A new type of soviet resistance?

Abstract

i n the tradition of my ancestors, a Zaporozhian cossack personified all the virtues that a man can possess. Ukrainian folklore is rich with tales about the cossack Mamai, a mythical figure who always appeared from nowhere to save the day. He is said to have been a fearless defender of faith and virtue and a protector of the frail and the sick. He could be either gentle or tough, but always he fought against evil, for he lived in a world in which distinctions between good and evil were not yet blurred. For a while and at a distance, Solzhenitsyn appeared to many of us as that legendary Mamai. It was shocking to discover that he was an ordinary mortal. As the legend of the man began to recede, we were at least happy to discover that he had cossack qualities. As the proverb says, a cossack is one who swims against the current: Solzhenitsyn is the epitome of such a swimmer. One would still like to think that what appears to be character flaws, as revealed in his speech to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), are due mainly to haste, harassment, inadequate time to ponder a statement, the need to drive home a point to a mass audience or possibly a poor translation. Henry Adams's observation that "no one means all he says, and yet few say all they mean" seems to be singularly apt in the present situation. However, much of what Solzhenitsyn says about dissent in the Soviet Union is directly relevant to the nature of legitimation of the Soviet regime and its acceptance or rejection by the governed. When we look at the history of the Soviet Union from the standpoint of the legitimation of its regime, or, in other words, the legitimation of the Communist party as its ruling body, we find that most of the official dates are not very appropriate to the task. Legitimate authority cannot even be said to have been established on December 30, 1922, the date for the establishment of the Soviet Union. The regime encountered a prolonged armed resistance at least until about 1928 and that entire period, beginning with the October Revolution, may be more properly considered the period of formation. Since 1928, three distinct phases in the legitimation process can be discerned, with the first two running a cycle of twenty years: 1. The Period of Opposition (1928-1948) 2. The Period of Dissent (1948-1968) 3. The Period of Noncompliance (1968) Considerable literature has now accumulated dealing with the Period of Opposition; the best known is Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. We also have learned much from reading the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam, Zhores Medvedev's The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, Roy Medvedev's Let History Judge, David Joravsky's The Lysenko Affair, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror and Borys Levytsky's The Uses of Terror. In addition to these wellknown works, we have vast documentation of the period by World War II emigrrs whose stories have been largely ignored in the West, even at the height of the cold war. The regime's opponents during this phase differed significantly from the resistance of the two later periods. Members of the early opposition believed that they were confronting the stupidity and intolerance of brazen and ruthless people, rather than "ev i l . " They did not seek martyrdom and would have been happy to avoid it if they could. They were modest but proud people doing their job and endeavoring to retain their integrity. They would have considered it unmitigated gall to expect people from other countries to make sacrifices for the sake of liberating them. They fervently believed that fighters against other tyrannies, including non-Communist tyrannies, were engaged in an equally valid struggle. The idea that some torturers are better (less "ev i l " ) than others would have been quite repugnant to them.