The Soviet Union Held The Dissident Movement Study

The dissident movement in the Soviet Union started when Brezhnev came into power and ended just before Mikhail Gorbachev began his reform. It is always a very important subject for any party in power to deal with these different or even opposing voices from the society, especially from those intellectuals representing the advanced class of the society. The policies and measures taken by the party and the government of the Soviet Union, however, caused serious problems, laying an apple of discord for the later collapse of the communist party and the Soviet Union, and have left us a lot of thinking and recalling that can help us draw some lessons.The Research on the Dissident Movement of the Soviet Union is a politically sensitive subject and there are quite a lot of difficulties in collecting the materials needed for the research due to the secrecy of their publication and the limitedness of their spreading. That's why no one in China has so far made an attempt in this field. Even in Russia, such a research was made after the fall of the Soviet Union.This dissertation consists of three major parts of introduction, the main text and the conclusion, around the topic of the dissident movement of the Soviet Union and the anti-dissident movement by the Soviet government. Introduction is an overall discussion of the significance of the research, the questions raised, the definition of "dissident", the findings made so far both at home and abroad, and the relationship between the dissident movement and the collapse of the Soviet Union.The major text of the dissertation is made up of four chapters. Chapter One is an analysis of the historical origin of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union and the international background in which it arose. The author holds that the dissident movement appeared in the Soviet Union for a lot of domestic and international reasons, but the primary reasons are the social foundation and the political system problems, and it is very complicated social and political phenomenon. The dissidents are neither the class enemies nor the dissidents of the Soviet society, but the products of this declining system.Chapter Two centers on the origin of the dissident movement and is one of the major chapters of this dissertation. It first gives an introduction of the parade and demonstration happened on the Pushkin Square of Moscow on December 5, 1965, the first such parade and demonstration in Soviet history with the slogan of "Follow the Constitution". It is actually from this incident on that the dissident movement began to surface in the Soviet Union and gradually developed into a very influential political problem during the rule of Brezhnev. Secondly, the chapter divides the dissident movement into several stages and gives a brief account of the characters of each stage. Thirdly, the chapter gives a detailed introduction of the different schools of the dissident movement, including the Democratic Socialists represented by RoyMedvedev, the Western School by Sakharov and the Slav School by Solzhenitsyn. Lastly, the chapter analyzes the movement for the reservation of civil rights, the essential content of the dissident movement.Chapter Three is an introduction and analysis of the underground publications, the major tool for the spreading, communicating and sharing of the thoughts, ideas and related information of the dissidents. Chapter Four gives an account of the policies and measures to the dissidents taken by the party and the government of the Soviet Union, and analyzes the consequences caused by the suppressive policies toward the dissident movement.On the basis of the analyses above, the dissertation concludes that most of the Soviet dissidents are not, as the Soviet government had said at the time, the activists that brought shame on the socialist system and the dogs of the imperialist thoughts that intended to overthrow the socialist system of the Soviet Union. In fact, they are a group of people who were dissatisfied with the status quo and concerned about the future an...