Related Research Articles
The Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) was a nine-year guerrilla war fought by insurgent groups known collectively as the Mujahideen, as well as smaller Maoist groups, against the military occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union and their satellite state, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA). The conflict lasted throughout the 1980s and fighting took place mostly in the Afghan countryside.
Human rights in the Soviet Union were severely limited. The Soviet Union was a one-party state until 1990 and a totalitarian state from 1927 until 1953 where members of the Communist Party held all key positions in the institutions of the state and other organizations. Freedom of speech was suppressed and dissent was punished. Independent political activities were not tolerated, whether these involved participation in free labor unions, private corporations, independent churches or opposition political parties. The freedom of movement within and especially outside the country was limited. The state restricted rights of citizens to private property.
Vladimir Konstantinovich Bukovsky was a Russian-born British human rights activist and writer. From the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, he was a prominent figure in the Soviet dissident movement, well known at home and abroad. He spent a total of twelve years in the psychiatric prison-hospitals, labour camps, and prisons of the Soviet Union.
Refusenik was an unofficial term for individuals—typically, but not exclusively, Soviet Jews—who were denied permission to emigrate, primarily to Israel, by the authorities of the Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc. The term refusenik is derived from the "refusal" handed down to a prospective emigrant from the Soviet authorities.
Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda (ASA) was a criminal offence in the Soviet Union. To begin with the term was interchangeably used with counter-revolutionary agitation. The latter term was in use immediately after the first Russian Revolution in February 1917. The offence was codified in criminal law in the 1920s, and revised in the 1950s in two articles of the RSFSR Criminal Code. The offence was widely used against Soviet dissidents.
Nicholas William Bethell, 4th Baron Bethell was a British politician. He was a historian of Central and Eastern Europe. He was also a translator and human rights activist. He sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative from 1967 to 1999. He served as an appointed member of the European Assembly from 1975 to 1979, and as an elected Member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1994, and from 1999 to 2003.
Edward Samoilovich Kuznetsov is a Soviet-Israeli dissident, refusenik, journalist, and writer. One of the leaders of the 1970 Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking affair, Kuznetsov's case drew international attention following his death sentence. As a result of global protests, his sentence was commuted to fifteen years' imprisonment.
Soviet dissidents were people who disagreed with certain features of Soviet ideology or with its entirety and who were willing to speak out against them. The term dissident was used in the Soviet Union in the period from the mid-1960s until the fall of communism. It was used to refer to small groups of marginalized intellectuals whose challenges, from modest to radical to the Soviet regime, met protection and encouragement from correspondents and typically criminal prosecution or other forms of silencing by the authorities. Following the etymology of the term, a dissident is considered to "sit apart" from the regime. As dissenters began self-identifying as dissidents, the term came to refer to an individual whose non-conformism was perceived to be for the good of a society. The most influential subset of the dissidents is known as the Soviet human rights movement.
Lubyanka Criminal Group is a book by Alexander Litvinenko about the alleged transformation of the Russian Security Services into a criminal and terrorist organization.
The Afghan mujahideen were various armed Islamist rebel groups that fought against the government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War and the subsequent First Afghan Civil War. The term mujahideen is used in a religious context by Muslims to refer to those engaged in a struggle of any nature for the sake of Islam, commonly referred to as jihad (جهاد). The Afghan mujahideen consisted of numerous groups that differed from each other across ethnic and/or ideological lines, but were united by their anti-communist and pro-Islamic goals. The union was also widely referred to by their Western backers as the Afghan resistance, while Western press often referred to them as Muslim rebels, guerrillas, or "Mountain Men". They were popularly referred to by Soviet troops as dukhi as derivation from Dari word دشمان dushman, which turned into short dukh and also was suitable due to their guerrilla tactics; Afghan civilians often referred to them as the tanzim, while the Afghan government called them dushman, a term also employed by the Soviets.
Lyudmila Mikhaylovna Alexeyeva was a Russian historian and human-rights activist who was a founding member in 1976 of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group and one of the last Soviet dissidents active in post-Soviet Russia.
The Education of Lev Navrozov: A Life in the Closed World Once Called Russia is a memoir of life in the Soviet Union by Lev Navrozov, the first of seven volumes. It was first published by Harper & Row in 1975.
During the Cold War (1947–1991), when the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in an arms race, the Soviet Union promoted its foreign policy through the World Peace Council and other front organizations. Some writers have claimed that it also influenced non-aligned peace groups in the West.
Albert Jolis (1912–2000) was an American diamond dealer, head of the international firm Diamond Distributors, Inc, and a fund-raising anti-communist, serving in the 1980s as board chairman of Resistance International.
In the Soviet Union, systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place and was based on the interpretation of political dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called "psychopathological mechanisms" of dissent.
Yuri Andreyevich Olkhovsky was a prominent US supporter of the Soviet dissident movement in the 1970s and 1980s, a retired professor of The George Washington University and a broadcaster for the Voice of America.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Mayakovsky Square in Moscow played an important role as a gathering place for unofficial poetry readings, and subsequently for expressing cultural and political dissent in the post-Stalin era.
In the 1980s a human rights movement began to emerge in the USSR. Those actively involved did not share a single set of beliefs. Many wanted a variety of civil rights — freedom of expression, of religious belief, of national self-determination. To some it was crucial to provide a truthful record of what was happening in the country, not the heavily censored version provided in official media outlets. Others still were "reform Communists" who thought it possible to change the Soviet system for the better.
Vladimir Bukovsky was prominent in the Soviet dissident movement of the 1960s and 1970s. A writer, neurophysiologist, and activist, he is celebrated for his part in the campaign to expose and halt the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union. Since being expelled from the USSR in late 1976 he has remained in active and vocal opposition to the Soviet system and the shortcomings of its successor regimes in Russia.
Vladimir Yemelyanovich Maksimov was a Soviet and Russian writer, publicist, essayist and editor, one of the leading figures of the Soviet and post-Soviet dissident movement abroad.
References
- ↑ "The Reagan Doctrine", chapter from Robert Kagan, A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996
- 1 2 3 4 5 Galina Akkerman, "Vladimir Maximov", Kontinent, No 146, 2010. (in Russian)
- ↑ Robert van Voren, On Dissidents and Madness: From the Soviet Union of Brezhnev to the "Soviet Union" of Vladimir Putin, Rodopi: Amsterdam & New York, 2009, p. 74.
- ↑ Armand Maloumian, And Even Our Tears, Avon Books: New York 1982.
- ↑ "Resistance International", An interview with Vladimir Bukovsky, Panorama, Moscow, December 1991 (in Russian), retrieved 20 May 2015.
- ↑ "Lord Bethell smuggles two soldiers out of Afghanistan", 11 November 1984, British Universities Film and Video Council