ABSTRACT

Marshall Shatz has likened the dissent of the post-Stalin period to the peasant rebellions of Tsarist times.1 While not an entirely appropriate analogy for the Brezhnev era dissident movement, during the Khrushchev period the comparison has some resonance. Shatz was right in the sense that the dissent of the Khrushchev years was generally disorganized and ephemeral, yet also fervent and widespread. On the other hand, these were most often individual acts of rebellion with a striking lack of commonly shared principles and were almost completely without cohesion. The most important point to proceed from is a clarification of what con-

stitutes ‘dissent’ and particularly ‘political dissent’ for the purposes of this chapter. In the context of post-Stalin Soviet history ‘dissidence’ has a fairly well-understood meaning, though this is perhaps now too strongly associated with the predominantly open and legalistic struggle of the Brezhnev years to reflect properly the dissent of the Khrushchev period. Perhaps most useful is Frederick Barghoorn’s definition of dissent as ‘the persistent – and from the official point of view – objectionable advocacy of policies differing from or contrary to those which the dominant group in the supreme CPSU control and decision making bodies … adopt’.2 The only significant point on which this study differs from this definition is by omitting the term ‘persistent’. A vital qualification of ‘dissent’ for this chapter is that these were beha-

viours with some public facet that was neither sanctioned by the authorities nor acceptable to them. What this means is that entirely private activities, such as listening to foreign radio broadcasts or expressing criticism of the regime solely within one’s own family, are not treated as dissenting activity, even though they undoubtedly occupied a position somewhere on the spectrum of what constituted dissent. Similarly, what could be termed ‘cultural dissent’ in the Khrushchev period also falls outside the remit of this chapter. Even extremely significant and controversial works such as Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone (1956) and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) were published with official sanction and, therefore, represent a distinct category of dissenting behaviour. ‘Political dissent’ is, to an extent, an artificial categorization, though largely

because it involves a diverse range of behaviours that have so far not been

properly classified. Essentially, it incorporates acts of protest and criticism that were not predicated on national or religious feeling. These were acts of dissent that can be broadly defined as ‘protest and criticism involving language and behaviours either reflecting or implying political discontent at the policies, representatives and principles of the Soviet regime’. The reason for excluding nationalist and religious behaviours from con-

sideration here is partly one of scope and partly of intended aims; it is certainly not any indication that they were in some way less important. Perhaps the most important consideration in looking at political dissent in isolation is that it was often specific to the events and personalities of the Khrushchev period, whereas the themes of nationalist and religious dissent were liable to transcend contemporary issues to a greater extent. Furthermore, as a period in which dissenting behaviour as a whole has not been widely researched thus far it is useful to look at its individual components before tackling the theme as awhole. To a certain extent, the Brezhnev era dissident movement has left the dis-

senting individuals and events of the Khrushchev period somewhat in the shadows, though some Russian-language scholarship has been produced on this theme in recent years. Archival research, in particular, has been rather scant on dissent as a whole, largely because the majority of sources on dissent were written during the 1960s and 1970s, when gaining access to official documents was all but impossible for researchers. The only widely available sources were dissidents themselves, often residing in exile. This has largely resulted in what Ben Nathans has termed a ‘person-centric approach to dissent’.3 It is an approach that has considerably less applicability for the Khrushchev era, when individuals rarely rose above the crowd and certainly never occupied the global status of later figures such as Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Shcharansky.