Soviet dissidents were citizens of the Soviet Union who disagreed with the policies and actions of their government and actively protested against these actions through non-violent means. Through such protests, Soviet dissidents would incur harassment, persecution and ultimate imprisonment by the KGB, or some other Soviet state policing arm.
From the mid-1970s, the term was first used in the Western media[1] and subsequently, with derision, by the Soviet propaganda: human rights activists in the USSR came to use the term for self-designation as a joke.
While dissent with Soviet policies and persecution for this dissent existed since the times of the October Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet power, the term is most commonly to the dissidents of the post-Stalin era.
References
- ^ Доклад: Диссиденты by Michel Aucouturier
See also
- Gulag
- Samizdat
- Chronicle of Current Events (samizdat)
- Moscow Helsinki Group
- List of Soviet dissidents
Further reading
- Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev, Piero Ostellino (1980) On Soviet Dissent, ISBN 0231048122
- Robert Horvath (2005) The Legacy of Soviet Dissent: Dissidents, Democratisation and Radical Nationalism in Russia, ISBN 0415333202
- Dissenters, Soviet Union on Google Books
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