"Soviet dissenters did not form and did not even aim to form a movement of political opposition. They did not plan to take over the government and did not offer an alternative set of policies. They did not agree with on another concerning the large political issues of the day, and they came to object to official policies for a wide variety of reasons. The heterogeneity of this small group became ever more obvious. Yet this group had something in common: its members were courageous people who were willing to accept considerable risks for principles in which they believed. They represented a moral voice, and their willingness to accept persecution showed that Soviet regime was hypocritical and did not live up to its own idea. Their behavior demonstrated that it was possible to "live in truth" as the great Czech dissident Vaclav Havel put it (K, 223)."
Dissent arose gradually in the Krushchev period--that is, at a time when the Soviet Union ceased to be a totalitarian state. One factor was the amelioration of terror, and another was the ever-increasing conact with advanced capitalist countries. Soviet propagandists were correct when they maintained the West was a subversive force...."People live better in the West (K, 223)
"The year 1956 was a pivotal one. Khrushchev's "secret" speech filled many with hope and enthusiasm, and a conviction that a new era would come into being. After all, the first secretary himself had called for an jonest examination of the nation's past. In the first blush of enthusiasm a great deal of truth was spoken. Inevitably, in the first blush of enthusiasm a great deal of truth was spoken. Inevitably, in the aftermath of a more or less open discussion of Stalin's crimes and after the return of tens of thousands of innocent people from concentration camps, ideas would be expressed that went beyond the officially approved views. Writers were struggling to find the limits of the permissible, but those limits were diffidult to find, for Khrushchev's regime was rather unpredictable. Some individuals honestly helieved that their ideas might meet with governmental approval. Since Khrushchev's personality was mercurial and circumstances were constantly changing, it was hard to know what was permitted and what was not. Many people inadvertently found themselves in trouble. (K, 224)"
224: Pasternak publishes in Italy
"When Pasternak died in 1960, many who believed that the authorities drove him to his grave gathered in the cemetery in silent support of the anti-Stalinist cause. This was the first post-Stalin political demonstration. The dissident movement, a small group of courageous intellectuals, slowly was coming into being. (K,225)"
"The dissidents began to spread their ideas by typescripts to produced in many carbon copies. The writings passed from hand to hand sometimes reaching thousands of people. This was samizdat (self-publishing) was born. The form of "publishing" became a regular part of the life of a large part of at least the urban intelligentsia. In the early stages of the cold war the United States established a set of radio stations in Munich, West Germany, in order to broadcast news and entertainment to communist Eastern Europe. The station which broadcast in Russian, Radio Liberty, made available to Soviet audiences Pasternak's entire long novel. This particular form publishing was called tamizdat (published elsewhere). The songs of dissenter bards such as Aleksandr Galich, Balut Okudzhava, and Vladimir Vysotskii were spread by passing audio tapes from hand to hand. (K, 225)"
"In the course of the second wave of the anti-Stalin campaing in 1962, Khrushchev personally intervened in order to allow the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novella A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This work was a subtle but unequivocal denunciation of Stalinist terror, perhaps the most daring work published up to that time in a Soviet journal. (K, 225)"
"While the author of that book was not arrested-for the arrest of Pasternak would have caused an international scandal, further harming the standing of the Soviet Union-the unknown and therefore unprotected reader could spend years in a labor camp for such an offense. (K,225)"
"In this respect the Brezhnev era was substantially different.There continued to be periods of relaxation and periods of more intense repression, but by and large the regime became more predictable. The authorities wanted to end the de-Stalinization process initiated by Khrushchev, which seemed too dangerous to them. (K, 226)"
-considered partial rehab of Stalin
No comments:
Post a Comment