The Legacy of Soviet Dissent

The Legacy of Soviet Dissent PDF Author: Robert Horvath
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134317980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
During the 1970s, dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn dominated Western perceptions of the USSR, but were then quickly forgotten, as Gorbachev's reformers monopolised the spotlight. This book restores the dissidents to their rightful place in Russian history. Using a vast array of samizdat and published sources, it shows how ideas formulated in the dissident milieu clashed with the original programme of perestroika, and shaped the course of democratisation in post-Soviet Russia. Some of these ideas - such the dissidents' preoccupation with glasnost and legality, and their critique of revolutionary violence - became part of the agenda of Russia's democratic movement. But this book also demonstrates that dissidents played a crucial role in the rise of the new Russian radical nationalism. Both the friends and foes of Russian democracy have a dissident lineage.

The Legacy of Soviet Dissent

The Legacy of Soviet Dissent PDF Author: Robert Horvath
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134317980
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book Here

Book Description
During the 1970s, dissidents like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn dominated Western perceptions of the USSR, but were then quickly forgotten, as Gorbachev's reformers monopolised the spotlight. This book restores the dissidents to their rightful place in Russian history. Using a vast array of samizdat and published sources, it shows how ideas formulated in the dissident milieu clashed with the original programme of perestroika, and shaped the course of democratisation in post-Soviet Russia. Some of these ideas - such the dissidents' preoccupation with glasnost and legality, and their critique of revolutionary violence - became part of the agenda of Russia's democratic movement. But this book also demonstrates that dissidents played a crucial role in the rise of the new Russian radical nationalism. Both the friends and foes of Russian democracy have a dissident lineage.

Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia

Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia PDF Author: Philip Boobbyer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317571223
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Embracing the political, intellectual, social and cultural history of Soviet Russia, this book provides a useful perspective of Putin’s Russia. Focusing on the ethics in Soviet Russia, it explores the history of moral thinking amongst dissidents, and examines the ethical assumptions of the perestroika era.

Soviet Dissent

Soviet Dissent PDF Author: Ludmilla Alexeyeva
Publisher: Wesleyan
ISBN: 9780819561763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
Traces the history of the struggles of individuals and organizations for civil rights in the Soviet Union

Dissidents among Dissidents

Dissidents among Dissidents PDF Author: Ilya Budraitskis
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839764201
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
How have the fall of the USSR and the long dominance of Putin reshaped Russian politics and culture? Ilya Budraitskis, one of the country's most prominent leftist political commentators, explores the strange fusion of free-market ideology and postmodern nationalism that now prevails in Russia, and describes the post-Soviet evolution of its left. He incisively describes the twists and contradictions of the Kremlin's geopolitical fantasies, which blend up-to-date references to "information wars" with nostalgic celebrations of the tsars of Muscovy. Despite the revival of aggressive Cold War rhetoric, he argues, the Putin regime takes its bearings not from any Soviet inheritance, but from reactionary thinkers such as the White émigré Ivan Ilyin. Budraitskis makes an invaluable contribution by reconstructing the forgotten history of the USSR's dissident left, mapping an entire alternative tradition of heterodox Marxist and socialist thought from Khrushchev's Thaw to Gorbachev's perestroika. Doubly outsiders, within an intelligentsia dominated by liberal humanists, they offer a potential way out of the impasse between condemnations of the entire Soviet era and blanket nostalgia for Communist Party rule--suggesting new paths for the left to explore.

The Dissidents

The Dissidents PDF Author: Peter Reddaway
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815737742
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The nearly forgotten story of Soviet dissidents It has been nearly three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union—enough time for the role that the courageous dissidents ultimately contributed to the communist system's collapse to have been largely forgotten, especially in the West. This book brings to life, for contemporary readers, the often underground work of the men and women who opposed the regime and authored dissident texts, known as samizdat, that exposed the tyrannies and weaknesses of the Soviet state both inside and outside the country. Peter Reddaway spent decades studying the Soviet Union and got to know these dissidents and their work, publicizing their writings in the West and helping some of them to escape the Soviet Union and settle abroad. In this memoir he captures the human costs of the repression that marked the Soviet state, focusing in particular on Pavel Litvinov, Larisa Bogoraz, General Petro Grigorenko, Anatoly Marchenko, Alexander Podrabinek, Vyacheslav Bakhmin, and Andrei Sinyavsky. His book describes their courage but also puts their work in the context of the power struggles in the Kremlin, where politicians competed with and even succeeded in ousting one another. Reddaway's book takes readers beyond Moscow, describing politics and dissident work in other major Russian cities as well as in the outlying republics.

State of Madness

State of Madness PDF Author: Rebecca Reich
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1609092333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.

The Universe Behind Barbed Wire

The Universe Behind Barbed Wire PDF Author: Miroslav Marinovič
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580469817
Category : Dissenters
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych recounts his involvement in the Brezhnev-era human rights movement in the Soviet Union and his resulting years as a political prisoner in Siberia and in internal exile.

Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia

Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia PDF Author: Dan Healey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226322339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
The first full-length study of same-sex love in any period of Russian or Soviet history, Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia investigates the private worlds of sexual dissidents during the pivotal decades before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Using records and archives available to researchers only since the fall of Communism, Dan Healey revisits the rich homosexual subcultures of St. Petersburg and Moscow, illustrating the ambiguous attitude of the late Tsarist regime and revolutionary rulers toward gay men and lesbians. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia reveals a world of ordinary Russians who lived extraordinary lives and records the voices of a long-silenced minority.

Dissent on the Margins

Dissent on the Margins PDF Author: Emily B. Baran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190495499
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Emily B. Baran offers a gripping history of how a small, American-based religious community, the Jehovah's Witnesses, found its way into the Soviet Union after World War II, survived decades of brutal persecution, and emerged as one of the region's fastest growing religions after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. In telling the story of this often misunderstood faith, Baran explores the shifting boundaries of religious dissent, non-conformity, and human rights in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses are a fascinating case study of dissent beyond urban, intellectual nonconformists. Witnesses, who were generally rural, poorly educated, and utterly marginalized from society, resisted state pressure to conform. They instead constructed alternative communities based on adherence to religious principles established by the Witnesses' international center in Brooklyn, New York. The Soviet state considered Witnesses to be the most reactionary of all underground religious movements, and used extraordinary measures to try to eliminate this threat. Yet Witnesses survived, while the Soviet system did not. After 1991, they faced continuing challenges to their right to practice their faith in post-Soviet states, as these states struggled to reconcile the proper limits on freedom of conscience with European norms and domestic concerns. Dissent on the Margins provides a new and important perspective on one of America's most understudied religious movements.

British Human Rights Organizations and Soviet Dissent, 1965-1985

British Human Rights Organizations and Soviet Dissent, 1965-1985 PDF Author: Mark Hurst
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472522346
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
In the latter half of the 20th century, a number of dissidents engaged in a series of campaigns against the Soviet authorities and as a result were subjected to an array of cruel and violent punishments. A collection of like-minded activists in Britain campaigned on their behalf, and formed a variety of organizations to publicise their plight. British Human Rights Organizations and Soviet Dissent, 1965-1985 examines the efforts of these activists, exploring how influential their activism was in shaping the wider public awareness of Soviet human rights violations in the context of the Cold War. Mark Hurst explores the British response to Soviet human rights violation, drawing on extensive archival work and interviews with key individuals from the period. This book examines the network of human rights activists in Britain, and demonstrates that in order to be fully understood, the Soviet dissident movement needs to be considered in an international context.