheskaya problema)', Problemy VostochnoiEvropy 37-8 (1993), p. 143.

48   Amal'rik, Zapiski dissidenta, pp. 43-44.

49   I. A. Brodskii, Sochineniya (St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 1992), p. 7.

50   Amal'rik, Zapiski dissidenta, p. 13.

51 For instance, the circle around Vladimir Osipov and Yurii Ivanov laid plans for terrorist actions, including an assassination attempt on Khrushchev in the early 1960s. Kheifets, 'Russkii patriot V. Osipov', p. 191. This also held true for the АН-Russian Social-Christian Union for the Liberation of the People, an organization discussed below.

52   Quoted in Bukovskii, I vozvrashchaetsya veter, p. 176.

53   Ibid., pp. 123-4, 176-8.

54   Il'ya Kudryavtsev, 'Oppozitsiya i totalitarizm v SSSR' (Moscow: Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, June 1993), pp. 5-8.

55   E.g., Bogoraz and Daniel, 'V poiskak nesushchestvuyushchei nauki', p. 145.

56   Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, p. 61.

57   See M. A. Naritsa's testament in Al'manakh samizdata. Nepodtsenzumaya mysl' v SSSR 1 (1974), pp. 55-6.

58   Bukovskii, I vozvrashchaetsya veter, pp. 182—4.

59   Roy Medvedev, On Soviet Dissent (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 56.

60   In 1977, the date for the demonstration was changed to 10 December in order to coincide with International Human Rights Day.

61   L. I. Bogoraz, V. G. Golitsyn and S. A. Kovalev, 'Politicheskaya bor'ba ili zashchita prav? Dvadtsatiletnii opyt nezavisimogo obshchestvennogo dvizhe-niya v SSSR' in A. N. Zav'yalova and N. K. Sazanovich (eds.), Pogruzhenie v triasinu (Moscow: Progress, 1991), pp. 530-1.

62   Amal'rik, Zapiski dissidenta, p. 45.

63   Amal'rik (ibid.) has described this moment of truth thus: 'a person placing his own signature [on a petition] was by that very act taking a step toward inner emancipation, and for many this step became decisive. For the political situation in the country one or another signature may not have had any significance, but for the signator himself it became a catharsis sui generis, a break from the system of double thinking in which "soviet man" has been brought up since childhood.'

In the case of the Sinyavskii-Daniel affair alone, some twenty-two protest petitions are known to have been circulated. Aleksandr Ginzburg, Belaya kniga po delu Sinyavskogo i Danielya (Frankfurt: Posev, 1967), pp. 64-7, 80-7, 95-100, 117-30, 148-66, 341-4, 385-7; Tsena metafory iliprestuplenie i nakazanie Sinyavskogo i Danielya, compiled by E. M. Velikanova, L. S. Eremina (ed.), (Moscow: Kniga, 1989).

64   Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, p. 18.

65   Bukovskii, I vozvrashchaetsya veter, pp. 210-12.

66   Andrei Amal'rik, SSSR i Zapad v odnoi lodke (London: Overseas Publication Interchange, 1978), p. 25; L. M. Alekseeva, Iswriya inakomysliya v SSSR (Moscow: Vest', 1992), p. 206.

67   Andrei Amal'rik, Prosushchestvuet li Sovetskii Soyuz do 1984 goda? (Amsterdam: Hertsen Foundation, 1974) pp. 26-8.

68   Larisa Bogoraz and Pavel Litvinov, Protsess chetyrekh: sbomik materialov po delu Galanskova, Ginzburga, Dobrovol'skogo i Lashkovoi (Amsterdam: Hertsen Foundation, 1971).

69   R. D. Orlova, Vospominaniya о neproshedshem vremeni, pp. 378-9.

70   Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 172-185.

71   Andrei Sakharov, Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom (Petersham, UK: Foreign Affairs Publishing, 1968).

72   Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, esp. pp. 20-3.

73   The participants in the demonstration on Red Square included Konstantin Babitskii, Larisa Bogoraz, Vadim Delone, Vladimir Demlyuga, Pavel Litvinov, Viktor Fainberg and Natalya Gorbanevskaya. All but the last of these were arrested, tried in consonance with standard Soviet practices and duly sentenced to either punitive labour or exile.

74   Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, pp. 95-126. Additional materials are available in the journal Karta 3 (1993), pp. 5-9.

75   In his letter, Victor Krasin urged dissidents to recognize that the 'movement had collapsed and that there was only one thing to be done, to lay out its whole history for the future. The KGB has nobly taken on itself the role of historian. Everyone must honestly tell [everything] to the KGB and in so far as everyone voluntarily disarms, the KGB will not punish anyone.' Quoted in Amal'rik, Zapiski dissidenta, pp. 298-9.

76   It would appear that suspicions about the moral reliability of members increased in the wake of this episode. For examples, see Medvedev, On Soviet Dissent, pp. 5-6, 132-3; Valerii Chalidze, 'Pravozashchitnoe dviz-henie: problemy i perspektivy', SSSR: Vnutrennie pronvorechiya 9 (1987), pp. 15-16.

77   A Moscow Helsinki Group headed by Yurii Orlov was announced on 12 May 1976, and regional affiliates were soon set up in Ukraine and Lithuania. The Moscow Helsinki Group actively investigated the regime's use of psychiatry for political purposes and collaborated in this respect closely with the Christian Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Believers, headed by Gleb Yakunin (Orlov, Opasnye mysli, pp. 189-90).

78   Peter Reddaway, 'Dissent in the Soviet Union', Problems of Communism 32 (November-December 1982), pp. 1-15.

79   Ibid., p. 13.

80   In the 1970s, some dissidents began rethinking strategy and tactics, arguing that appeals for human rights were irresponsible without a practical plan for reforms in the economic, societal and cultural spheres that an enlightened Soviet regime might implement in future. Examples of these arguments circulated in samizdat include: Amal'rik, Prosushchestvuet li Sovetskii Soyuz do 1984 goda?, esp. p. 41; L. Ventsov [B. Shragin], 'Dumat'!' (manuscript, M-BIO); and Ego [V. V. Igranov], 'K problema-tike obshchestvennogo dvizheniya' (manuscript, M-BIO). Their arguments failed to persuade many others. Perhaps a representative example of the counter-position within the movement would be the sentiments voiced by Tat'yana Khodorovich who, along with Tat'yana Velikanova and Sergei Kovalev, assumed responsibility for resuming production and distribution of the movement's principal organ, the Chronicle of Current Events, in 1974. "There are no "differently minded people [inakomyslyashchikh]", no "dissidents'", she wrote, 'there are only people, on the one hand, and, on the other, a faceless, organized and trained [vydressirovannoe] violence with one single well-developed instinct: to stifle each and every thought . . . [Therefore] I don't desire to enter into dialogue with an organization that doesn't recognize the existence of moral rights' (T. Khodorovich, 'Po veleniyu sovesti', Al'manakh samizdata 1 (1974), pp. 37-8).

81    One such achievement was the appearance of a new samizdat journal, Poiski, in 1979 that partially realized a stillborn project of V. V. Igrunov called 'Almanakh-77' which would have eschewed the publication of more materials on repression in order to devote its pages to articles on history, sociology, politics and economics. Poiski was put out by Valerii Abramkin, Petr Abovin-Egides, Pavel Pryzhov (Gleb Pavlovskii), Victor Sokirko and others. Interview with V. V. Igrunov (6 March 1994; M-BIO).

82   On two occasions, V. Igrunov was solicited by the KGB to write up proposals for reform of the socio-economic and governmental order in the USSR. The first took place in May 1979 when - following a number of interrogations and 'conversations' at the KGB office in Odessa during which Igrunov presented his views on the urgency of initiating a process involving broad sections of the intelligentsia in working out an evolutionary plan mindful of the stability of state and society that any meaningful reform was liable to place under stress - KGB captain N. A. Filippskii proposed a paid work leave enabling Igrunov to compose such a project and submit it to him. Personal circumstances required Igrunov to decline this offer.

The second solicitation occurred three years later, occasioned by the arrest on 6 April 1982 of Gleb Pavlovskii with whom Igrunov had very close ties through dissident activities, having collaborated with him as co-editor of the samizdat journal Poiski. On 8 April, KGB major L. V. Kulyabichev visited Igrunov in hospital recovering from a bout of tuberculosis in order to record Igrunov's reaction to Pavlovskii's arrest. As the discussion turned to other issues, Kulyabichev expressed a keen interest in many of Igrunov's ideas and proposed that Igrunov draft an extended outline for reform with two principal goals in view: curtailing the level of internal repression and setting out alternative paths for socio-economic development in the USSR. Igrunov this time accepted the KGB offer, but stipulated that acceptance was contingent on his freedom to consult with other dissidents. Kulyabichev agreed.

Consultations with other members of the movement began in late May when Igrunov was released from hospital. A number of leading figures in the movement - among them Larissa Bogoraz and Mikhail Gefter -consented to participate in the project and a protocol for negotiations and consensus-building around the planned text was worked out (M-BIO archives). A copy of these protocols and a prospectus were transmitted in mid-June to Kulyabichev who expressed great interest in the project's ideas. For reasons unknown to us, however, the KGB then closed down this channel of communication. Thereafter, the KGB maintained surveillance on Igrunov, but lifted the prohibition introduced after his arrest in the 1970s against working in his profession (economist). Since Igrunov committed most of his major ideas to letters sent to Pavlovskii, who was then in a labour camp, the KGB none the less obtained a large portion of the work that would have been done under the aborted contact.

83   A. J. Greimas and F. Rastier, 'The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints', Yale French Studies 41 (1968), pp. 86-105. For application of this model to various cultural-political systems of representation, see: Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Claude Levi-Strauss, The Naked Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), esp. pp. 649-50; Michael Urban, 'The Structure of Signification in the General Secretary's Address: a Semiotic Approach to Soviet Political Discourse', Coexistence 24 (1987), pp. 187-210.

84   See Medvedev, Kniga о sotsialisticheskoi demokratii, pp. 52-6, 63-7.

85 We refer here to the group 'Young Socialists' that emerged at the beginning of the 1980s. Led by such individuals as Pavel Kudyukin, Boris Kagarlitskii and Andrei Fadin, the group's samizdat journals Levyi povorot and Varianty featured social science analyses heavily influenced by European neo-Marxism. This tendency assumed a certain salience in the 'informal' movement in 1986.

86 Alexander Yanov, The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 185. On this same point in theoretic perspective, see Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, esp. pp. 34-43.

87 On this group generally, see: VSKhSON: Programma. Sud. V tyur'makh i lageryakh (Paris: YMCA Press, 1975); Alexander Yanov, The Russian New Right (Berkeley: Institute for International Studies, University of California, 1978), pp. 21-38; N. Mitrokhin, 'Istoriya russkogo natsional'nogo dvizhe-niya v SSSR. 1940-80-e gody' (senior thesis; Moscow: Russian State Humanities University, 1994) (M-BIO archives); and for a sympathetic treatment, John Dunlop, The New Russian Revolutionaries (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1976).

88 According to one account, members of the VSKhSON who were arrested and tried by the authorities evinced degrees of 'extremism' in their respective commitments to the national-religious postulates of the VSKhSON 'in direct dependence on the degree of their previous faith in the ideals of communism'. VSKhSON: Programma. Sud. V tyur'makh i lagerakh, p. 94.

89 Quoted in John Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 45 (emphasis in original).

90 Yanov, The Russian New Right, pp. 62-80, esp. p. 80. On Veche generally, see Yanov's The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000; Dunlop, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism.

91 Yanov, The Russian Challenge and the Year 2000, p. 155.

92 The description of the Fetisov group offered by The Chronicle of Current Events is available in Reddaway, Uncensored Russia, pp. 431-3.

93 The text of this leaflet appears in Yanov, The Russian New Right, pp. 170-2.

94 Sergei Soldatov, Zamitsy vozrozhdeniya (London: Overseas Publication Interchange, 1984), pp. 183-95.

95 Dunlop, The Faces of 'Contemporary Russian Nationalism, pp. 32-6.

96 Yanov, The Russian New Right, pp. 39-61.

97 Stephen Carter, Russian Nationalism: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow (London: Pinterl990),pp. 108-16.

98 Ibid., p. 83; Yanov, The Russian New Right, pp. 49-51.

99 L. A. Alekseeva, Istoriya inakomysliya v SSSR (Moscow: Vest', 1991), p. 206.

100 Both episodes are recounted in Yanov, The Russian New Right, pp. 52-60.