USSR under Brezhnev - Political dissent

1. Rostropovich on Solzhenitsyn
The award to Solzhenitsyn of the Nobel Prize for literature on 8 October 1970 was treated by the party
leadership as a provocative act, and a top secret (sovershenno sekretno) order was given for a
campaign to be launched to discredit the author and to argue that the award was not a literary but a
political act. The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich sheltered Solzhenitsyn, and in an open letter on 31
October 1970 he condemned the intellectual closure of the period.
Dear Comrade Editor,
It is no longer a secret that A. Solzhenitsyn spends most of his time in my house not far from Moscow.
I witnessed his expulsion from the Union of Writers at the very time when he was working hard on the
novel [August] 1914, and now comes the award of the Nobel Prize to him and the newspaper
campaign about this. It is the latter that forces me to take up my pen to you. This is already the third
Soviet author to receive the Nobel Prize, but in two out of the three cases [Solzhenitsyn and Boris
Pasternak] we consider the award a dirty political game, but in one (Sholokhov) as the due recognition
of a worldclass authorPeople should not be forced to condemn what they quite simply have not read
or heard. I remember with pride that I did not attend the meeting of cultural figureswhere they
abused B. Pasternak and designated a speech for me to make criticising Doctor Zhivago at a time
when I had not even read it Every person should have the right without fear to think independently
and to speak out on what they know, what they have personally thought, lived through, and not only
weakly vary what has been instilled into them. We will inevitably achieve free thought without
prompting and pressure Mstislav Rostropovich
2. Solzhenitsyns Letter to the Soviet Leaders
Solzhenitsyn sent this letter on 5 September 1973. He argued that the root of the evil of Soviet Russia
lay entirely in the ideology. The letter was an appeal to the Soviet regime to save itself by placing itself
at the head of a programme of national renewal by relinquishing its obsession with Marxist-Leninist
ideology. Russia could only be liberated through the rejection of this ideology and then through
universal repentance. This is one of the most important documents of the whole late Soviet period.
Introduction
I do not entertain much hope that you will deign to examine ideas not formally solicited by you,
although they come from a fellow-countryman of a rare kind one who does not stand on a ladder
subordinate to your command, who can be neither dismissed from his post, nor demoted, nor
promoted, nor rewarded by you, and who is therefore one from whom you are almost certain to hear
an opinion sincerely voiced, without any careerist calculations, such as you are unlikely to hear from
even the finest experts in your bureaucracy. I do not entertain much hope, but I shall try to say what is
most important in a short space, namely, to set out what I hold to be for the good and salvation of our
people, to which all of youand I myself- belong. That was no slip of the tongue. I wish all peoples
well, and the closer they are to us and the more dependent upon us, the more fervent is my wish. But it
is the fate of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples that preoccupies me above all, for, as the proverb
says: its where youre born that you can be most useful. And there is a deeper reason too: the
incomparable sufferings of our people. (...)
Ideology
(...) Marxism is not only not accurate, not only not a science, has not only failed to predict a single
event in terms of figures, quantities, time-scales or locations (something that electronic computers
today do with laughable ease in the course of social forecasting, although never with the help of
Marxism) - it absolutely astounds one by the economic and mechanistic crudity of its attempts to
explain that most subtle of creatures, the human being, and that even more complex synthesis of
millions of people, society. Only the cupidity of some, the blindness of others and a craving for faith
on the part of still others can serve to explain this grim humour of the twentieth century: how can such
a discredited and bankrupt doctrine still have so many followers in the West! In our country there are
fewest of all left! We who have had a taste of it are only pretending willy-nilly
Cast off this cracked ideology! Relinquish it to your rivals, let it go wherever it wants, let it pass from
our country like a storm-cloud, like an epidemic, let others concern themselves with it and study it,
just so long as we dont! In ridding ourselves of it we shall also rid ourselves of the need to fill our life
with lies. Let us all pull offand shake off from all of us this filthy sweaty shirt of ideology which is

now so stained with the blood of those 66 million that it prevents the living body of the nation from
breathing. This ideology bears theentire responsibility for all the blood that has been shed. Do you
need me to persuade you to throw it offwithout more ado? Whoever wants can pick it up in our place.
But how can all this be manoged?
Everything depends upon what sort of authoritarian order lies in store for us in the future. It is not
authoritarianism itself that is intolerable, but the ideological lies that are daily foisted upon us. Not so
much authoritarianism as arbitrariness and illegality, the sheer illegality of having a single overlord in
each district, each province and each sphere, often ignorant and brutal, whose will alone decides all
things. An authoritarian order does not necessarily mean that laws are unnecessary or that they exist
only on paper, or that they should not reflect the notions and will of the population . . .
You may dismiss the counsels of some lone individual, some writer, with laughter or indignation. But
with each passing yearfor different reasons, at different times and in different guiseslife itself will
keep on thrusting exactly the same suggestion at you, exactly the same. Because this is the only
feasible and peacefulway in which you can save our country and our people.
3. Roy A. Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy
How democratic is contemporary Soviet society? There are two diametrically opposed views on the
subject. On the one hand, it is frequently asserted that Soviet citizens have all democratic rights
without exception, that our society is the most democratic in the world, etc. On the other extreme, one
often hears that there is no democracy whatsoever in our country, that Soviet citizens lack all, or at
least the most important, democratic rights. Both opinions are equally mistaken. If one examines the
UN documents on the rights of man with an unbiased eye, it is clear that Soviet society has come a
long way in terms of economic, social, and cultural rights in the fifty-three years since the October
Revolution. They include the right to work and to receive vocational training, the right to organize
trade unions, the right to education, social security, family and maternity benefits, medical aid, the
protection of minors, the right to participate in cultural life and to benefit from the results of scientific
progress. Immediately after the Revolution, the eight-hour working day was introduced, and
afterwards, the seven-hour day. The right to leisure was guaranteed; child labor in industry was first
restricted and then abolished. Soviet women were the first in the world to receive equal rights, and an
enormous effort was made to secure their emancipation. (...)
However, although it is right to be proud of Soviet achievements with respect to social, economic, and
cultural rights, it must also be recognized that Soviet society is today still very backward when it
comes to the whole complex of civil and political rights. Of course there has been considerable
progress, if one compares the present situation with that of tsarist Russia or with the more recent
Stalinist autocracy. A great deal has been done to correct and eliminate the consequences of Stalinism.
But it is not good enough to compare the present with the past. Considering the potential and the needs
of a socialist society, clearly whatever advance has been made in the realm of political and civil rights
is still completely inadequate
For the great majority of workers, collective farmers, and intelligentsia, political participation hardly
exists. This is largely because the structure of government and the way it operates reduce to a
minimum any possibility for workers or intellectuals to influence the formation of economic, political,
or other important policies. On almost all levels of government, the role of the individual remains a
subservient one. Industrial and office workers and collective farmers to a very large extent are
alienated from production and hardly participate at all in the real running of their enterprises and
institutions. We still do not possess the freedoms our socialist society deserves: freedom of speech,
opinion, of the press and of thought. There is still no freedom for artistic creativity and scientific
research, particularly in the social sciences. Nor is there freedom of the individual or inviolability of
the person. We still do not possess freedom of movement and choice of residence. (...)We still do not
have freedom of association and organization or the right to hold peaceful meetings and
demonstrations, as befits a socialist society
We must, however, protest in no uncertain terms against the restrictions on human and social rights
mentioned above, restrictions that reduce these rights to zero, turning them into empty declarations,
paper formalities designed to deceive the people. It is absolutely not true that there is a contradiction
between democratic freedom and public order, although this view is often expressed by Soviet writers
and sometimes by certain foreign Marxists.