Soviet Dissidence and the Public during De- and Re-Stalinization

The Dissident Library aims to intervene in the academic discourse on the Soviet movement of dissidents and strives to make their methodological objectives and results available to a broader public. The project consists of a series of online seminars conceived by the now-liquidated human rights organization International Memorial. It connects scholars from around the world. The seminar also features smaller formats with individual authors. Discussions with contemporary witnesses (especially dissidents and authors of the first monographs on dissidence from the 1970s and 1980s) focus on the contextualization and historicization of earlier research. This will result in a digital library of dissidence that—while taking into account different research perspectives and understandings of concepts—collects audio and video materials as well as contemporary documents.      

The archive seminar compiles comments on open letters by Soviet dissidents. In an authoritarian, enclosed society, open letters create accessible public spaces for debates on socially important questions banned from official media. E.g., Soviet dissidents reported on human rights violations in open letters that were quoted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Today, many of these letters can be found in the Archiv Samizdata, a collection of unofficial, self-published documents spread across different institutions worldwide. Thanks to its online format, the archive seminar enables collaboration among participants of students from different universities and countries.

The project will examine the trial against author Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) who, in 1964, was sentenced to five years in exile on charges of “social parasitism,” but soon thereafter, in 1965, returned to Leningrad after an intervention by Soviet and Western intellectuals. In post-Stalinist times, the trial was the first in which the audience created and distributed alternative court records. One of these records made it to the West and made the Brodsky case known there as well. Just like the open letters, this record is viewed as a form of journalism and analyzed as a genre oscillating between literature and law, prose and document. The analysis will focus on ways in which the individuals involved (defendants, attorneys, supporters) developed their own juridical rhetoric, discursive strategies, and forms of communication as a result of an intense engagement with institutions and representatives of Soviet law. They did this to redefine their place in society and force the state to engage with the opposition’s arguments and accusations.