Pollution and Purification in the Moscow Human Rights Networks of the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

In this article Barbara Walker examines the theme of (samo)zhertvovanie in the Moscow human rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Some participants in that movement have expressed emotional satisfaction in the belief that they were motivated by the desire for self-giving; but that belief has sometimes been received with doubt. Walker uncovers the social phenomenon of a charity movement for the benefit of political prisoners that, she argues, lies near the social and emotional heart of the human rights movement. An important theme of the charity movement, whether real or constructed, is emotional purification of a sense of personal and social contamination stemming from participation in what some experienced as corruption in Soviet state and society. This article draws on ideas of spiritual atonement and salvation through altruism as explanatory cultural factors in this phenomenon.