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This is a revised and expanded version of a lecture presented at The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 17, 2006.

“Official and Unofficial Culture in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia”

Charles Timberlake
Professor Emeritus of Russian History
University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri

I---INTRODUCTION & CONCEPTUALIZATION

Art reflects the values of the society that produced the artist. And, by depicting those values in various genres, artists help society understand its values more clearly and more profoundly. Because art does state values, it frequently provokes strongly positive or strongly negative reactions, depending on the beholder’s agreement or disagreement with the values stated in the work of art.  If one of the disgruntled viewers is an artist, s/he might well compose a work of art specifically to rebut the idea stated in the offending work of art. In an open society, where works of art may be exhibited publicly, conflicts between values (stated as subject matter or as method of presentation) give birth to new schools of artistic expression and enrich the diversity of the arts in general.

But this observation assumes that artists compose their works in an ideologically diverse society that permits freedom of artistic expression to all its spiritual orientations. And, it assumes that the artist is an INITIATOR of statements, and not merely a DISSEMINATOR of statements. This is the cultural and socio-economic-political model that evolved in Western Europe and that has been exported to several other non-Western areas of the World. It is the model of the ORGANIC SOCIETY that is constantly in flux, with individuals forming themselves into groups to advance a cause, no matter how brilliant or stupid their cause might be. This model assumes hundreds or thousands of factions contending with each other with the result that no one of them acquires enough power to dominate all the others. This is the well-known characterization that James Madison described in “Federalist Paper No 10.” Such an open, and necessarily secular, society cannot, by its very nature, adopt an OFFICIAL CULTURE.

The Bolsheviks, who seized control of the organs of state power in Russia in November 1917, loathed and detested the social, economic, political, and cultural diversity in the Western organic society. To them, this diversity was the result of class warfare in which bourgeois factory owners exploited their proletarian workers, and the proletariat organized into unions that would soon seize control of the factories and manage them as the common property of a “classless” society. Content and taste in all the arts were determined by the bourgeois “ruling class” which used the arts to justify its privilege.  “Where,” Bolsheviks asked, could a bourgeois artist

“find passion, if the worker in the capitalist countries is not sure of his tomorrow, does not know whether he will have work, if the peasant does not know whether he will be working on his bit of land or thrown on the scrap heap by a capitalist crisis, if the working intellectual is out of work today and does not know whether he will have work tomorrow?”[Zhdanov, speech to the Union of Soviet Writers, 1934. See full bibliographic citation below.]

By 1934--the Bolsheviks asserted--Western culture was in decline because the capitalist system that produced that culture was in decay. “The hey-day of capitalism…has gone, never to return.  Today a degeneration in subject matter, in talents, in authors and in heroes, is in progress.”

If the negative Western socio-economic-political system produced uninspired, negative culture, what did the Bolsheviks consider to be the positive characteristics of the system they had created in the reconstituted Russian Empire they renamed as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?  And what would be the characteristics of the superior culture that this new ruling group would produce? How will its values be expressed as subject matter and as artistic style?

 II---THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SOVIET SOCIETY IN 1934.

 II-1)  The most important characteristic was the existence of THE MONOPOLY PARTY. Rule by a monopoly party is much more than rule by a SINGLE PARTY. The Bolshevik Party in 1934 had a monopoly on power and political participation. It had created all existing political institutions, and it controlled appointment to all important staff positions. It had used the power of the state organs in 1921 to ban all other political parties. It arranged trials, guilty verdicts, and imprisonment or exile of all leaders of all former political parties, including the Marxist Menshevik party. The only access to an important position in the ruling structure was THROUGH THE BOLSHEVIK PARTY.

The Party was THE INITIATOR of all action---the brain that sent commands to

other parts of the body.  Only its actions were OFFICIAL. Any action by a person or group of persons without the party’s permission was UNOFFICIAL. In the totalitarian regime they were constructing, UNOFFICIAL came to mean ILLEGAL.

A—THE PARTY CONTROLLED THE GOVERNMENT. In fact, it functioned as THE LEGISLATIVE BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT. The “government” (described by the Constitution of 1936) functioned not as a legislative body the Constitution alleged, but merely as the EXECUTIVE AGENCY that implemented decisions made by some 12 to 13 people who composed the Political Bureau (Politburo) of the party. But, the people who held the most important government positions were also members of the party organ that made the decision. Having made a decision, party and government officials passed commands downward through parallel party and government hierarchies. At every administrative level, the party committee (which always included the head of government for the administrative region) met to discuss the command, and then passed the commands downward, through the same parallel party and government structures, to the party and government officials at the next administrative level below them. Thus, the Party Politburo adopted legislation. It then implemented those decisions through two parallel, hierarchical bureaucracies that had---at every administrative level—interlocking directorates. We may accurately refer to this relationship as “the Bolshevik Party and its government.”

B---THE PARTY CONTROLLED THE JUDICIAL BRANCH. The party appointed from its ranks loyal party members as judges and prosecutors whose job was to apply a stamp of legality to the punishment the Bolsheviks ordered for people whose ideas or actions were ‘anti-Soviet’ (e.g., obstructing a Bolshevik agent who was removing confiscated icons from a church).

C---THE PARTY CONTROLLED THE SECRET POLICE whose staff it hired and dismissed. Secret police agents were in virtually every village by 1934.

D---THE PARTY CONTROLLED THE ARMED FORCES through the parallel command system of a “political officer” and a “military officer” at each rank. The political officer’s orders superseded orders by the military officer, except (this wording was added during World War II) “in a purely military situation.” For the party, all decisions were political.

E---THE PARTY CONTROLLED THE ECONOMY. During its first three years in power, the party confiscated all privately-owned industrial, commercial, and financial institutions and proclaimed them “property of the whole people.” The party-controlled government was the instrument by which the “whole people” exercised its will. A PARTY COMMITTEE inside each factory chose the factory manager and monitored his/her work in fulfilling the production quotas set for the current Five-Year Plan.

The Party managed the economy through the central planning agency (Gosplan). Beginning with the First Five Plan (1929-32), and continuing into the Second Five-Year Plan (1933-37, formally adopted in January 1934), the Party ordered Gosplan to determine how to meet ever-higher production goals. These plans were to include increases in all types of production necessary for another type of industry to meet its increased production target. For instance, the manufacturer of buttons and cloth must increase his production sufficiently for the manufactures of shirts to meet his increased production quota.

The party (through the government) also owned or controlled all the land. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 and created the Soviet government, the government automatically owned all land that had previously belonged to the tsarist government. By its first act—the DECREE ON LAND on November 7, 1917—the Soviet government confiscated vast amounts of privately owned land:  1) land belonging to all types of religious organizations, including all church buildings and monasteries; 2) all land belonging to the nobility, and 3) all land owned by “the bourgeoisie.”

From 1917 to 1930, only the peasantry owned land privately. But, the peasantry comprised some 80% of the population. In 1930, the Party and its government began a campaign to combine all the peasantry’s  land, livestock, and farm equipment into collective farms that would own all this property collectively. At the same time, local party and government officials were to identify “prosperous” farms (also called “kulak” farms), confiscate all their property and transfer it to the collective farms. But, owners of “prosperous” farms were considered members of the bourgeois class, and were, therefore, not allowed to join the collective farms. All male kulaks who were “capable of physical labor” were sent to forced labor camps where they would work for free for the state. All other members of their families were imprisoned, quite often inside former monasteries and convents. The Party called this campaign “bringing class warfare to the village” to “liquidate the kulaks as a class.” Collectivization and dekulakization began in earnest in January 1930 and were completed, at the expense of thousands of lives, by 1934.

Parallel with the campaign to “liquidate the kulaks as a class” was the campaign to abolish the clergy in general, and the Russian Orthodox clergy in particular. Considering the “prosperous” peasants (the kulaks) and the village clergy to be “natural allies” against the Bolshevik policy of confiscation of church and private property, the government closed the relatively small number of monasteries that had not already been closed by 1930. They expelled monks and nuns; they levied impossibly high taxes on priests, and denied families of priests access to social services. Many priests divorced their wives in hopes that their wives and children could obtain access to soup kitchens in this period of famine and starvation.

F---By 1934, THE PARTY OWNED THE ARTIFICIAL SOCIETY IT HAD ERECTED ON THE RUINS OF TSARIST SOCIETY. Through confiscation of property (buildings, paper, ink) and imprisonment of editors and other journalists, the party controlled the dissemination of information.

The party controlled social organizations, including professional associations. With rare exception, the Bolsheviks abolished very quickly all groups it inherited in 1917. It gained control of those too large to abolish (such as a labor union) and transformed them from inside. The Bolshevik approach to institution-building was the top-down approach. An institution was, first, an idea in the head of a bureaucrat. He wrote the idea into a constitution that described the institution’s administrative structure and stated it goals, which always included the ubiquitous goal of helping the party build Communism.  Once the institution was described, the party sought to entice people of the type to join it. Soviet society was, therefore, the opposite of the ORGANIC Western society. In the latter, the institution-building process was the bottom-upward model. A group of citizens voluntarily formed an organization to advance some purpose, quite often to advance their own interests.  Members then drafted a constitution, decided what activities to undertake and how to finance them, including the possibility of assessed members a fee. In 1932, for instance, the party abolished all artists’ unions and combined them all into The Union of Russian Artists. Later, using the process described herein, the party began creating unions for separate artists, such as writers and translators, composers, cinematographers.

Soviet society by 1934 was an ARTIFICIAL society; it had an uncanny similarity in appearance with the organic Western society. But behind the façade was an empty structure, a modern version of the Potemkin village. The leadership of party-created groups worked not to advance the interests of a group’s members; it helped the party manipulate the members of the group to achieve the party’s objectives. For examples, professional artist associations would not defend Shostakovich when Stalin banned his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936. Nor would the Union of Soviet Writers support Solzhenitsyn’s request to the party in 1967 to allow his books to be published in Russia.

 II--2) THE SECOND MAJOR CHARACTERISTIC OF THE SOVIET SYSTEM IN 1934 WAS THE PARTY’S EFFORTS TO IMPOSE A MONOPOLY IDEOLOGY. The educational system and the artists were to play the major role in completing this process. Society was to learn one OFFICIAL EXPLANATION of all historical events and to memorize lists of “good” and “bad” people, events, and groups in Russian history. Pupils were to memorize “the major flaws of religion” and the atheist’s “correction” of those errors.

III--3) THE THIRD CHARACTERISTIC:  The Bolsheviks were materialists who believed that all human consciousness was the result of social relations and that social relations were the result of the way goods were produced. Nothing about the human body or the human mind was spiritual.  A change in the ownership of the means of production (land and factories) produced a change in social relations. A change in social relations produced a new consciousness. Greed was not an immutable human trait. By increasing the production of food, goods and services, the socialist system would satisfy all of man’s “wants and needs.” Since greed is merely extreme want, greed would disappear when all human material wants were satisfied. This purged and transformed bourgeois man would be THE NEW SOVIET MAN—a person who works for the purpose of improving society, not just to increase his own wealth. The new man would “WORK ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITIES, AND RECEIVE ACCORDING TO HIS NEEDS,” even if transformed man produced far more than he consumed. These words are Karl Marx’s definition of communist society, which is the final stage in the evolution of socialism.

IV---ADOPTION OF SOCIALIST REALISM AS THE OFFICIAL CULTURE

ARIn 1934, the party assigned artists the task of helping to eradicate “bourgeois consciousness” and to instill in its place a new socialist consciousness. The new consciousness included tireless, unselfish labor to build Communism. In 1934, the artists’ specific task meant:  convince miners, construction workers, factory workers of every type, and farmers to work still harder, without additional salary, to achieve the increased production targets the Party set for its Second Five-Year Plan.

Party Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov presented and explained the assignment at the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers. But, his message was for all branches of the creative intelligentsia, not merely for writers. He described the beginning of a formal culture, which the Party called “SOCIALIST REALISM.” He made clear that this official culture was the basis of a new form of censorship—a censorship of INCLUSION.  In future, all works of art must be done by recipe: they must contain mandatory ingredients in the proper measures. Citing Stalin’s statement that writers are “engineers of the human soul,” Zhdanov asked the rhetorical questions: “What does this mean?  What obligations does such an appellation put upon you? He then answered the question for writers, and though not stated directly, for all other artists as well.

It means, in the first place, that you must know life to be able to depict it truthfully in artistic creations, to depict it neither “scholastically” nor lifelessly, nor simply as “objective reality.” But rather as reality in [the process of] its revolutionary development.  The truthfulness and historical exactitude of the artistic image must be linked with the task of ideological transformation, of the education of the working people in the spirit of socialism.  This method in fiction and literary criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism.

We say that socialist realism is the fundamental method of Soviet fiction and literary criticism.  And this implies that revolutionary romanticism will appear as an integral part of any literary creation, since the whole life of our Party, of the working class and its struggle, is a fusion of the hardest, most matter-of-fact practical work, with the greatest heroism and the vastest perspectives.  The strength of our Party has always lain in the fact that it has united and unites efficiency and practically with broad vision, with an incessant forward striving and the struggle to build a communist society.

Soviet literature must be able to portray our heroes and to see our tomorrow. This will not be utopian since our tomorrow is being prepared by planned and conscious work today…

Our Soviet literature is tendentious and we are proud of it, for our tendentiousness is to free the working people---and the whole of mankind—

-from the yoke of capitalist slavery.”  [Note: Quoted material is in bold italics to assist reading on computer screen. The English translation of this speech has been published in various places. The fullest documentation of this congress is Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1977). The translation I used is in Thomas Riha, compiler, Readings in Russian Civilization, Vol. 3: Soviet Russia, 1917-1962. 2nd ed., revised (Chicago: University of Chicago  Press, 1969): 694-95.]

What could an artist learn from this directive?  What were the required ingredients? Realism is required, but “objective reality” is not acceptable. Heroes must link today’s reality with life “tomorrow,” a non-existent society. Artists had to sift among the flood of sounds and images of their daily lives to sort them into categories of “temporary” (and therefore not suitable for portrayal) from those that were “reality in its process of revolutionary development.”

Let us consider this problem in an actual situation.  A painter chooses to memorialize the construction of a dam to produce hydroelectricity. He can paint scenes of priests, and others in costumes that reveal their identity, consuming a woefully inadequate meal, under guard because they are on work assignment from a nearby forced- labor camp. The artist rejects this image because forced labor, inadequate diet, and all the other deplorable conditions are only temporary.  He chooses to show “our tomorrow” by painting four stylized male figures, straining their healthy bodies and robust muscles to the maximum, working as a harmonious team to insert a heavy log into its place in the dam. The electricity from dam is “tomorrow—reality in the process of its revolutionary development.” Artists learned by trial and error that the term “socialism realism” meant “art the Party likes.”

The paintings in this seminar room (in The Museum of Russian Art) depict the elements of socialist realism at their utmost. Those in the upstairs collection depict the movement away from these elements in the 1960s and 1970s. The painting entitled “A Guy from the Urals,” which is on the wall at the rear of our seminar room, is an excellent illustration of the socialist-realist hero. He is the stereotypically muscular male steelworker, exerting every ounce of his strength to increase industrial production 330%-- the target the party set in the First Five-Year Plan. The artist did not choose the typical worker as hero; the hero’s role in art was to serve as role model, to inspire the worker to emulate the hero. This is what Stalin meant by the term “engineer of the human soul.” This is the didactic function of socialist realism as an artistic style.

A few slides will illustrate the subject matter that artists accepted and rejected.  First is the huge concrete statue at the Exhibition on Achievements of the Socialist Economy.  In this statue, a healthy stylized woman (we can find her inserted, at times seemingly stenciled, in hundreds of works of art) represents the peasantry by holding in a sickle in her outstretched right hand. The equally healthy, muscular male (we can also find him in hundreds of works, as in the four men straining to insert the log in the dam) represents the proletariat by holding a hammer in his outstretched right hand.

The second slide is a vast concrete monument that simulates a rocket launch, with the smoke/concrete broad at ground level, but narrowing as the eye follows it upward to the very top where sits Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to circle the Earth.

The third slide illustrates rejected subject matter, although it portrays an effort to retain human dignity in spite of serious obstacles. It is a picture of an elderly woman (not the female peasant with sickle) washing men’s overalls in an icy creek that runs beside Holy Trinity Monastery in the town of Sergiev Pasad (called Zagorsk at the time of the photo in 1985) some 40 miles north of Moscow. Where is this woman’s washing machine?  The resources needed to manufacture it became Sputnik, whose launch we saw celebrated in the previous slide. Doing laundry in an icy stream is temporary; Sputnik is “tomorrow.”

The next three slides are of a farmers’ market in SE Moscow in 1985. The scenes captured here are also of the “temporary.” This market is a remnant of the bourgeois past. Here, survival of “greed” is visible everywhere. Here, farmers rented stalls and sold the surplus production from their garden plots. A student at the University of Moscow once told me how “slimy” she considered these salespeople. Their prices were three or four times higher than those in the official state stores, but what she, and virtually everyone, did not know is that the government sold food for only one half, and even one-third, of the cost of producing that food. In 1987, 13% of the Soviet Union’s budget was spent as subsidies for food. Despite the subsidies, state stores regularly ran out of food or its food was of very poor quality. As a customer in such stores on six extended visits from 1966 to 1985, I have seen piles of rotted bananas, entire cases of eggs broken and wasted although unbroken ones were very difficult to find, and still shortages. Note in this slide the abundance of, and apparently high quality of, fresh food.  The items for sale were produced not by our beautiful peasant-woman-with-sickle by these plump, stereotypically attired peasant ladies.

Soviet writer Andrei Siniavsky discussed the artists’ difficulty in portraying only heroes in Soviet art. In his essay “On Socialist Realism,” he wrote that all works by socialist-realist writers

“are panegyrics on Communism, satires on some of its many enemies, or descriptions of life “in its revolutionary development,” i.e., life moving toward Communism. . .

Words fail us when we try to talk about it [Communism]. We choke with enthusiasm and we use mostly negative comparisons to describe the splendor that is waiting for us. Then, under Communism, there will be no rich and no poor, no money, wars, jails, frontiers, diseases---and maybe no death. Everybody will eat and work as much as he likes, and labor will bring joy instead of sorrow. As Lenin promised, we will make toilets of pure gold…..

Each work of socialist realism, even before it appears, is assured of a happy ending. The ending may be sad for the hero, who runs every possible risk in his fight for Communism; but it is happy from the point of view of the superior Purpose.. . .[In the play] OPTIMNISTIC TRAGEDY, the heroine dies at the end, but Communism triumphs.

Whoever follows the Party line knows that. . . differences in age, sex, nationality and even intelligence [among Soviet artists] is differences of opinion within a single opinion, conflicts within a basic absence of conflict. We have one aim---Communism; one philosophy—Marxism; one art—socialist realism.”  [The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism, Vintage Russian Library, 1960, pp 167-68]

Dimitry  Shostakovich noted the problem from a composer’s point of view. Fearful that he would be sent to a forced-labor camp because Stalin disliked the opera he composed in 1936, and because the executed General Tukhachevsky was one of his admirers and friends, Shostakovich composed his celebratory Fifth Symphony in 1937. He subtitled the symphony “A Soviet Artist’s Practical Creative Reply to Just Criticism.” In his memoirs, he wrote,

“I think it is clear to everyone what happens in the Fifth. The rejoicing is forced, created under threat…It’s as if someone were beating you with a stick and saying ‘Your business is rejoicing, your business is rejoicing,’ and you rise, shaky, and go marching off, muttering, ’Our business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.” [Quoted in www.lasr.cs.ucla.edu/geoff/prognotes/Shostakovich/symphony5.html]

Siniavsky cites a work that won the Stalin Prize in 1949 because it stated so blatantly the alleged uniqueness of socialist realism. The writer asserted that,

‘Russia took its own road—that of unanimity. . . . For thousands of years men suffered from differences of opinion. But now we, Soviet men and women, for the first time agree with each other, talk one language that we all understand, and think identically about the main things in life. It is this unanimity that makes us strong and superior to all other people in the world, who are internally torn and socially isolated through their differences of opinion.’ [Ibid, 175-76]

After Stalin’s death, the unity (forced or natural) dissolved and Stalin became a villain during de-Stalinization. Siniavsky wrote in 1959 that Stalin’s death

“inflicted an irreparable loss upon our religiously aesthetic system; it cannot be resuscitated through the new revived cult of Lenin. . . . Stalin seemed to be specially made for the hyperbole that awaited him: mysterious, omniscient, all-=powerful, he was the living monument of our era and needed only one quality to become God---immortality.

If only we had been intelligent enough to surround his death with miracles! We could have announced on the radio that he did not die, but had risen to Heaven, from which he continued to watch us, in silence, no words emerging from beneath the mystic mustache. His relics would have cured men struck by paralysis or possessed by demons. Children, before going to bed, would have kneeled by the window and addressed their prayers to the cold and shining stars of the Celestial Kremlin.. . . In the meantime, our art is marking time between an insufficient realism and an insufficient classicism.” [215-17]

V--DE-STALINIZATION, 1956-1963: A SHORT RECESS FROM OFFICIAL CULTURE

During the first two years after Stalin’s death, factions within the Politburo and Central Committee struggled with each other to determine Stalin’s successor.  In 1955 N. S. Khrushchev emerged victorious over Lavrenty Beria and Georgy Malenkov. He tried to strengthen his position further by undermining his Stalinist opponents. To undermine them, he launched an attack against Stalin’s legacy. In 1955, he created a committee of historians to prepare a list of documents from the party’s archive to prove Stalin’s evil deeds.

Then, he presented the committee’s data in his famous “Secret Speech” to the XX Congress of the CPSU in February 1956.  He enumerated what he called “the crimes of Stalin,” and he castigated Stalin for developing ‘a personality cult.” That is, Stalin allowed himself, rather than the Party as a unit, to be venerated for the Party’s achievements. Having alleged in the speech that many innocent people had been sent to forced-labor camps, Khrushchev ordered creation of review boards that in summer of 1956 released HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of prisoners from concentration camps. Many of these prisoners were former soldiers whose only crime was to be captured by the German Army rather than be killed. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was imprisoned while a soldier because he used a pejorative term for Stalin in a letter, came to know many of these soldiers, and he later wrote about them in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  He was one of the former soldiers released by the review boards in 1956.

Khrushchev’s devastating attack on Stalin (although not published in Russia) further emboldened his opponents in the party. In 1957, while Khrushchev was on a state visit to Finland, the Politburo voted to replace him as head of the party. He returned, told the Politburo that it did not the authority to replace him, and called a meeting of the party’s Central Committee, which did have that authority. He ordered Minister of War Marshal Zhukov to send military planes to fly all CC members to Moscow for the meeting. At its meeting, the CC reversed the decision of the Politburo, and Khrushchev retained his position.

With a strong opposition still in place in1962, Khrushchev allowed the intelligentsia, including artists of all types, to support his criticism of Stalinism. Virtually every element within the intelligentsia went beyond its task; they criticized not only Stalin, but the Soviet system that produced him. This ‘excessive criticism’ during the 1960s and 1970s became known as “the dissidence movement.” That is, artists, university professors and researchers, research scientists in government military and space institutions, tried to gain more autonomy for themselves and their institutions. In this period some artists of every genre (painting, music, literature, sculpture) produced works that did not meet the criteria of “socialist realism.”

The most important event in stimulating the development of the dissidence movement was publication in 1962 of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the leading Soviet literary journal NOVY MIR (The New World).  Despite the Politburo’s vote against publishing this work (Khrushchev prepared a copy for each of them as preparatory reading for the meeting), Khrushchev personally signed as the “responsible” censor. Clearly, this was not a socialist realist novel.  It raised the taboo subject of forced-labor camps; its central character is an anti-hero; He bribes superiors, tries to get out of work by pretending to be ill; he is devoid of Communist ideology. The last paragraph defines a "good day" as one without the several bad things that could have happened. The camp was a microcosm of Soviet society—itself a large concentration camp—under Stalin.

But, the audience for this publication was vast. The hundreds of thousands of former prisoners who were released by review boards in 1956 understood every detail of the life of the central character Ivan Denisovich. Reading the book and sharing it with their families allowed some former prisoners a degree of catharsis that was not otherwise available. From 1962 to 1966 other prisoners began writing their stories. They circulated the manuscripts among friends or submitted them for publication. When censors in publishing houses rejected all these manuscripts, friends of the authors began making handwritten or typewritten carbon copies. They loaned the copies to other people on the condition that the borrower make additional copies. This process increased the number of copies exponentially. This means of distributing a manuscript soon became known as “self-published”—samizdat.

The next logical step in distribution was to smuggle one of these many copies abroad and publish it in the West. The special term tamizdat [“published there”] came into existence to designate literature written in Russia, but published only “there” [tam]—a code word that everyone knew for “the West.” It is quite likely that the KGB sold some of these manuscripts for hard cash to Europeans who then published them in journals financed by the CIA.

VI--RE-STALINIZATION, 1963-1985

Khrushchev, himself, reintroduced Stalin’s methods to root out unofficial culture. If not already aware by late 1962 of the degree to which Soviet artists had abandoned socialist realism, Khrushchev became sharply aware of it on December 1, 1962, when he attended the exhibition of experimental art on the second floor of the Manezh Exhibition Hall just outside the Kremlin. He did not like the art he saw there, and he argued with artists about the proper role of art in society.

Immediately after this encounter, Khrushchev and state and party bureaucrats in charge of cultural policy began a campaign to re-establish strong control over the arts. Khrushchev launched the drive March 1963 with his famous talk to a meeting of party and government leaders with “workers in literature and the arts” in Moscow. He explained to them the party’s preferences in painting, music, and literature.

“Art belongs to the sphere of ideology. Those who think that in Soviet art there can be peaceful cohabitation of both socialist realism and formalist, abstractionist tendencies will inevitably slip into the position of peaceful coexistence in the sphere of ideology,… Peaceful coexistence in the field of ideology is treason against Marxism-Leninism and a betrayal of the cause of the workers and peasants...Our people and party will not tolerate any encroachment on the monolithic unity…that exists at all strata of the people---workers, collective farmers, and the intelligentsia—who are successfully building Communism under the guidance of the Leninist Party.

Abstractionism, formalism…is one of the forms of bourgeois ideology….The Communist party is fighting and will continue to fight against abstractionism and against any other formalist distortions in art. We cannot be neutral toward formalism. When I was in America some artists…gave me some pictures...  Tell me, what is depicted here? They say this shows the view of a city from a bridge. No matter how you look at it, there’s nothing there but a band of various colors. And this daub is called a picture!

Here is another of these ‘masterpieces’ You can see four eyes, or maybe more. They say that this is a picture of horror, fear. How ugly the abstractionists have made art!  These are examples of American painting.

…On New Year’s Eve, I spent the whole day in the Russian forest…I said to the people with me, ’Look at those fir trees and the way they are dressed, and look at the snowflakes playing and flashing in the sun’s rays How extraordinarily beautiful it all is”! But the modernists and the abstractionists want to paint these firs with their roots in the air, and they say that this is the new and progressive art.

It is impossible that normal people would ever accept this art, that people would be deprived of the opportunity to look at pictures of nature re-created in the works by artists that decorate the halls of our clubs, our Houses of Culture, our homes.…Man will never lose the capacity for artistic talent and will not allow dirty daubs that any donkey could paint with his tail to be foisted on him in the guise of works of art. (Applause)

Music [also] holds a great and important place in the spiritual life of our people, in ideological work…To put it briefly, we stand for melodious, meaningful music that stirs people’s souls and inspires strong emotions, and we oppose any cacophony.…How stirring are the old revolutionary songs such as “Whirlwinds of Danger,” [and] who does not know the “International”? It has become the international anthem of the working class. What revolutionary thoughts and feelings it inspires, how it lifts man and mobilizes him against the enemies of the working people!

...We are for music that inspires, that summons to deeds of valor and to work. When the soldier goes into battle he takes with him what he needs, and he never leaves the band behind. On the march the band inspires him. Music for such bands can be written and is being written by composes to adhere to socialist realism, who do not alienate themselves from life and from the people’s struggle….

The press and radio, literature, painting, music, the cinema and the theater are sharp ideological weapons of our party. And the Party is concerned that its weapon be always in battle readiness and that it hit the enemy accurately. The Party will allow no one to blunt its edge, to weaken its effect.

Soviet literature and art are developing under the direct guidance of the Communist Party and its Central Committee. The Party has reared remarkable, talented cadres of writer, artists, composers and cinema and theater workers who have inseparably linked their lives and their creative work with the Leninist Party and the people.” [In Riha, Vol. 3, pp. 704-08].

 Using one of Stalin’s devices, the party put several artists/writers on trial in 1964. One of the earliest, and most creative indictments, was the trial of 24-year-old poet Joseph Brodsky in February in Leningrad for “parasitism”---the consumption of more goods and services than one produces.  Brodsky had been subjected to psychiatric examination in Kashchenko Hospital in Moscow in December 1963 and January 1964 to determine what mental illness prevented him from working at the level the party wanted. [He was not “A Guy from the Urals.”]  The diagnosis revealed that he had “psychopathic character traits,” but that he was capable of “working in a remote locality” to cure his illness. At the end of the trial, the judge decided that five years of forced labor in the “remote locality” of Archangel forced-labor camp was the proper cure for his illness.

The researcher can easily find similarly unenlightened statements about the arts and persecution of artists by American politicians. Michigan Congressman George Dondero’s speech in 1949 explained how the “artists of the ‘isms’” sought to aid the Communists by destroying the values of American society. [Was he serious or merely satirical?]

“Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth….Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane….Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms. Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason.”[Quoted by Louis Menand, “Unpopular Front: American art and the Cold War,” The New Yorker, October 17, 2005: 175-76]

US politicians lacked an articulated definition of an official culture to use as a basis for persecution. The different characteristics of the Western model and the Soviet model, as described earlier in this lecture, also restrained would-be persecutors in the US.

On October 14, 1964, Khrushchev became a victim of his own scheme to reintroduce some of Stalin’s methods. While he was on vacation in the Crimea, his opponents in the party’s Central Committee removed him from his positions of party secretary and premier of the Soviet government. Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin replaced him as head of party and premier of government, respectively. They instructed Secret Police Head Iurii Andropov to stamp out the dissidence movement completely. But, restoration of the fundamentally flawed Stalin system exacerbated the economic, social, and political problems that Khrushchev had tried to solve.

Khrushchev’s successors resurrected the “show trial” from the 1930s as their main weapon against tamizdat---publishing unofficial literature abroad. In February 1966 the new regime tried writers Andrei Siniavsky and Yulii Daniel on basis of Article 58 of the Penal Code which prohibited "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." In this fascinating, but grotesque trial, the prosecutor and judge insisted that opinions stated by fictional characters were the author’s personal opinions. If a character criticized a state or party bureaucrat, the author had written “anti-Soviet propaganda” and was conducting “anti-Soviet agitation.”

The two writers published various works abroad under pseudonyms of Abram Tertz (Siniavsky) and Nikolai Arzhak (Daniel). The KGB discovered their identities and arrested them in September 1965. They were in imprisoned and interrogated until their trial in February 1966. The party particularly disliked Siniavsky’s novella The Trial Begins in which a Soviet prosecutor sacrifices his innocent son out of loyalty to the party. Daniel was the author of short stories such as "This is Moscow Speaking" in which Radio Moscow announces “Public Murder Day,” a day in which citizens may kill anyone they wished with impunity. "Hands" is a story about a former member of a secret police firing squad that executed prisoners. His hands suddenly begin shaking uncontrollably. “Man from Minap” featured a character whom high party and government officials hired as a gigolo for their wives because he could produce a child of desired gender by concentrating during the act either on Karl Marx or Rosa Luxemburg.  The judge convicted the two defendants and sentenced Siniavsky to 7 years in prison, and Daniel to 5 years because he apologized for “enemies of the Soviet Union” having made use of his literature.

This show trial had the opposite effect the state desired. Rather than intimidate writers from sending their works abroad, the trial produced a flood of written protests against the arrest, against the trial, then against the verdict of the trial. In 1967 and 1968, the government arrested, tried, and sentenced the protesters. Others protested the trial of the protesters and the second wave of protesters were then tried. In this way, the numbers of participants in the dissidence movement increased exponentially, and the movement both broadened and deepened to layers of society below the elite first layer of professors, academicians, and established artists who were the first dissenters.

The first protestors demonstrated on Pushkin Square in Moscow on December 5, 1965 in support of Siniavsky & Daniel. The following month--January 1966--demonstrators on the same square were arrested when they demanded the release of Siniavsky & Daniel.  In February, demonstrator Viktor Khaustov was tried and sentenced to 3 years imprisonment under Article 190-3 of the RSFSR Criminal Code.

A short time after the end of the Siniavsky-Daniel trial, a transcript of the trial was published in the West as a part of the rapidly expanding body of tamizdat literature.  The transcript was published in several languages, including the English translation entitled On Trial: The Soviet State versus “Abram Tertz” and “Nikolai Arzhak” published in New York by Harper and Row in 1967.  In transcripts contains Siniavsky’s brilliant and eloquent statements of the role of the artist in society. The judge and prosecutor are shown as bludgeoning, ignorant brutes. Moscow intellectual Ginzburg compiled and published an additional volume in the West related to the Siniavsky-Daniel trial. It was published in English translation as White Book on the Siniavsky-Daniel Trial in 1967.

Documents related to the 1967–68 Moscow trials of the four leaders of the 1966 demonstration on Pushkin Square also were smuggled abroad and published in the West.   Moscow human rights activist Pavel Litvinov collected a large number of the written protests and  transcripts of the trials.  In September 1967, the KGB summoned him to their office to warn him that he would be prosecuted on criminal charges if he circulated a transcript of the trial of demonstrator Bukovsky as he was intending to do. Seven days later, he released a transcript of this conversation with the KGB.  In 1971 his collection was published abroad in Russian. In 1972 Longman Publishers published an English translation under the title The Trial of the Four: a collection of materials on the case of Galanskov, Ginzburg, Dobrovolsky & Lashkova, 1967-68, compiled and with commentary by Pavel Litvinov.

The government then began trials to punish those who had objected to the Siniavsky-Daniel trial. Those derivative Moscow Trials of May 1966 to April 1968 produced still more protests. Rather than intimidate Soviet society by use of the show trials, as Stalin had done, their use in the 1960s provoked the intelligentsia into still more vocal dissent from the official culture. The size of the unofficial culture in the West grew proportionally.  [See the bibliography at the end of this copy of my lecture for chronologies and collections of documents on the dissidence movement.]

The highly visible trials of intellectuals tainted the Soviet Union’s image abroad, especially among the large number of Communist sympathizers in Italy and France. Still more detrimental to the Soviet Union’s image was the torrent of insults the Communist parties of China and the USSR were hurling at each other. In March 1969 the conflict led to an armed clash on the Soviet-Chinese border.  The Chinese declared that the USSR was planning to invade, proclaimed the end of the Cultural Revolution, and announced a major effort to arm itself in preparation for the Soviet invasion. In shock, the Soviet Union began trying to patch up relations with the West so it could purchase technology to strengthen its economy and its military against possible future Chinese threats.

                  In 1970, the Soviet party and government adopted a new tactic to prevent defendants at these public trials from making beautiful speeches, and to prevent the judiciary’s demonstration its role in the Soviet system.  The new tactic was the use of psychiatry to punish dissenters. KBG psychiatrists (sometimes in the uniform of a KBG colonel) performed perfunctory examinations and issued the diagnosis of schizophrenia---multiple personalities. Critics of the regime suffered from “delusions of reformism.” Since the defendant was mentally ill, s/he could be tried in absentia. If the person on trial was in a psychiatric ward rather than at the trial, s/he could not defend artists with eloquent statements that would be published abroad.

Probably the best-known instance of the abuse of psychiatry to punish a critic of the regime is that of geneticist Zhores Medvedev in 1970. He and his twin brother Roy described the incident in their jointly written book, A Question of Madness, published by Vintage Books in 1972.  As punishment for publishing The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko with Columbia University Press in 1969 about Stalin’s damage to the field of genetics, a KGB “doctor” examined Medvedev at its infamous Serbski Institute for Forensic Medicine in Moscow. The diagnosis was a split personality---“sluggish schizophrenia”--that was to be treated through “out-patient care.” One of Medvedev’s personalities was “a scientist’s personality”; the other was a “reformist personality.” The solution was, of course, to sluff off the personality that sought social reform and get back to work in the genetics laboratory.  For such abuse of psychiatry, the World Congress of Psychiatrists expelled the Soviet Union in 1974. [See Alexander Podrabinek, Punitive Medicine. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers, 1980, for examples and methods of abuse in the USSR.]

VII---TRYING TO BALANCE SUPPRESSION OF ARTISTIC DISSENT AND IMPROVING RELATIONS WITH THE WEST, 1969-1979

An important part of the USSR’s strategy for strengthening itself was to make major purchases in the US in areas ranging from grains through oil-drilling bits, truck assembly plants, chemical factories, ball bearing grinders to improve missile guidance systems, and the latest computers. To demonstrate that US-Soviet relations had entered a new era, the two sides agreed to many cultural exchanges. But, these produced new problems in the form of defections by Soviet artists while they were in the US or Western Europe. Imposition of a huge “emigration tax” on people seeking to emigrate (mainly Russian Jews trying to go to Israel) produced great antipathy toward the Soviet government in the US, and ultimately prevented the USSR from gaining Most-Favored-Nation status from the US Congress in 1974. Continued punishment of dissenters in the USSR kept alive the chant inside and outside the country that the regime violated human rights, even after it signed the Helsinki Accord of August 1, 1975, promising to protect such rights.

Trying to get rid of its domestic dissenters in ways that would not hamper its new economic and political arrangements, the Soviet regime relaxed emigration restrictions after the huge outcry of 1972-73.  In addition, it began stripping its most vocal critics of their Soviet citizenship and sending them to the West (e.g., Solzhenitsyn 1974, painter Oscar Rabin 1978), and it allowed some artists to emigrate (cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, sculptor Ernst Neizvestnyi). Many other artists and human-rights activists who were Jewish immigrated to Israel from 1973 to 1975, a period in which the Soviet government waived payment of the emigration fee because it hoped to mute the sharp criticism it received, especially in the US Congress, for having created the fee.

At the same time, however, the regime tried and sentenced several human rights activists, and tried to suppress nonconformist (unofficial) art. For example, on September 15, 1974, the regime sent a bulldozer to knock down paintings at the outdoor exhibition of unofficial paintings in a Moscow suburb. [For more information about persecution of painters in the 1970s, see the two articles in the catalog of the current “Soviet Disunion” exhibition at The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis: Soviet Disunion: Socialist Realist & Nonconformist Art: The Museum of Russian Art, April 20-August 19, 2006 (Minneapolis: The Museum of Russian Art, 2006): Maria Bulanova, “Soviet Art: A Perspective on a Twentieth-Century Phenomenon” and Alla Rosenfeld, “Soviet Nonconformist Art: Its Social and Political Context” [pp. 10-31.]

By 1979, so many famous Soviet artists lived outside the Soviet Union that Soviet culture was clearly divided into its “domestic” and “abroad” segments. Some who remained at home referred to themselves as “internal emigrants”—spiritually, they had emigrated, but physically they were still in the USSR. More and more, the most creative and skilled artists lived abroad.

VIII---THE ‘SECOND COLD WAR’ 1980-1985

The worsening of the Soviet Union’s relationship with the rest of the world in this period made conditions all the severe for Soviet artists. The dark days of this period, which began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 (by soldiers riding in trucks built in the assembly plant that Ford sold to Russia in 1972), erased the last vestiges of the improved US-Soviet relationship. The US and its allies (including China) boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow, and the USSR reciprocated by boycotting the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The period witnessed still other serious negative blows to the new open-ness in US-Soviet relations. Among these were Reagan’s declaration of the Soviet Union as “the evil empire,” the Soviet shoot-down of South Korean Airlines flight KAL-007, and US effort to obstruct the Soviet Union’s construction of the Siberian Gas Pipeline to Western Europe.  With nothing left in its relationship to lose, the USSR imposed very tight restrictions on emigration, which mainly affected the Jewish population, and kept tight control over artists of every genre.

VI--GORBACHEV’S RENEWAL OF DESTALINIZATION 1985-1991

The death of General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko created the possibility of changes in the party’s domestic and foreign policies. New General Secretary M. S. Gorbachev tried to revive the relationship with the West and to reunite the foreign and domestic segments of Russian culture by enticing those abroad to return home. When the vast party and state bureaucratic apparatus obstructed his efforts to reform, he began shifting power from party to government to bring reality closer to the Soviet Constitution.  Wanting the support of “public opinion” for his reforms, he turned, as Khrushchev had done, to the media and cultural institutions. But, he knew the institutions of society had only the voice of the party. To give them their own voice, Gorbachev went one large step beyond Khrushchev. Gorbachev ordered new elections in every professional, cultural, and academic institution, and ignored the pleas by former officials who lost elections, for the party to intervene to return them to their positions.

Some commentators used their newly found freedom to criticize not only Gorbachev’s opponents;  they criticized Gorbachev also. After his initial instinct to close these critical journals, Gorbachev reconsidered and, realizing the impact that act would have on the economic and political reforms he was attempting, he decided to let the journals continue. He stopped enforcing censorship, and the media became increasingly outspoken on all issues affecting society.

IX—WHATT FORM OF CULTURE IN “DEMOCRATIC” RUSSIA, 1990-2006?

By 1990, painters of every subject and every style and every level of skill had poured onto the sidewalks and into the parks of Russia’s major cities offering their wares to pedestrians. So had Hare Krishna and other sectarian proselytizers.  No official ideology or culture existed any longer in Russia or the other republics of the USSR. Artistic offerings ranged from tasteful works of skill to the crudest pornography. The more organized, and usually more talented, artists exhibited their works in privately owned galleries that sell on commission. Some skilled artists have emigrated from Russia to virtually every major city of the world, including especially such places as Helsinki and,  in summers to Savonlinna, Finland, where they offer their works to tourists attracted by the annual opera festival. They offer their works in galleries they rent on their own, in established galleries that sell on commission, and/or they contract with buyers to paint specific works. [Author’s interviews in Savonlinna, Finland, summer 2003 and 2005]

In the 1990s, a vast array of books also awaited purchasers on the same sidewalks and parks.  The classics of pre-Soviet Russian literature and series of volumes of photographs devoted to individual pre-Soviet or Silver-Age painters lay alongside the best-known tamizdat literature that was recently published for the first time inside Russia. Jumbled on tables were also a large number of translated romance novels from the West, pulp-grade pornography, and publications on the lives of saints and religious education of children by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Artistic expression remains far freer in 2006 than during the Soviet period. Producers of popular art still thrive in large number in St. Petersburg and Moscow as their analogs do in some areas of London.  Private galleries offer opportunities for exhibit and sale of art. The emergence of a layer of very wealthy Russians (the “New Russians”) has returned the long-absent phenomenon of the private patron of the arts to Russia. [Note: Jamey Gambrell discusses this new phenomenon in his article “Russian Philanthropy,” The Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No 1 (Fall 2004), on-line at www.carnegie.org, and in his review of the catalogues of the exhibition “Russia” at the Guggenheim Museum September 16, 2005 to January 11, 2006. His review is “An Affair of State,” The New York Review, January 12, 2006: 48-56.]

The recent acceleration of concentrating power in the hands of President Putin and the leadership of the United Russia Party that supports him includes using the police power of the state to harass all persons (including artists) and groups in society that criticize expansion of the executive’s powers. The government silences its critics by arresting them for tax evasion. To pay their back taxes, they must sell whatever instrument of expression they own. Close allies of the President buy these media organs at bargain prices. Thus, critics are rendered voiceless and the central government incrementally increases its control of media.. Since it is impossible for an honest business to survive if it pays all the taxes, every business engages in tax evasion. The most infamous examples of this tactic are the government’s campaigns against Vladimir Gusinski (owner of Independent Television and several journals at the time) and Boris Berezovsky (owner of several journals and one TV station at the time) from 2001 to 2003.

Will increasing power of the executive branch of government lead to re-establishment of an official culture in Russia? One group alleges that such a culture already exists to a significant degree, and is increasingly being imposed by the ruling party on all of society. A conservative group of Russian Orthodox artists successfully used a clause on religious freedom in the 1993 Russian Constitution and an article from the criminal code against inciting ethnic and religious hatred, to win a suit against the director and a curator of the Andrei Sakharov Museum in Moscow in 2003.  The complaint was against an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that, the claimants alleged, ridiculed the Russian Orthodox Church. The judge fined the museum director and the curator $3,600 each, but did not imprison them as the suit requested.

In November 2005 nine artists used the same articles as the bases for a suit against five other artists whose works in the exhibit “Russia 2” in Moscow caused them “moral injury.”  They sought an equivalent of $175,000 in damages, and they asked the court to ban these works from public view in all forms and venues in Russia. Commenting on the seeming irony of artists’ requesting the state to ban certain works of art after the experience of artists during the Soviet period, complainant Dmitri Shmarin alleged that artists suing other artists was not a contradiction, “not an effort to restrict artistic freedom…Artists, of course, can do whatever they want, but if they insult us, we ask the sate to protect us.” One of the “insults” was a painting in the exhibition catalog of the figures of Pushkin, Putin, and an icon of Jesus Christ imposed on a nude male torso. The works of the exhibition, he said, were “intended to destabilize the internal peace of our country.” [In this statement are echoes of Zhdanov’s and Khrushchev’s assertions that “all art is ideological,” and of the 1949 Stalin-prize-winning novel’s allegation that Russians had a unanimity of opinions about all subjects.]

Organizer of the exhibit and owner of the gallery where it was staged Marat Guelman explained in an interview “It’s not at all like it was in Soviey times, when art was underground….It is just that there are two countries that exist today in Russia. ‘Russia 2’ showed that.”  Russia 1, in his scheme, is a group of adherents to the newly emerging ideology centered on the Russian Orthodox Church and advanced by the political alliance supporting Putin’s rapid expansion of the powers of the executive branch of government---“restoration of the vertical structure,” as Putin calls it. This group in government, supported by bands of young men that burn literature they dislike, attempts to intimidate critics of the government, its agencies, or the Russian Orthodox Church. This group uses its vast connections in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government and in conservative social groups to protect the Russian Orthodox Church from competition with the Roman Catholic Church and other missionaries who attempt to “fish in Russian waters.”

“Russia 2,” Guelman said, is more than an exhibition; it is a movement composed of some 400 members that allows artists to express themselves in whatever form they wish, without adhering to an official ideology. [Steven Myers, “Moscow Show Pits Art Against Church and State, The New York Times, November 25, 2005]

The society that will determine the future form of art in Russia is rapidly acquiring its characteristics. Will it return to something similar to the Soviet model, in which an official culture became the basis for censorship? Or, will Russian society remain sufficiently pluralistic, allowing freedom of artistic expression?  The concepts of artistic freedom and freedom of the press have deep roots in Russian history. These roots have shot up some above-ground growth in the late tsarist period, again during the  dissidence movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and still again in the 1990s. But one arbitrary regime after another has been able to snip off this growth, and they have been able to find compliant artists to help them. Soon, we will discover whether a sufficiently robust civil society has developed in Russia to resist the current efforts to snip off that growth.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In addition to works cited in brackets in the text of this lecture, and works listed in the one-page “Bibliographical Information” at the end of the exhibition catalog, the following works provide documents on and analysis of the social, political, and ideological context for art in the USSR during the period of De-Stalinization and the dissidence movement it engendered, 1953 to 1985.

Alexeyeva, Ludmilla. Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious, and Human Rights.  Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1987.

Brumberg, Abraham, ed. In Quest of Justice: Protest and Dissent in the Soviet Union Today. New York: Praeger, 1970.

Daniel, Yuli [Nikolai Arzhak]. This is Moscow Speaking and Other Stories.

Marchenko, Anatoly. My Testimony. New York, E.P. Dutton, 1969.

Reddaway, Peter, ed. Uncensored Russia: The Human Rights Movement.  The Annotated Text of the Unofficial Moscow Journal ‘A Chronicle of Current Events’ (Nos. 1-11).

Rothberg, Abraham. The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime, 1953-1970. Cornell University Press, 1972

Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and his Era. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.

Tokes, Rudolf. L. ed. Dissent in the USSR: Politics, Ideology, & People. Baltimore:

The Johns Hopkins University Preess, 1975.

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