Soviet Dissidents Research Articles

Andy Sessler: The Full Life of an Accelerator Physicist

This article describes the distinguished career of Andrew M. Sessler, the visionary former director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), one of the most influential accelerator physicists, and a strong, dedicated human-rights activist. Andy died on 17 April 2014 from cancer at age 85. He grew up in New York City, and attended Harvard (BA in Mathematics, 1949) and then Columbia (PhD in Physics, 1953.) After an NSF postdoc at Cornell with Hans Bethe and a stint on the faculty at the Ohio State University in 1954–59, he joined the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (now LBNL) in 1959, and spent the remainder of his career there. Although Andy left his mark on several areas of physics, including nuclear structure theory, elementary-particle physics, and many-body problems, his lasting and most important contributions came from his efforts in accelerator physics and engineering, to which he devoted most of his life's work. In collaboration with his colleagues of the legendary Midwestern Universities Research Association, he developed theories for the RF acceleration process and the collective instability phenomena, helping to realize the colliding-beam accelerators with which most of the high-energy-physics discoveries of the last few decades have been made. His work in connection with the free-electron-laser (FEL) amplifier for high-power microwave generation constructed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory anticipated the optical-guiding and the self-amplified spontaneous-emission principles, upon which the success of the X-ray FELs as the fourth-generation light sources is based. Throughout his career Andy made major contributions to issues related to the impact of science and technology on society. He helped usher in a new era of research on energy efficiency and sustainable-energy technology and was instrumental in building the research agendas in those areas for the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and later the Department of Energy. With a lifelong interest in promoting the human rights of scientists, Andy was instrumental in initiating the American Physical Society's Committee on International Freedom of Scientists and in raising funds to endow the APS Andrei Sakharov Prize. He and Moishe Pripstein cofounded Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov, and Sharansky; the group's protests along with those of other groups led to the release of the three Soviet dissidents. More importantly, Andy's voice and example became a major force in helping call the world's attention to the plight of scientists trapped in places where their human rights and their ability to do science were severely compromised. Andy received many honors, including the AEC's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award in 1970, the APS's Dwight Nicholson Medal in 1994, and the Enrico Fermi Award from the US Department of Energy in 2014.

Inside the Psychiatric Word: Diagnosis and Self-Definition in the Late Soviet Period

The punitive psychiatric hospitalization of Soviet dissidents and nonconformists spurred the writing and circulation of memoirs of detention, transcripts of conversations with psychiatrists, copies of psychiatric files, handbooks on legal and medical aspects of psychiatric examination, works of fiction, poems, and other related documents. Rebecca Reich draws on this major body of texts to determine how politically unorthodox citizens engaged with psychiatry in life and on the page. Close reading of texts by Vladimir Bukovskii, Semen Gluzman, Aleksandr Vol'pin, and others suggests that unsanctioned accounts of hospitalization did more than expose the abuse of psychiatry; they challenged Soviet psychiatric discourse and promoted inakomyslie, “thinking differently,” as the psychological norm. By depathologizing themselves and pathologizing the state during encounters with psychiatrists and in samizdat, dissidents and nonconformists engaged in self-definition and asserted their own diagnostic authority.

Corvalán for Bukovsky: a real exchange of prisoners during an imaginary war. The Chilean dictatorship, the Soviet Union, and US mediation, 1973–1976

Based on Chilean, Soviet, American, and Italian declassified documents, this article examines a particular case in the global Cold War: the only international exchange of political prisoners during that period, involving the general secretary of the Chilean Communist Party Luis Corvalán and Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. It emphasises the intersecting agendas, purposes, and consequences of multiple state and non-state actors in this episode: from the governments of Chile, the US, and the USSR, to the Chilean Communist Party, the Soviet dissident movement, and finally to the European communist parties, Cuba, international solidarity, and human rights movements.

Addiction, the Concept of Disorder, and Pathways to Harm: Comment on Levy

Addiction, the Concept of Disorder, and Pathways to Harm: Comment on Levy

Thawed Selves: A Commentary on the Soviet First Person

Thawed SelvesA Commentary on the Soviet First Person Benjamin Nathans (bio) Here’s a question worth pondering: why does the phrase “Soviet intellectual history” sound odd? Why is it that so much recent scholarship on the intellectual lives of Soviet citizens has focused almost entirely on their dialogues with themselves, on subjectivity and selfhood at the expense of the social? Is it that the USSR’s war on capitalism eviscerated the public marketplace of ideas? Or that the enthronement of a state-sponsored ideology impoverished what had been a burgeoning tradition of social thought? Now that historians and anthropologists of the post-Stalin era have begun to dismantle the walls separating “official” from “nonconformist” texts, what structures of thought can we discern in the landscape of “developed socialism”? The finely textured case studies by Andrew Stone and Benjamin Tromly give us an opportunity to address these questions from new vantage points. Their articles provide valuable portals into the lives and thought of two Soviet citizens who, in radically different ways, came to question some of the cardinal values of the Soviet state. Both lives were massively disrupted by that state, as were the lives of an extraordinary number of their contemporaries. In Anatolii Bakanichev’s case, successive ordeals in Nazi and Soviet concentration camps produced a profound distancing from postwar Soviet society’s deepest source of moral legitimacy: the triumph of Soviet good over Nazi evil. For Revol´t Pimenov the sequence was reversed, as dissenting ideas led to biographical rupture in the form of arrest, imprisonment, and exile. In Stone’s reading, Bakanichev’s life offers an alternate genealogy of “other-thinking,” distinct from the more familiar trajectories of metropolitan dissidents (such as Pimenov). At the same time, Stone argues, Bakanichev’s self-emancipation from Soviet myth—along with glimpses of analogous processes in other World War II veterans—cracks open the supposedly monolithic worldview of the frontovik generation. [End Page 177] Bakanichev emerges as an emblem of unorthodox thought and genuine diversity in the mental world of late Soviet society. Tromly’s conclusions could hardly be more different. In his view, Revol´t Pimenov’s story speaks not to self-emancipation but to the tenacity of Stalin-era mental habits. What appears on the surface as Pimenov’s revolt against Stalinism turns out to be a recapitulation (in the new circumstances of the “Thaw”) of the quintessentially Bolshevik ambition to achieve an extrapersonal identity, the self as incarnation of revolutionary consciousness. Like Stone, Tromly endows his protagonist with broad significance in part by linking him to the subsequent history of the Soviet dissident movement. Here too, however, his conclusion points in a very different direction. Rather than offering an alternate path toward “other-thinking,” Tromly argues, Pimenov’s case casts “other-thinking” itself in a new and ambivalent light. Foreshadowing the dissidents’ “extreme moral commitment” to “abstract ideals” (175), Pimenov’s intellectual biography suggests “the lasting power of modes of Soviet selfhood” (175) into and beyond the Thaw era. The stark contrast between the findings of these two talented historians does not trouble me. After all, they have reconstructed the intellectual journeys of two figures who were themselves quite different. Stone and Tromly belong to a cohort of scholars (among whom I count myself) who seek to scrutinize our still rather schematic understanding of what Zygmunt Bauman has called “second-generation socialism.”1 Rather than dwell on, much less attempt to resolve, the tensions between these richly suggestive accounts, I would like to examine individually some of their central arguments. Each of the two articles leans heavily on a single concept. In Stone’s case this is the idea of moral equivalence. Invoked more often (though not by Stone) for polemical than analytical purposes, moral equivalence typically asserts an identical degree of culpability between two parties, stances, methods, and so on, where one has been construed as morally worthier than the other. It is also typical for claims of moral equivalence to leave unclear exactly what is equivalent to what. These characteristics apply in spades to Bakanichev’s account. As Stone notes, at various points in Bakanichev’s memoir the two entities on either side of the...

My Life in Prison: Memoirs of a Chinese Political Dissident by Jiang Qisheng, and: Heart for Freedom: The Remarkable Journey of a Young Dissident, Her Daring Escape, and Her Quest to Free China’s Daughters by Chai Ling (review)

Reviewed by: My Life in Prison: Memoirs of a Chinese Political Dissident by Jiang Qisheng, and: Heart for Freedom: The Remarkable Journey of a Young Dissident, Her Daring Escape, and Her Quest to Free China’s Daughters by Chai Ling Peter R. Moody (bio) Jiang Qisheng. My Life in Prison: Memoirs of a Chinese Political Dissident. Edited by Naomi May. Translated by James Dew. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2012. xv + 223 pp. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-1-4422-1222-0. Chai Ling. Heart for Freedom: The Remarkable Journey of a Young Dissident, Her Daring Escape, and Her Quest to Free China’s Daughters. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2011. xvi + 344 pp. Hardcover $22.99, isbn 978-1-4143-6246-5. Both authors considered here were active in the student democracy movement of 1989, and both remain critics of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) regime, Jiang Qisheng from within the country and Chai Ling from without. Jiang was head of the Beijing Student Autonomous Federation and was among those who met with then Premier Li Peng in hopes of engaging in a dialogue with the authorities. He served a brief prison sentence after the movement was suppressed, and was re-arrested in 1999 for helping to organize a demonstration with the Tiananmen mothers on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the massacre. His book recounts his time in the Beijing Detention Center while awaiting trial and at the Transfer Center prior to being sent to prison. It does not discuss his four years actually in prison. One gets the impression these years were the easiest part of his ordeal. [End Page 273] Chai Ling was the “supreme commander” of the hunger-strikers at Tiananmen. After the army seized the square, she and her husband, also a prominent activist, managed to escape. She and her husband were soon divorced. She eventually made her way to the United States. After receiving an MA from Princeton, she remarried a wealthy Boston businessman-politician and founded Zenzabar, a successful Internet company. In 2009, she converted to Christianity, and the book constitutes a kind of apology (in the classical sense of explanation) for her life. The last few chapters are mainly a devotional meditation. Both works are addressed to an English-language audience, probably primarily an American audience. Both, one assumes, are designed to influence American public opinion, with the ultimate aim of encouraging that opinion to push for more humane political order in China. It is hard to know how effective they will be toward that end. The American relationship with China is more complicated now than it used to be and more complicated than the old American relationship with the Soviet Union. From 1976 to 1989, China truly did seem to be undergoing what its rulers purport most to fear, a peaceful evolution, with the political system on a trajectory not necessarily toward liberal democracy but toward greater openness and tolerance to match the growing liberal economy. There was much goodwill between the aware publics in both countries. After the June 4 massacre, this goodwill vanished. However, China’s economic performance in the subsequent decades has fed into an increased military capacity, to the point where, for good or for ill, America can no longer take for granted its ability to exercise political influence in the Western Pacific. Also—and here is the crucial difference from the old Soviet Union—China’s growth has brought about a symbiotic intertwinement of the two countries, such that despite many political, economic, military, and moral frictions, the political establishments of both countries are highly motivated to avoid major stresses in the relationship. Thus, in contrast to the media attention that used to be showered on Soviet dissidents, these works will probably receive minimal notice. In 1989, the American embassy in Beijing was sheltered the outspoken physicist Fang Lizhi for months, despite President George H. W. Bush’s reservations about taking an overly moralistic line toward the PRC. The United States was later able to arrange for Fang’s safe departure. In 2012, the United States declined to give asylum to the Chongqing police boss Wang Lijun. Wang certainly seems...

Samizdat and Soviet Dissident Publics

In this article Ann Komaromi proposes a new critical look at the history of Soviet dissidence by way of samizdat and the idea of a private-public sphere. Samizdat is defined in a less familiar way, as a particular mode of existence of the text, rather than in terms of political opposition or a social agenda. This allows for a broader view of dissidence that includes familiar phenomena like the civil rights or democratic movement, along with relatively little known national, cultural, musical, artistic, poetic, and philosophical groups. The multiple perspectives of Soviet dissidence correspond to a decentered view of a mixed private-public sphere that resembles Nancy Fraser's modification of Jürgen Habermas's classic public sphere. This model of a private-public sphere provokes new questions about unofficial institutions and structures, the dialectic between private and public impulses in Soviet samizdat, and the relationship of dissidents to foreign individuals and organizations. The empirical basis for this analysis is a survey of Soviet samizdat periodicals from 1956 to 1986.

Putting Human Rights on the Agenda of the CSCE Process: Connections between the U.S. Congress and Soviet Dissidents after the Helsinki Final Act

Putting Human Rights on the Agenda of the CSCE Process: Connections between the U.S. Congress and Soviet Dissidents after the Helsinki Final Act

Elena Georgievna Bonner

Soviet paediatrician, dissident, and human rights activist One day in the late 1980s, Elena Bonner and her second husband, Andrei Sakharov, were on their way home when they saw a...

On Dissidents and Madness: From the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the “Soviet Union” of Vladimir Putin

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessOn Dissidents and Madness: From the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the “Soviet Union” of Vladimir PutinD. Ray Freebury, M.B., F.R.C.P.C.D. Ray FreeburySearch for more papers by this author, M.B., F.R.C.P.C.Published Online:1 Aug 2011https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.62.8.pss6208_0979AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail On Dissidents and Madness: From the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev to the “Soviet Union” of Vladimir Putinvan VorenRobert; New York, Rodopi Amsterdam, 2009, 312 pages, $96.10 hardcover, $28.50 softcoverThe book On Dissidents and Madness is the personal story of a unique man and a true friend of ethical psychiatry. It is a story of courage, terror, opportunism, ingenuity, honesty, and humanity. It is a story of countries, politics, psychiatric organizations, ruthlessness, apologists, and shame. And although it is also a story of growth and change both personal and societal, it reminds us that resistance to true reform still runs deep in society.A related review is available as an online supplement to this review at ps.psychiatryonline.org.As a teenager in 1977, Canadian-born Dutch author Robert van Voren had been troubled by stories of the mistreatment of Soviet dissidents and began collecting signatures on a petition to send to Moscow. He made frequent, daring undercover trips to the Soviet Union, obtaining firsthand information about the psychiatric mistreatment of political dissidents. When, early in the 1980s a group of British, French, German, and Swiss psychiatrists and activists met in Paris and formed the International Association on Political Use of Psychiatry (IAPUP), van Voren was the only member of the group who had the damning evidence of political misuse of psychiatry.The aim of the group was to have the Soviet All-Union Society of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists barred from membership in the World Psychiatric Association (WPA). The IAPUP was successful insofar as the All-Union Society resigned rather than face the ignominy of expulsion. Subsequently, the WPA assembly voted for conditions that Soviet psychiatry would have to meet before being readmitted. The assembly, rather than its executive branch, eventually distinguished itself as WPA's decision-making body. As a former chairman of the APA Committee on the International Abuse of Psychiatry, and subsequently as a colleague of van Voren with the Geneva Initiative in Psychiatry (GIP), this reviewer can corroborate the engrossing and often troubling events reported, which included the all-too-leaden responses of the leadership of the WPA.Van Voren was also concerned about the treatment of genuine psychiatric patients in the Soviet Union as well as the devaluation of psychiatrists and the inadequate training they received. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the GIP (the transformed IAPUP) was able to organize a series of meetings in some of the newly independent states where psychiatrists from various parts of the former Soviet Union met and were exposed to the best of Western psychiatry. After some initial mistrust, it did not take long before a Network of Reformers emerged under the aegis of the GIP.The second part of the book is an account of the successes of the GIP and the Network of Reformers in creating nongovernmental organizations of psychiatrists, nurses, and even public mental health support groups in the countries that achieved independence after the fall of the Soviet Union. In this section of the book we also see how the author transformed from a zealous, sometimes vengeful teenager to an inspired but realistic and worldly-wise reformer. He was very much aided in this transformation by a philosophical Ukrainian Jewish psychiatrist, Semyon Gluzman, who, despite having been a victim of the abuses and having spent several years in the Gulag, did not paint all the abusers alike.Despite the presence of some annoying grammatical errors and spelling mistakes that were missed during the editing of the book, this is a very readable account of a dishonorable episode in the history of psychiatry and the contributions of those who endeavored to restore some honor and humanity to our specialty. It will have wide appeal to those interested in the history of psychiatry and should be required reading for psychiatric residents.The reviewer reports no competing interests.Dr. Freebury is a training and supervising psychoanalyst with the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 62Issue 8 August 2011Pages 979-979 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 August 2011 Published in print 1 August 2011

Adam Michnik’s Understanding of Totalitarianism and the West European Left

There is a supreme irony concerning the history of the concept of “totalitarianism”: during the 1970s, many Western social scientists and intellectuals abandoned this concept, arguing that it was too rigid to account for the changes that were occurring in Eastern Europe at the time; one of the developments they cited was the rise of Central European and Soviet dissidents. At precisely this time, however, the dissidents themselves started to apply the adjective totalitarian to the Communist regimes they rebelled against. Focusing on Adam Michnik’s writings, the article assesses this seeming paradox by adopting a transnational perspective. The article’s main thesis is that, for Michnik, the value of “totalitarianism” did not lie in its analytical precision but in the discursive force the term acquired in transnational exchanges in which Michnik tried to mobilize the support of the Western left for the cause of the Polish opposition. The article substantiates this thesis with two case studies. Addressing West German Social Democrats, the concept of totalitarianism seems to have served as a means of convincing them that support for the Polish opposition was not detrimental to reforms in Eastern Europe and to international détente but a necessary precondition for any authentic peace. In addressing French audiences, Michnik seems to have used the adjective totalitarian to convince his interlocutors that human rights advocacy was not any kind of issue but that French and Polish democratic socialists faced a common threat.

Former Soviet Dissidents Believed APA Pressure Forced Change

APA letters to incarcerated Soviet dissidents served notice to Soviet officialdom that the world was watching, and documents in Soviet archives reveal that authorities paid attention. This is the second article in a three-part series on psychiatry and the Cold War.

Advocating dignity: human rights mobilizations in global politics

List of Illustrations Preface* Introduction. The New Moral Order: Between Human Dignity and Territorial Sovereignty Chapter 1. Raising the Bar, 1900-1949 PART I. AN EMERGING HUMAN RIGHTS ORTHODOXY: THE FIRST ROUND Chapter 2. Cold War Politics and Human Rights Publics: The International Antiapartheid and Soviet Dissident Movements, 1952-90 Chapter 3. Mothers' Courage and U.N. Monitoring of Disappearance, 1973-83 PART II. THE DEBATE CONTINUES: CRITICS AND NEW MECHANISMS Chapter 4. The Gender Factor since the 1970s: Universality and the Private Sphere Chapter 5. Citizenship, Socioeconomic Rights, and the Courts in the Age of Transnational Migrations PART III. HUMAN RIGHTS AT A CROSSROADS: WARS, CRIMES, AND PRIORITIES Chapter 6. Ethnic Violence, Humanitarian Intervention, and Criminal Accountability in the 1990s Chapter 7. September 2001 and History Conclusion: Making a Difference Notes Index

Journal “Molodaya Gvardiya” (“The Young Guard”) and Ideological Contradictions of 1960th years

History of Soviet dissidents is well studied, but the activities and views of Russian national-patriotic movement are known less. One episode of this activity — a serious ideological and world outlook conflict between “thick” literary magazines in 1960th is reviewed in this brief research. The theme of the hidden ideological contradictions in nomenclature and creative circles, in general, loyal to the authorities, revealed through the story of literary discussion.

“…Хотя Эти Люди Существовали, не Они Строили Новые Национальные Государства”

SUMMARY: AI editor Serguei Glebov conducted this interview with Levan Berdzenishvili, a classical philologist who in the late Soviet period taught at Tbilisi University and in the post-Soviet years served as director of the National Library of Georgia (1998–2004). The interview presents Berdzenishvili first of all as a political persona: a Soviet dissident, the cofounder of the Republican Party of Georgia (1978), a prisoner in the prison camp for political offenders in Mordovia (1984–1987), a one-time member of the Georgian Parliament (2004–2008), and an opponent of the politics of the current president of Republic of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. Levan Berdzenishvili reflects on the history of the Georgian dissident movement, on the relationship between nationalism and civil rights activism in it, and on the phenomenon of “Soviet internationalism” among political prisoners that inspired him to reconsider his nationalist stance. He regrets that post-Soviet Georgia, Russia, and Ukraine were constructed by another generation that lacked this specific formative Soviet experience. Berdzenishvili proposes his own explanations of current Georgian politics, the causes of the Russian–Georgian war of 2008, and the trajectories of post-Soviet transformations in the region in general.

The Occident Within—or the Drive for Exceptionalism and Modernity

If we are to understand what (state) socialism was about, grasping the images, perceptions, and mentalities upon which this social order rested is crucial. (1) A possible approach to such entities leads through the study of mental mapping. Symbolic geographies reveal how human agents, in particular historical and cultural contexts, define themselves by locating themselves spatially as well as temporally, drawing the boundaries of social spaces where they are within, and relating themselves and their spaces to others and to what lies, in their discursively constructed spatial-temporal order, without, behind, and ahead. What makes these socially and historically situated processes really important is their intimate relationship to the formation of identities and, indeed, to identity politics (including the regular attempts in all kinds of political regimes at the deliberate management of identities through the projection of images about themselves and others). State socialism, the social order established by the communist regimes in Russia and in East Central Europe during the first half of the last century, is no exception in this regard. Barbara Walker's perceptive essay on the relationship between Soviet dissidents and Western journalists reporting from the USSR stands out from this set in that it alone focuses on the micro-dynamics of East-West encounters and interaction. Emphasizing the role of Soviet isolation in general and the constant stress to which the regime exposed dissidents, Walker shows clearly the role of the insider-outsider distinction played in this interaction as well as the high demands against the Western journalist if s/he wanted to establish a workable rapport with dissidents (and the high expectations of involvement and shared values one had to face if accepted and identified as an insider). Rewarded with an excellent analysis of the culture of dissidence and the dynamics of group formation along the boundary between insiders and outsiders, the reader is eager to see future reports from Walker's research discussing in greater detail issues pertinent to the questions what it meant for the dissidents to be Soviet, how they related to the socialist social order, and how all this affected their relations to Westerners (and Western journalists). All the other essays confront the issues of systemic identity in discussing various social fields' history under state socialism in terms of the symbolic geographies they yielded. Without wishing to turn the wheel of historiography back to the times when a great deal of theorizing about the Soviet type of political, social, and cultural order emphasized the ideocratic nature of these regimes, the despotic implications of Marxism, these new studies on identity formation and identity politics demonstrate unequivocally the supreme role of the Marxist-Leninist view upon the social universe of the modern and late modern era in prevalent discourses of identity throughout the career of the state-socialist project. While we strongly believe that the discourses of socialist society need to be taken seriously, this claim is not about the primacy of ideology imposed from above. It is about a common structuring feature or shared tendency of discursive practices (the practices of imagining) observable in various walks of life in state-socialist societies. There is no direct path from this claim to suggestions trying to assert anything like an ontological priority of ideology, even less of discourses, over all other practices in these (or other) societies. A discussion of the ways in which discursive and other practices combine to co-produce and reproduce a social order is beyond the scope of the studies included in this issue. The findings presented here offer valuable observations concerning the dynamics of discursive processes of identity formation along the Cold War East-West divide. Marxist-Leninist theory of social development tells a relatively simplistic story about a sequence of social formations. …

Reforming the Fox: Spenser's "Mother Hubberds Tale," the Beast Fables of Barnabe Riche, and Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin

Reforming the Fox:Spenser's "Mother Hubberds Tale," the Beast Fables of Barnabe Riche, and Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin Thomas Herron Gluttonie, malice, pride, and covetizeAnd lawlesnes raigning with riotize;Besides the infinite extortions,Done through the Foxes great oppressions,That the complaints thereof could not be tolde. —"Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale," 1309–13.1 Political allegory thrives amid state secrecy and endemic corruption. At least two early modern authors, Edmund Spenser and his fellow radical Protestant reformer in Ireland, Barnabe Riche, wrote risqué allegories in order to promote harsh tactics as a means of cultural change. Unlike Soviet dissidents, to take one modern example, who promoted open-minded and/or democratic principles in the face of totalitarianism, Riche and Spenser took the opposite tack, using their shadowy allegories to promote more militant and authoritarian policies in their adopted country. Riche's richly allegorical Adventures of Brusanus (1592) and Greenes Newes both from Heaven and Hell (1593) lament the abuse of power by local magistrates and condemn the waffling of weak administrators. Spenser's satire "Prosopopoia. Or Mother Hubberds Tale" (1591) demands that London aggressively put an end to the power of moderate albeit highly corrupt governors of the realm, including [End Page 336] those among the queen's own Protestant clerical and civil appointees in Ireland. Spenser's political allegories readily bleed into each other, and English readers who appreciate his satires need not understand their Irish topicality. Nonetheless, "Mother Hubberds Tale" and its host-volume, the aptly titled Complaints (1591), are shaped by Spenser's increased desire for a militant Protestant solution in a highly corrupt Ireland, riven by factional politics and dominated by corrupt administrations. The crafty and hypocritical Fox in the first and fourth parts of the "Tale," it is argued here, primarily satirizes the Archbishop of Dublin and Armagh and Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Adam Loftus, rather than the Lord Treasurer of England, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, as previously understood. This identification of the Fox corresponds with similar contemporary satire of Loftus by Riche. It is in the context of attempted radical reform in and outside of the Dublin Pale in the late 1580s that we should understand the beast fables of both authors. Spenser and Riche demonstrate hostility toward those who, rightly or wrongly, failed to share the reforming spirit of their militant Protestant faction in the worst of times. This is not to say that Spenser held no republican fantasies for the eventual transformation of his adopted land.2 Rather, as in book 5 of The Faerie Queene, short-term necessity demanded that he celebrate the fertile magnificence and strong arm of the prince and her deputies in allegorical guise. The authority he opposed was corrupt and local, its solution authoritarian. Spenser's "Mother Hubberds Tale," when read in the context of contemporary and similarly disguised complaints by Riche, laments the decline of a once-staunch Protestant reformer, Loftus, into spiritual and worldly corruption and suggests that martial, not common law, is among the solutions to Ireland's malady. I Politics Spenser approached his colonial situation as administrator and planter with a starkly alternating pessimism and optimism based on experience, [End Page 337] a conviction that "evil" inhabited the world, and belief, a prophetic hope that it might one day be overthrown. On the optimistic side, Spenser's Faerie Queene makes his position in Ireland resonate with a universal central significance as a land to be labored over, protected, and made fertile by the great sun-goddess Queen Elizabeth I.3 Simultaneously, in what appears as a dynamic tension in his artistic vision, Spenser complains regularly about the world and Ireland in particular, comparing it often to an obscure and lawless wilderness ruled by petty tyrants. He does this in order to meditate on the state of the exiled Christian soul in a hostile or decentered world of confusing signs. Spenser's fascination with lapsed souls and corrupt civilization has as much to do with his fixation on inner states of savagery and Christian salvation as on actual savage conditions in the world, and we can appreciate how the stereotypical colonial images in his poetry, such as those describing the...

Aleksandras Shtromas

Aleksandras Shtromas (1931-1999), a British-American scholar, became an eminent figure in his native Lithuania, yet Westem social scientists have yet to discover this human rights activist, Soviet dissident, and political thinker. Shtromas had no doubts about the inexorable collapse of the Soviet Union, resting his analysis on the assumption that communism was unable to provide any viable social and moral order. The vast majority of the Soviet intelligentsia had become skilled at the ideological cat-and-mouse games, wrestling wth Soviet Newspeak and censorship, and employing an Aesopian language in order to survive and remain as decent as possible in a world of brainwashing and lies. A gifted prophet of post-communism, Shtromas was the only political scientist in the world who took the disintegration of the Soviet Union as early as the late 1970s as an ongoing process. This essay links Shtromas' legacy to the great East European dissenters.

Voices of freedom: Samizdat

In the first socialist systsem culture was more than a realm of artistry and aesthetics.1 It was often another dimension of a fierce struggle—ideological and political—against the bourgeoisie (Whit...

Ethno-Territorial Federalism and A. D. Sakharov’s Constitutional Draft

387 Ab Imperio, 4/2004 There are some other provisions where ambiguities can be noticed. Such is the case of Paragraph 20, where despite Sakharov’s commitment to peace he proposed, at the level of each republic, the establishment of military forces and other armed services. Or, in another instance, certain contradictions emerged when on the one hand he states that foreign policy will be the prerogative of the central level (Paragraph 19), and yet each republic will be able to establish direct international economic contacts (Paragraph 22). By opening access to international and global markets, republics will directly engage in shaping the context and application on the ground, in fact at the local level, of economic foreign policies and they will become agents of foreign policies. Despite these points of contestation, Sakharovs’ constitution is a visionary and formidable document committed to the rule of law, social justice, equality among all, and respect for human rights and basic freedoms. It is also a document that not only illustrates the density of Sakharov’s thought and the search for a democratic and humanistic future for the entire world but also reflects late Soviet dissidents’ worldview. In that sense, the document is a memorial to the great historical moment of social and political transformations of the late 20th century that Sakharov so much helped to spearhead. It is often difficult for contemporaries to understand what is going on in front of them. This is also true for the foreign observers of an event. When Gorbachev’s economic reforms and their painful consequences were attracting worldwide attention, both the citizens of the USSR and foreign observers Kimitaka MATSUZATO ETHNO-TERRITORIAL FEDERALISM AND A. D. SAKHAROV’S CONSTITUTIONAL DRAFT 388 Вспоминая конституционный проект А. Д. Сахарова... thought that the idea of reform was good, but that Gorbachev lacked the strong will to realize it in full or that he was encountering resistance by the nomenklatura. Several years after the collapse of the USSR, scholars began to argue convincingly that Gorbachev’s reforms themselves were destructive by their intention (to create a market economy without imposing adequate risks on enterprises) and implementation (voluntarism and leapfrogging changes in policies).1 In contrast to Gorbachev’s hyper-reformism, Sakharov’s constitutional draft (for the expected Union of Republics of Europe and Asia) impresses us by its conservatism, if we read it as a guideline for state building. Yet it is another example of how difficult it is for contemporaries to understand the real reasons for the crises they face. The draft confirms the traditional idea of ethno-territorial federalism, which premises the coincidence of federal constituents (union republics and other administrative territorial units) and the spatial distribution of ethnicities (Paragraphs 17 and others). According to this approach, each federal constituent has its titular nation, the members of which are more or less privileged in “their” republic.2 Remember that almost all the republics in the USSR, both union and autonomous, were named for some titular nation.3 The Russian Empire was built on a purely territorial principle. To be more precise, the Russian empire tried hard to avoid overlapping the administrative territorial boundaries with the ethnic distribution of the population. Imperial officials thought that ethnically homogeneous regions would provoke separatism among the population and make inter-ethnic relations more complex (a compromise between a population distribution of 90 percent and 10 percent is often more difficult to achieve than that between 60 percent and 40 percent). There were few exceptions to this principle: for example, the introduction of Kovno (Kaunas) Province in the 1840s and the Steppe Governor-Generalship in the 1880s. However, both of them had limited, concrete purposes: the former was planned to sever Lowland Lithuanians 1 Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich (Eds.). The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System. An Insiders’ History. Armonk, NY, 1998. 2 Therefore, the fact that in present-day Tatarstan ethnic Tatars, who compose only half of the population but make up 80 percent of the political elites, is a result of the realization (not distortion) of ethno-territorial federalism. 3 The only examples named after the place name were Crimea and Dagestan. But Crimea had its title nation (Crimean Tatars) and multiethnic Dagestan had and...