Meerson-Aksenov "The Dissident Movement and Samizdat"

Meerson-Aksenov, Michael. "The Dissident Movement and Samizdat." In The Political, Social and Religious Thought of Russian 'Samizdat'- An Anthology.  Edited by Michael Meerson-Aksenov and Boris Shagrin. Translated by Nicolas Lupinin. 19-46. Massachusetts: Nordland Publishing Company, 1977.

"The dissident movement and samizdat are two sides of the very same process which may be called the awakening of the consciousness of Soviet society." (M-A, 19)

"Literally ideocracy means the supremacy of an idea-in our age of totalitarian societies, it means the supreme rule of a government ideology. The later is possible only in the absence of competing ideas. Ideology predominates only in full isolation, for there is a great difference between ideology in the singular and the plural. In free press societies competing ideologies exist with political groupings behind them. Any kind of party membership assumes the sense in which totalitarian society knows it. (M-A, 19)

"Reality begins to demand ideological interpretation; ideology is a deformation of this reality. For example, key ideas of communism such as "proletarian revolution," "class enemies," "ideological struggle," "enemies of the people," "building communism," and others do not reflect reality." (M-A, 20)

"In this way, irrespective of the private opinions of ideologues, ideology must remain true to itself. Aristing from this, at the level of principle, in the necessity of correlating it with objective information. This, in turn, leads to dual consciousness. However, this trait is particularly inherent in the layer of the Soviet intelligentsia whose function is, on the one hand, the preparation of ideological information, and, on the other, the extraction of 'pure' information to supplement ideology." (M-A, 22)

"Ideocracy needs a mentor in ideological catechism,--the intelligentsia which simultaneously turns out to be the servitor and the victim of ideology. It is the servitor because it is precisely to it, and not to the strata of administrators, party workers, manufactures and the military, that ideology is obliged for its worldly activity. At the same time it is the material foundation of its being. It is the victim because, consciously or unconsciously, it suffers from its mercenary role and the subjection of its labors to ideological goals which deprive it of its own professional values and which subsitute for professional honest. The historian, philosopher, literateur, teacher, journalist, writer, etc...are judged not by their professional qualities but by the degree of their 'ideological function.' (M-A,23)

"The ruling party apparatus, recognizing its dependence on ideology, and through it also its dependence on the intelligentsia, watches the latter with a sleepless eye. From the start it attempts to quash any tendency toward free thought or even cultural pluralism in the intelligentsia, for this would be destructive to its monolithic nature. If a significant part of the intelligentsia considers this position of "service" to be normal and even propitious insofar as it guarantees certain privileges, then it produces a moral conflict in the other sector of the intelligentsia between its professional consciousness and human virtue and that ideological role which it is forced to play. In the main this relates to the humanitarian intelligentsia whose activity is wholly drawn into the sphere of "ideological struggle." (M-A, 23)

"This Anglo-Saxon term, which initially signified a certain sectarian alienation of the minority from the ideological 'monolith' of the majority, especially in reference to the opposition movement in the USSR, is unusually good. A. Amal'rick very accurately noted that opposition first arose among the acadmic and creative intelligentsia and that the dissident movement commenced in the form of 'cultural opposition.' The intelligentsia came out for the 'separation of ideology from culture' not in the form of some kind of public announcement or an appeal to the party, but in the form of a free creativity frequently parallel to teh activity within the framework of the system's "official culture." This was the birth of samizdat an independent, subculture in the womb of of which a social consciousness began to be formed." (M-A,24)

"Furthermore, the possibility of 'ideocracy' assures an ideological hypnotization of society, its rejection whether voluntary  or forced, of consciousness. It assumes an ideological state signifies the rejection of personal values with that which is called ideology." (M-A, 25)

"In a certain sense, samizdat always existed in Russia, whether in the form of Prince Kurbskii's letters to Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the writing of archpriest Avvakum, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the notebooks of the masons and later the Decembrists, the unpublished letters of Chaadeaev, or, finally in the Soviet period, in the from of factional party polemics in the '20s and various works in the '30s that could not be published." (M-A, 25)

"Despite Stalinist terror, samizdat in this form was bever crushed. Even in the fiercest year, 1936-1938, there were small groups of intellectuals that passed around within the group typed literature which was forbidden or not publishable." (M-A, 25)"

"It was transformed from an incidental use of forbidden information to a form expressing social consciousness, when it began to grow into an independent area of culture that saw itself not as a corrective or a supplement to official Soviet culture but as a self-contained and singularly original sphere for the realization of society's spiritual and intellectual life." (M-A, 26)

27: Pasternak as catalyst- "With its full weight it fell upon the writer. It showed all the intellifentia what an improper interpretation of "freedom," "liberalization," and "Creative collaboration" could lead to." (M-A, 27)

"Historical foresight has chosen as the creator of samizdat as a phenomenon which arouses man's social being toward independence-a quite unexpected social champion, one quite distant from this role, a writer taken up with the inner life of the spirit, deaf to political history and a social in the whole tone of his works. Spirit stands at the cradle of Russian samizdat. With Pasternak it began as process of the creative formation of consciousness. At first it was in literature, the poetry, the arts...Then it grew into a spontaneous social process expressed in hundreds of letters, complaints, witnessing the violation of 'human rights.' Finally, it gave birth to independent political and social thought. (M-A, 28)

"The subsequent growth of a 'legal' samizdat literature revealed: letters of protest to native and foreign organizations which witness widespread violations, a whole literature that calls for a formal adherence to socialist law and, finally, the emergence of the bulletin Khronika and the Committee for for teh Defense of Human Rights in the USSR." (M-A, 31)

"The movement is characterized by an 'absence of ideals' and by empiricism: its purpose is to defend, on the basis of law, those who are under attack by the regime; and hence it can function without overly concentrating on the nature of the regime itself." (M-A, 33)

"In the role of a disseminator of samizdat, typed in six to fifteen copies on a typewriter, I have heard the following requests many times from the reader: 'Please give me one of the first copies. In five years of reading samizdat I have managed to ruin my eyesite. In the last five year an anecdote about samizdat has made the rounds: a father of a family type out Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace--a classic Russian work that may be bought cheaply in any book store. When he is asked why he is doing this he answers: ''My son is in school where they are studying War and Peace. He must read it for the course but he refuses to read anything that is not in samizdat.' This anecdote, by the way, demonstrates a growing lack of faith in the printed word in the USSR as such, no matter what is printed." (M-A, 38)

Kenez Vol. 4 Dissent

"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