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Authors: Stephen Kotkin
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as nonconformist behaviour. But of the several thousand individuals jailed or exiled for unorthodox views or actions during the Brezhnev years, only a small minority consisted of internationally recognized human-rights campaigners such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1975). A second category of dissenters comprised hard-core separatists, especially in western regions annexed during the 1940s. But seekers of religious freedom constituted the great majority of those who suffered 45
reviving the dream
at the hands of the regime; there were seventeen attempts at self-immolation on Red Square in 1981 alone, none of them known to the outside world, and more importantly, to the Soviet population. 12 A leader of Moscow’s underground human-rights organization, summing up the situation in 1984, wrote, ‘the history of dissent in the USSR is a tragic one’, adding correctly that ‘the movement never became a mass movement and the immediate demands of the dissidents were almost wholly frustrated’. 13
But the regime faced a threat considerably greater than ‘dissidents’: a several-million-strong army of scientists who were overwhelmingly not politically active yet still clashed with the authorities because they needed access to basic domestic data—let alone foreign publications—which were denied to them by their hack political supervisors.
This dilemma of needing and yet stifling scientific exchange became ever more acute, and a few top apparatchiks broached the possibility of relaxing censorship. But the party’s chief ideologue in the Brezhnev period, Mikhail Suslov—a CC secretary since 1949 (under Stalin), and a full politburo member since 1955—pointed out that it was only a matter of months after the removal of censorship in Czechoslovakia that the tanks had to roll in. Who, he asked, was going to send tanks to the Soviet Union?
Some restrictions were eased on a case-by-case basis, but for most scientists, just as for cultural intellectuals, Communist Party membership was a prerequisite for career advancement, and was used to enforce the basic chain of command.
46
reviving the dream
Outside Moscow, republic party machines, usually led by a Communist of the titular nation, with a Russian as number two, received substantial autonomy in exchange for maintaining loyalty to Moscow. National themes did become ever more prevalent in the non-Russian republics, paralleling the ‘national Communism’ of Eastern Europe, but nationalism was nowhere allowed to displace the official socialist ideology, and loyalty was nowhere in question. Only in the Russian republic—which alone lacked a separate republic party—were Russian nationalists permitted, occasionally, to criticize Marxist-Leninism and atheism publicly in the name of the preservation of pre-revolutionary monuments, the Russian soul, and the environment. 14 But such cultural nationalism was never allowed to become an independent force. In both Russia and the non-Russian republics, separatist threats were weak, and multinational solidarity strong, reinforced by propaganda, Russification and its career advantages, the mutual dependencies of the planned economy, and the high incidence of ethnically mixed marriages. Russian dominated, and replete with injustices, the Union fostered many resentments, but, rather than a cauldron of mutually exclusive nationalisms, it was in many ways a polyglot, multicultural world.
In sum, the post-war Soviet Union tried to slake a thirst for self-contained apartments that gave people some private space, provided educational opportunities that made people both orthodox and critical, and expanded communications technologies, letting in more of the Western 47
reviving the dream
world. The authorities encountered a sharpening diver-gence between the aims of advancing science and maintaining secrecy for political reasons. They were also unable to energize society, especially youth, with the
reviving the dream
at the hands of the regime; there were seventeen attempts at self-immolation on Red Square in 1981 alone, none of them known to the outside world, and more importantly, to the Soviet population. 12 A leader of Moscow’s underground human-rights organization, summing up the situation in 1984, wrote, ‘the history of dissent in the USSR is a tragic one’, adding correctly that ‘the movement never became a mass movement and the immediate demands of the dissidents were almost wholly frustrated’. 13
But the regime faced a threat considerably greater than ‘dissidents’: a several-million-strong army of scientists who were overwhelmingly not politically active yet still clashed with the authorities because they needed access to basic domestic data—let alone foreign publications—which were denied to them by their hack political supervisors.
This dilemma of needing and yet stifling scientific exchange became ever more acute, and a few top apparatchiks broached the possibility of relaxing censorship. But the party’s chief ideologue in the Brezhnev period, Mikhail Suslov—a CC secretary since 1949 (under Stalin), and a full politburo member since 1955—pointed out that it was only a matter of months after the removal of censorship in Czechoslovakia that the tanks had to roll in. Who, he asked, was going to send tanks to the Soviet Union?
Some restrictions were eased on a case-by-case basis, but for most scientists, just as for cultural intellectuals, Communist Party membership was a prerequisite for career advancement, and was used to enforce the basic chain of command.
46
reviving the dream
Outside Moscow, republic party machines, usually led by a Communist of the titular nation, with a Russian as number two, received substantial autonomy in exchange for maintaining loyalty to Moscow. National themes did become ever more prevalent in the non-Russian republics, paralleling the ‘national Communism’ of Eastern Europe, but nationalism was nowhere allowed to displace the official socialist ideology, and loyalty was nowhere in question. Only in the Russian republic—which alone lacked a separate republic party—were Russian nationalists permitted, occasionally, to criticize Marxist-Leninism and atheism publicly in the name of the preservation of pre-revolutionary monuments, the Russian soul, and the environment. 14 But such cultural nationalism was never allowed to become an independent force. In both Russia and the non-Russian republics, separatist threats were weak, and multinational solidarity strong, reinforced by propaganda, Russification and its career advantages, the mutual dependencies of the planned economy, and the high incidence of ethnically mixed marriages. Russian dominated, and replete with injustices, the Union fostered many resentments, but, rather than a cauldron of mutually exclusive nationalisms, it was in many ways a polyglot, multicultural world.
In sum, the post-war Soviet Union tried to slake a thirst for self-contained apartments that gave people some private space, provided educational opportunities that made people both orthodox and critical, and expanded communications technologies, letting in more of the Western 47
reviving the dream
world. The authorities encountered a sharpening diver-gence between the aims of advancing science and maintaining secrecy for political reasons. They were also unable to energize society, especially youth, with the
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