Soviet dissidents and the legacy of the 1917 revolutions

Abstract

This article seeks to explain why, as the dissident movement burgeoned in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, there was almost no discussion about the October Revolution in samizdat, and it was the anti-Stalinist motif that predominated instead. It argues that at the time anti-Stalinism constituted a unifying language of activism for the “sixtiers” generation for several reasons: their communist upbringing; family ties to repressed communists; and the tacit acceptance of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization as a reformist framework for their action. As they feared Stalin’s public rehabilitation, anti-Stalinism became the most pressing cause, pushing any deeper reflection on the regime’s legitimacy into the background. However, by the 1970s, as a result of increased repression and the growing isolation of dissidents, the movement had split into several currents. An avowedly non-political current, the human rights movement emerged as a result of the rejection of revolutionary violence. Renouncing the prospect of regime change, it staked instead on a “legalist” strategy, which precluded any questioning of the Revolution as the foundation of the current regime. By contrast, for the more politicized Russophile current represented by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and for the democratic socialist current embodied by Roy Medvedev, it became important to affirm their vision of the Revolution and its place in history in order to affirm their own political programs. While Medvedev sought to offer a demythologized account of the October Revolution to bolster its legitimacy, Solzhenitsyn denounced the February Revolution as a fateful caesura in Russian history.