Soviet Downfall Essays - Soviet Dissidents, Dissent,

Soviet Downfall Abstract This essay concentrates on two representatives of the dissident movement in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and in the 1970s--Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The essay introduces the history of the dissident movement in the Russian Empire under the Tsars and in the Soviet Union under various leaders, mainly under Nikita Khruschev, Leonid Brezhnev and Michael Gorbachev. It presents the historical conflict of Slavophils and Westernizers that began in the time of Peter the Great and discusses its impact on Russian thinkers over the years. The essay proposes that Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov are representatives of two branches of Russian philosophy, modified with time: Slavophilism and Westernism. Solzhenitsyn is presented to be a person with Slavophilic tendencies, while Sakharov is presented to be an advocate of the Western model of development for Russia. The essay discusses their paths to dissidence and their opposition to the Soviet regime. It also provides a comparison of their views and ideas. The essay attempts to follow the chronological order of their lives. In the end it provides a brief overview of their recent actions, based on their ideas, drawn from Slavophilism and Westernism. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 the world changed dramatically. The Cold War ended and the threat of communism ended in Europe. Such Eastern European countries as Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and others stopped being Soviet satellites. East and West Germany, meanwhile, were moving rapidly toward unification.[1] But this was not the end. In November 1991 the Soviet Union, the evil empire that had kept the democratic and non-democratic world in fear and strain for almost seventy years disappeared. It left fifteen independent republics, with Russia being the largest one. Russia, out of all the former Soviet bloc states and the former Soviet Union, was the first one to fall to Communism. But also it was the last one to liberate itself from it despite all the controversy going on inside Russia such as the three-day-coup of August 1991 by Brezhnev-era hard-liners. These transformations, though painful sometimes, were unexpected and startling. There could be many explanations for why Communism was being abandoned: America's and NATO's successful containment policies; the arms race bankrupting Moscow, and mostly it was the obje ctive fact that Comm unism is a rotten system.[2] But even such reasons would have never been enough if the human beings in the oppressed countries stayed passive. However, the human spirit can never be destroyed and there is always an opposition to the existing regime whatever it is. In totalitarian societies such as Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy dissent was outlawed and dealt with brutally. In the Soviet Union, another totalitarian state, the opposition also was always illegal until the collapse of the empire with the brief exception of Alexander Kerensky's provisional government in 1917. The dissident movement had a long history of persecutions in Russia starting from Czarist times when great national poets and writers such as Alexander Pushkin, Michael Lermontov, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodr Dostoevsky suffered from censorship which extended to their brilliant works. It also had two major branches: the Westernizers and the Slavophils. The split in Russian society began in the times of Peter the Great (1672-1725), who reformed the administration of the state in a way unknown before to Russian people. His reforms touched almost every aspect of Russians' life through the introduction of European styles and traditions which Peter I learned during his year-long stay in Holland and England. Ever since then the intellectual movement was divided in the two major groups of thinkers--Westernizers and Slavophils. Westernizers were those who believed that the traditional Russian ways of life could be a bitter handicap, and the sooner Russia caught up with the West the better. The Slav ophils, influenced by the German romantics, opposed westernization and idealized Russia's distinctiveness.[3] One of the brightest events of the dissident movement of the 19th century was the Decembrist revolt in December of 1825, when a group of Russian army men tried, without success, to abolish Tsarist rule by refusing the oath of allegiance to a new Tsar, Nicholas I, and forcing him to abdicate. The Decembrist conspirators were of liberal inclinations, and their background was Russian freemasonry and