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9 A Dissident at Last Andrei Sakharov joined the dissident movement shortly after it became a recognizable phenomenon in the mid-1960s. A Soviet dissident could be generally described as someone who regarded the Soviet system as flawed, based his criticisms on moral principle, believed in the inherent dignity and worth of the individual , and whose efforts to change the Soviet system for the better prompted the leadership to try to silence him. To a remarkable degree, the trajectory of Soviet dissidence in the 1960s and 1970s—from isolated protests condemning specific actions of the government to a coordinated and organized movement for systemic reform—followed that of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia. Before the mid-1960’s, most critics of the Soviet Union couched their objections in terms strikingly similar to those Khrushchev had used in criticizing Stalin—they ascribed systemic problems to the moral failings of an individual or a small group.1 These critics believed there was nothing wrong with the Soviet Union that the removal of individuals with defective character would not cure. The Soviet system was basically sound; Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization showed that the system could reform itself, albeit within limits, and that the mistakes made and the crimes committed were primarily the result of a moral failure, the correction of which required the spiritual regeneration of individuals rather than the transformation of political institutions and society. Most of these critics were writers by profession who used literature to express their ideas not only because it was the genre for which they were specifically trained but because, as Marshall Shatz has pointed out, literature tends to transform political issues into moral ones. Thus, programmatic alternatives and specific recommendations of policy are largely absent in their work.2 Since changing specific policies was not the intent of the critics anyway, literature was well suited for their purposes. Examples abound of this kind of criticism in the Soviet Union from 1953, when Stalin died and de-Stalinization began, to the mid-1960s, when it gave way to outright dissidence. In 1953 Vladimir Pomerantsev’s article “On Sincerity in Literature” called for an end to the strict limitations Stalin’s doctrine of Socialist Realism had placed on Soviet writers in rendering accurate, three-dimensional portraits of the characters they created.3 Three years later, Vladimir Dudinstev, in his novel Not by Bread Alone, decried what he considered the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of Soviet bureaucrats, whose collective foibles he neatly encapsulated in the figure of a thoroughly unappealing factory manager named Drozdov, who, after the novel appeared, became for many readers the prototype 1. For what follows, I found Shatz, Soviet Dissent, 100–12, very helpful. 2. Ibid., 115. 3. V. Pomerantsev, “Ob iskrennost' v literature,” Novyi mir 12 (December 1953): 218–45. A Dissident at Last 119 of the unresponsive, self-interested Soviet apparatchik. Although Dudintsev located the problems he saw in Soviet society in an entire stratum rather than in a small number of individuals, he still believed that the regime, acting on its own, would resolve them. In the novel, a party official intervenes to save Drozdov’s principal antagonist, who in the end is released from the labor camp to which he was exiled. In much the same way, Alexander Iashin’s short story “Levers,” which also appeared in 1956, describes how ordinary party members who were discussing matters that concerned them openly and honestly prior to a formal party meeting abruptly resort to the formulaic rhetoric of Marxism-Leninism when higher-ups arrive and the meeting begins.4 Mention should also be made of Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, which the Soviet government refused to allow him to accept. Doctor Zhivago, while rejecting the presumption of Bolshevism that objective reality is not only understandable but also predictable , nevertheless makes clear that the proper response to the fanaticism such certitude generates is not to confront it but to endure it (as the character, Iurii Zhivago, does) or to bear witness to it (as Pasternak did by writing the book). Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which Khrushchev in 1962 allowed to be serialized in Novyi mir, imparts a similar message : even though Stalinism ruined the lives of millions of people, most of them completely apolitical—Ivan Denisovich is the equivalent of the American John Doe—the most one could do to prevent its...

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