— Alexander Yulevich, how and when did dissidents appear?
— Proto-dissident companies, circles began to emerge after the 20th Congress: creative Moscow youth gathered to read poetry at Mayakovsky Square, there were avant-garde artists, nonconformist writers.
Unformed ferment began to turn into conscious opposition when nonconformists began to be criminally prosecuted. The most iconic cases — the case of Joseph Brodsky and the case of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, my father, — led to many of these circles and companies merging into a certain common socio-cultural environment; this environment was later called dissidents — from the Latin dissidens, disagreeing. The word, by the way, came from outside, from foreign observers.
— And what did they call themselves?
— They struggled with it for a long time! I remember these discussions. An idea came from somewhere in the provinces to call themselves the «Democratic Movement of the Soviet Union», to which one of my acquaintances remarked: whatever you call it in this country, it always ends with «SS». It didn't catch on, just like the word «democrats»: most believed that their systematic protest activity was of a non-political nature, and they had a poor attitude towards the word «politics». Sometimes they called themselves protestants, sometimes, semi-ironically, — signatories, because a significant part of their activity initially consisted of open letters of protest against political persecution. All this activity was accompanied by self-irony: people fought against the system, laughing at themselves.
— Like in the favorite toast of human rights activist Pavel Litvinov «Let's drink to the success of our hopeless cause»?
— Yes, only this toast was not invented by Pavel, it was invented by Sinyavsky back in the 50s.
— And where does the self-irony come from?
— Probably, without it, it is impossible to engage in something that, from the perspective of the engaged, has no prospects. This is an existential worldview: I do it not to achieve something, but because I cannot not do it. I remember Vaclav Havel saying, speaking in Moscow at the Sakharov Center in the mid-2000s and addressing the current Russian opposition: «Just don't take yourself with beastly seriousness!»
But there were also those who perceived their activities as political opposition — Vladimir Bukovsky, for example, or Andrei Sakharov (but for him, politics was global).
— Where does a person dissatisfied with the government end and a dissident begin?
— I think where this dissatisfaction is realized in some public actions. This is the first condition. And the second — that these actions go beyond the system, are independent of it.
There was, for example, the magazine «New World», whose editorial board, led by the remarkable Alexander Tvardovsky, tried to push the boundaries of what was permissible within the Soviet system — and quite successfully. And there was samizdat, which did not imply interaction with the authorities at all: just a person and a typewriter. The difference between an oppositional censored magazine and samizdat is the difference between the sixties and dissidents. And at the end of the 60s, many authors who had previously been published in «New World», «Youth», «Theater», became «unpublishable» — and went into samizdat.
Opposition to political persecution initially tried to stay within the system: people wrote collective letters not just anywhere, but to government agencies or the CPSU Central Committee. But quite quickly, protest activity went beyond these boundaries. In 1968, the «Chronicle of Current Events» appeared, a typewritten informational bulletin of human rights activists, in 1969 — the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR. By the end of the 60s, the human rights movement had already become purely dissident.
People lacked civil society, it was impossible to build it, and they began to model it. Samizdat — not free press, but a kind of model of free press.
Dissident associations, like the Initiative Group — also not quite public organizations, but rather a model of independent civil organizations. And so on — up to the point that in the second half of the 70s, inspired by the Polish example, they tried to create something like free trade unions (but unfortunately, this did not work out at all).
— But the principle fake it till you make it really works: if there are no models of the desired, there is no understanding that it is even possible.
— Exactly. And when unexpectedly for many, including me, perestroika began, all the dissident developments were in demand.
It is characteristic that in those plots that eluded the attention of dissidents in the 70s-80s, perestroika stalled — for example, in matters of interethnic conflicts. For dissidents, all social collisions were reduced to a collision between the authorities and independent public, there was no idea that different segments of this public could enter into confrontation. And when this began to happen, there was confusion.
— What united the participants of the dissident movement?
— I prefer to speak of the dissident community and avoid the word «movement». As my mother, a prominent figure in the dissident environment, said, «if there was a movement, it was Brownian».
What common movement could there be among Lithuanian Catholics and Seventh-day Adventists, who believed that all evil came from Catholicism, Russian nationalists and Jewish refuseniks, adherents of true Marxism-Leninism and those who considered socialism a terrible evil or were generally indifferent to politics?
It was an incredible zoo, but maybe its strength was in this. All living things went into dissidence — not because they wanted to, but because they were pushed there: the system rejected any independent activity. Nonconformist art went into dissidence, author's song, independent humanitarian knowledge, etc. Although there were separate initiatives that did not enter the community, — for example, early environmental initiatives from the provinces or the rock movement (although in other countries of the socialist camp it was part of the dissident movement, in Czechoslovakia, for example).
Dissidence — is a set of groups, circles, currents, directions, individual initiatives, diverse, and sometimes opposing. They were united by the fact that they were all independent of the state and all (well, almost all) declared that any initiative, even one they did not sympathize with, had the right to exist. Common was solidarity in the fight against persecution, that is, human rights activities.
Even at the turn of the 60s-70s, dissidents of all directions and persuasions developed a common language — the universal language of law. Everyone found this language suitable, and the human rights movement, not very large in number, turned out to be the backbone, the spine of this strange amorphous community.
— How did this language arise?
— The human rights movement has an inventor and father — Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, a mathematician, philosopher, and poet, who was imprisoned many times. Even in the late 50s, he preached the idea that law is a universal key to all social problems. He was very popular in Moscow circles, although considered eccentric. In 1965, when Sinyavsky and Daniel were arrested, he decided to organize a public rally demanding an open trial for the arrested. He wrote a leaflet — a call to come to Pushkin Square in Moscow for a «publicity rally», called it a «Civil Appeal», and scheduled the rally for December 5 — Constitution Day, which explicitly stated the freedom of demonstrations. He distributed the appeal through acquaintances in several Moscow universities.
Volpin's initiative met with bewilderment and horror. There had never been rallies under human rights slogans in the USSR. Who could seriously talk about rights in a Soviet country, even after the 20th Congress? However, quite a lot of young people came to the Pushkin monument at the appointed time (and even more people came to see what would come of it). The rally was, of course, dispersed, but no particularly severe repressions occurred. And then many began to think that talking to the authorities in the language of law was right, that this is how it should be.
By about 1968, this language had already become generally accepted among those who wanted to oppose the authorities. The epigraph to the first issue of the «Chronicle of Current Events» was a quote from the Declaration of Human Rights about the freedom of information dissemination.
So yes, the dissident community was a mishmash of the most diverse ingredients, hundreds of companies and ideas. But this mishmash had a common seasoning — the idea of human rights protection.
— Were there conflicts within the dissident community?
— Of course, there were, but not like now. Mainly these were the famous kitchen debates. After Stalin's death and the end of the terror era, people stopped being afraid and closing in on themselves. By the late 50s, companies became large, broad, open. External pressure was more important than internal disagreements, and when a person ended up behind bars, they were definitely pushed aside. The division into those who were accepted and those who were not was there, but more in the later period, and it was more a question of who was accepted into the company and who was not. If accepted — something extraordinary had to happen to expel a person from there. Definitely not because of certain views.
— On December 18, we will remember Arseny Roginsky — a human rights activist, historian, and one of the founders of «Memorial»*. Did you work with him for many years?
— Yes, we met in Tartu on August 21, 1968, the day Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia. At that time, the authorities put an end to our common hopes for improving the situation in the Union. People were in despair, gathered, drank vodka, tried to understand what kind of world we were living in now — much like February 24, 2022. In one of these companies, I encountered Arseny.
And we truly came together in 1976, when Arseny appeared with the idea of making the historical almanac «Memory», the only, it seems, periodical publication of samizdat that claimed academic scientificity. In 81, he was imprisoned, in 85, he was released. A little later, we joined the memorial movement with him; under him, it acquired not only a socio-political but also a research face.
I am still in «Memorial». We continue to work: if we talk only about the dissident theme, then last year we published a documentary collection «Object of Observation: KGB against Sakharov», and this spring — the second volume of the reference book «Encyclopedia of Dissidence», dedicated to dissidents in the USSR (the first volume, dedicated to dissidents of Central and Eastern Europe, we released back in 2022).
— «Memorial» has done a tremendous job of telling how the country actually lived and suffered. Did you want to write the true history of Russia in the 20th century?
— No, «Memorial» never claimed to be the only keeper and interpreter of the «true history of Russia». We just wanted a serious conversation about the Soviet past to begin in society. Much is based on images of the past. But talking about the traumatic past is very difficult. It's harder for us than for the Germans: their dictatorship lasted only 12 years, and they mainly killed others (well, and German Jews, whom they first declared others). And with us, our own killed their own, it's insanely hard to accept. Moreover, the Germans were defeated, which greatly contributes to the enlightenment of minds.
Our past should not be exalted or cursed, but comprehended in the course of a broad national discussion. We did not have enough influence to initiate such a discussion, we did not have enough strength to seriously bring the historical dimension into the national consciousness. If we had enough strength — there would be no war.
* Recognized in Russia as a «foreign agent», liquidated by court decision.