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

The Dissident Library aims to intervene in academic discourse on the Soviet dissident movement and strives to make current methodological objectives and findings available to a broader public. The project consists of a series of online seminars that connect scholars from around the world and in-depth discussions with individual authors. Moreover, discussions with 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. The result of these pursuits and conversations is a digital library of dissidence that brings together an archive of audio and video materials, as well as contemporary documents, while accounting for diverging research perspectives and conceptual understandings.

This project stems from interviews I have been recording with Pavel Litvinov since 2019, one of the key figures in the Moscow dissident circle of the late 1960s. His name appears consistently across works on the dissident movement in the USSR, a movement was more generally focused on moral and symbolic protest rather than political opposition, especially in connection with the 1968 Red Square demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by a notable eight demonstrators, including Litvinov. However, Litvinov also compiled collections of trial documents as alternatives to the reports of state institutions and the press; he communicated with Western politicians and journalists, and he established contacts with other dissident groups in other cities and republics of the USSR.

Drawing on this archival material and my interviews with Litvinov, the project aims to clarify the program of the Moscow dissidents—a program that focused on rejecting both political activity as “dirty” and rejecting party discipline more generally in favor of a society based on ‘Western values.’ Western values must be considered here from a Moscow perspective of the time that did not have access to Western press and political documents. Their program revolved primarily around the notion of “public,” which Litvinov and Larisa Bogoraz problematized in their open letter “To World Public Opinion” (1968).

The project will bring forth an annotated edition of selected interviews with Pavel Litvinov, supplemented by the publication of archival material as well as interviews that I have conducted with other individuals who were active in the dissident movement. These new interviews attempt to reflect on the memoirs of dissidents of the Moscow movement that have been published over the last forty years. Through these interviews, the project will analyze the social influence of the Moscow dissidents circle inside and outside the USSR, whilst explicitly refraining from generalizing these findings to ‘Soviet dissidents’ as a whole.

The project examines the trial against author Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996), who was sentenced to five years in exile on charges of “social parasitism” in 1964. However, soon thereafter, in 1965, he returned to Leningrad after an intervention by Soviet and Western intellectuals. This was the first trial in post-Stalinist times, in which observers created and distributed alternative court records. One of these records made it to the West, bringing the Brodsky case to public attention there too. Much like the open letters at the time, this record is considered a form of journalism and analyzed as a genre oscillating between literature and law, prose and document. The analysis focuses on the ways in which the individuals involved (the defendant, his attorneys, and his supporters) developed their own juridical rhetoric, discursive strategies, and forms of communication as a result of their intense engagement with institutions and representatives of Soviet law. This was done in an attempt to redefine their place in society and force the state to engage with the opposition’s arguments and accusations.

This archive seminar develops commentaries on open letters by Soviet dissidents. In an authoritarian, enclosed society, open letters create accessible, public spaces for debates on important social issues that are banned from official media. For instance, Soviet dissidents used open letters to report on human rights violations, which were then 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 participants from different universities and countries to collaborate.