Dissident movements (socialist countries)
반체제 운동 (사회주의권)
Dissident movements in socialist countries were the activities of people who openly voiced political views sharply at odds with the official ideology and practice of their state and were persecuted for it — dismissed, imprisoned, confined to psychiatric hospitals, exiled or expelled. The word "dissident" came into use in the 1960s for an opposition in the USSR and Eastern Europe that, unlike earlier anti-Soviet movements, did not fight the system by violent means but appealed to its laws and officially proclaimed values. Its instruments were samizdat and tamizdat, petitions, open letters and, from the 1970s, human-rights groups monitoring the Helsinki Final Act. Landmarks include the Soviet human-rights movement and the Chronicle of Current Events, Czechoslovakia's Charter 77, Poland's Workers' Defence Committee (KOR), China's Democracy Wall and Charter 08.
In depth
Term and scope
"Dissident" comes from the Latin dissidens, "disagreeing". According to the Russian encyclopedia the word came into use in the 1960s for the opposition movement in the USSR and Eastern Europe which, unlike the anti-Soviet and anti-communist movements of the preceding period, did not fight the Soviet system by violent means but appealed to Soviet laws and officially proclaimed values; it was first used in the West and then by the dissenters themselves. Memorial, which began a research programme in 1990, characterised dissent by its principles — non-violence, openness (glasnost), exercising basic rights in practice, and the demand that the law be observed — and by its forms: uncensored texts, independent associations and occasional public actions. Because the Korean 반체제 and English "dissident" apply to opposition to any regime, this entry is limited to people persecuted for openly criticising the system within socialist states; purges in intra-party power struggles and criticism only from exile abroad are not included.
The Soviet Union
The broad dissident movement is dated to the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel (arrested 1965) and the Warsaw Pact entry into Czechoslovakia (1968). On 5 December 1965, Soviet Constitution Day, the mathematician Alexander Esenin-Volpin and others held the "glasnost meeting" on Pushkin Square in Moscow, demanding an open trial for the two writers under the slogan "Respect the Soviet Constitution". In 1968 the samizdat bulletin Chronicle of Current Events, first compiled by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, began recording human-rights violations, and on 25 August a demonstration on Red Square protested the entry into Czechoslovakia. After the USSR signed the Helsinki Final Act in 1975, Yuri Orlov's Moscow Helsinki Group was announced on 12 May 1976. Typewritten samizdat and tamizdat published abroad carried the information.
The participants held no single view. In 1983 Lyudmila Alexeyeva distinguished "true communists" who believed Marxism–Leninism had been distorted in the USSR (Roy Medvedev among them), liberal Westernisers, eclectics, Russian nationalists, and nationalists of the Baltic, Ukraine and the Caucasus; Zionist activists, the Crimean Tatar movement for return and members of several religious groups were also counted as dissidents. Elena Bonner saw dissent above all as a moral movement to "free oneself from official lies", and Vladimir Bukovsky wrote that the strongest motive was not to take part in a crime. In the mid-1960s most critics were democratic socialists who placed hopes in the Prague Spring; after 1968 they divided between those looking to Western-style democracy and Orthodox-nationalist currents.
The authorities rejected the possibility of any opposition, called dissidents "renegades" and portrayed them as agents of Western intelligence services. From 1960 Article 70 of the RSFSR Criminal Code ("anti-Soviet agitation") and from 1966 Article 190-1 were applied; 8,145 people were convicted under these articles between 1956 and 1987. Dismissal, expulsion from study, psychiatric confinement, exile, loss of citizenship and expulsion abroad were also used, and from 1967 the KGB's Fifth Directorate handled the work. Alexander Solzhenitsyn was stripped of citizenship and expelled in 1974 after The Gulag Archipelago appeared abroad; Andrei Sakharov was sent into exile in Gorky without trial in 1980. On Mikhail Gorbachev's initiative most were released in 1986–1987, and Sakharov, Sergei Kovalev and others became people's deputies.
Eastern Europe
In Yugoslavia Milovan Djilas was tried after an interview criticising the ruling stratum in 1954, published The New Class (1957) abroad and was imprisoned. The East German chemist Robert Havemann was expelled from the SED and lost his teaching post in 1964 after lectures criticising dogmatism. Czechoslovakia's Charter 77, dated 1 January 1977, criticised the government for not observing the human and civil rights it had pledged at Helsinki; 1,898 people had signed by January 1990. Václav Havel and Pavel Kohout wrote much of the text; Jan Patočka, one of the first three spokesmen, died on 13 March 1977 after an interrogation. Many signatories were left-wing intellectuals, often former Communist Party members, and the first signatories included Zdeněk Mlynář, Jiří Hájek and Ludvík Vaculík. Havel's essay "The Power of the Powerless" (1978) analysed the "post-totalitarian" system and the nature of dissent. In Poland, after the workers' protests in Radom and Ursus in June 1976, the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) was formed in September to provide legal, financial and medical help to the persecuted; Jacek Kuroń was a founder, Adam Michnik joined in 1977, and its members ranged from pre-war Polish Socialist Party members and wartime underground fighters to the student activists known as the "Commandos". Czech historians contrast Charter 77, which never won broad popular support, with Poland's Solidarity, which became a mass movement.
China
During the 1957 Rectification Movement the People's University student Lin Xiling argued in speeches that neither the Soviet Union nor China had yet built a "true socialism" with socialist democracy and a sound socialist legal system, and was labelled a rightist. In the Cultural Revolution Yu Luoke wrote "On Family Background", against discrimination by class origin; he was arrested in 1968, executed on 5 March 1970 and exonerated nine years later. The Democracy Wall of Xidan in Beijing, covered with big-character posters from November 1978 to December 1979, is regarded as the beginning of the contemporary Chinese democracy movement; most participants saw it as a struggle over correct and incorrect Marxism, and Wei Jingsheng, author of "The Fifth Modernization", was sentenced to fifteen years. Charter 08, inspired by Charter 77 and first signed by 303 people in December 2008, led to an eleven-year sentence for Liu Xiaobo, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.