Dissent: Political, Ethnic, and Religious

Abstract

Dissent has a long and honorable tradition among the Russian intelligentsia. From the time of Alexander Radishchev in the eighteenth century to the present day, intellectuals have spoken out against the policies and practices of the regime. The tactics of dissident groups and the responses of the government, whether the tsarist regime or the Soviet, have also been remarkably consistent over the years. Radishchev, whose Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow depicted the poverty of the serfs, was condemned to death, but Catherine the Great commuted the sentence to exile in Siberia. Like Radishchev, thousands of persons who have written or voiced their criticism of the Soviet regime have been imprisoned or exiled since the 1960s. Even the ghoulish practice of interning opponents in psychiatric hospitals has historical antecedents. The nineteenth-century philosopher, biologist, and leader of the Westernizers, Peter Chaadaev, was arrested, condemned as insane, and placed in an asylum. He emerged several years later to write his scathing Apology of a Madman. Neither are samizdat (self-published) tracts criticizing the regime a new development in the Soviet Union. In the mid-nineteenth century, Alexander Herzen, another Westernizer who had been forced to emigrate to the West, began publishing an underground newspaper, The Bell. Copies of The Bell were smuggled back into Russia and helped to arouse greater opposition to the tsarist regime. In 1896, Lenin was imprisoned and spent three years in exile in Siberia. Following his release, he fled to Zurich and founded the Social Democratic newspaper Iskra (The Spark). Trotsky also engaged in criticism from abroad. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in January 1929 and began publishing the Russian-language newspaper Bulletin of the Opposition from exile. The Bulletin, which was similar to today’s Chronicle of Current Events, focused on abuses of power by the party leadership.